Turn It Again: Jewish Medieval Studies and Literary Theory

Originally published as a special issue of Exemplaria these essays deserve a much wider audience. They deal with Jewish studies and the medieval historian rabbinic ecclesiology and the synods of Nicaea and Yavneh Jewish women martyrs sexual politics and marriage late-medieval Castile nation and miscegenation cultural hybridity and Kabbalistic anthropology. The authors are widely published scholars and critics in various fields of Jewish studies. The volume will be valuable to many scholars teachers and students. The essays open up so many interesting avenues of inquiry that they will enlighten and challenge not only specialists in Jewish studies but also scholars critics students and teachers of medieval literature and Jewish literature medieval history and culture womens studies and religious studies. This superb collection of essays exemplifies the benefits of employing critical theory in Jewish studies research. It also demonstrates the importance of including the textual traditions of Jewish culture in any serious study of the middle ages. The essays will appeal to medievalists intellectual historians literary theorists researchers in gender studies religious studies specialists and those engaged in cultural studies. Anyone working in Jewish studies will profit from the authors textually grounded theoretically sophisticated analysis. -- Robert A. Daum Diamond Chair in Jewish Law & Ethics University of British Columbia Sheila Delany is Professor of English Emerita at Simon Fraser University. Her many books articles essays and reviews helped open up Anglophone medieval studies especially in Chaucer to modern critical theory gender-oriented work and class-based historicism.