Browsing by Subject "manuscripts"

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    Making Jewish Books in North Africa, 1700-1900
    (2020-05) Sienna, Noam
    Books can be many things, in addition to vehicles for text: they can also be artisanal crafts, commercial merchandise, family heirlooms, illicit contraband, religious relics, and more. Beyond their status as objects, books are also nodes in a social network, part of a complex cultural system that connects people, objects, places, and ideas. This dissertation presents the Jewish book itself as a vital source for Jewish history, showing that the study of Jewish books, and their makers and readers, has the potential to reshape our understanding of Jewish society during the complex and turbulent transition into modernity. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in book history, and the emerging subfield of Jewish book history, I propose a methodology that combines bibliography, material culture, textual interpretation, and social history. In this dissertation, I argue that Jewish books must be studied as both material and social objects, paying attention to how they were brought into being, how they took their particular physical and visual forms, and how they were woven into the everyday lives of individuals and communities. I focus on how North African Jews were involved in the making of books in both manuscript and print, both in North Africa and abroad, demonstrating that book-making was a primary link between Jewish communities in North Africa and their coreligionists in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Examining the material and social aspects of the production of North African Jewish books in the 18th and 19th centuries, I highlight how the Jewish book illuminates the encounter between the world of a text and the world of its readers.
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    The Work of the Magi: Adoration Images and Visions of Globalization in Early Modern Europe
    (2015-02) Swanson, Susan
    This dissertation investigates the extent to which early modern depictions of the three magi of the biblical Adoration story can be understood within a representational "economy," that is, an economy defined by ideas and ways of knowing that circulate through the visual innovations and re-imaginings of this story. This project is significant in its potential contribution to our understanding of defining events in the early modern period, specifically those having to do with the changing boundaries of world knowledge brought on by the range of encounters with the New World. While much of the scholarship on depictions of the Adoration has focused on stabilizing formal and iconographical content, pictorial innovations suggest a more complex conceptual work that these images are called on to perform which has yet to be adequately explored. Through a framework that utilizes the concepts of exchange and the movement of people and goods, the "work of the magi" helps refine our vision of the production and exchange of material and global identities within and at the borders of the Christian contexts of early modern Europe and the Americas, much the same way the power of the magi themselves is bound to their intrepid pilgrimage and offerings of gifts. Particularly notable in the early modern era is the marked increase in the numbers of Adoration images and atypical compositions. Through these pictures, artists and their patrons--clergy, merchants, rulers, and nobles--used the story of the magi to address the most urgent questions of the day surrounding the complexities of trade, conquest, and world exploration. These compositions, in turn, inform our examination of the history of globalization.