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, women's 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.
