kevin r.brine
The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies Across the Disciplines is a multidisciplinary collection of essays on the theme of Judith beheading Holofernes based on the narrative given in the biblical Book of Judith. Judith was a symbol of the city of Florence in the Italian Renaissance and a favorite theme of the sculptors and painters such as Donatello ( left panel above) and Sandro Botticelli (right panel).
The collection includes new archival source studies, the translation of unpublished manuscripts, the translation of texts unavailable in English, and Judith images and music. Continue...
REVIEWS
“The Sword of Judith is a wide-ranging collection of essays concerned mainly with the many guises in which the story of Judith appears in both Jewish and Christian tradition from pre-Christian times through the Middle Ages to the Counter-Reformation. [...] This breadth is welcome and refreshing and gives an idea of the richness of the Judith material.[...] [it] contains a wealth of interesting, learned, and useful material.”
---Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Modern Language Review 107 (April 2012), pp. 663-65
“The Sword of Judith collects essays across a huge range of disparate approaches. It is also is a new kind of book: you can buy it as a bound volume, or read it on a website with free access and a very large number of hyperlinks to a range of original texts, articles and studies, discussion threads, and, of course, images. Its existence as a fixed representation in print of a malleable bundle which exists elsewhere goes some way to explaining its repetitiveness, since the authors cannot know how readers might approach any single item…
The book’s twenty-five short chapters introduce Jewish and Christian textual traditions as well as representations of Judith in art, music and drama..”
---Ruth Morse, “Cultural History” The Times Literary Supplement (The TLS), December 10,2010. The TLS Digital Archives
CONTENTS
Introductions
1. The Judith Project
Kevin R. Brine
2. The Jewish Textual Traditions
Deborah Levine Gera
3. Judith in the Christian Tradition
Elena Ciletti and Henrike Lähnemann Continue...