Unruly Books

<b>This volume explores the idea of the unruly book from books now known by their titles alone to books that subverted structures of power and gender</b>. The contributors show how these books functioned as sticky objects and they examine the story of what such books signified to the people who wrote read discussed yearned for or even prohibited them. The books examined are those of the first millennium of the Common Era and the writings of Judaism Christianity Islam and related traditions. In particular the contributors examine the bounty of books within this period that are hard to pin down whether extant lost or imagined-books that challenge modern scholars to reconceptualize our notions of books (biblical or otherwise) religion manuscript culture and intellectual history. Through the critical analyses presented in this volume the contributors negotiate the diverse stories told by unruly books and show that by listening to the stories that books tell we learn more about the worlds that imagined and discussed them.