The Cairo Genizah is famous as a source of manuscripts for the study of the medieval Mediterranean world, especially Jewish communities during the High Middle Ages. However, among the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern manuscript fragments in Genizah collections are more than 12,000 moveable-type printed items, most of which come from Europe.…[Read more]

The Norse poem Atlakviða shows an irregular metre which is difficult to classify. This makes it a useful test case for comparing the explanatory abilities of two major theoretical frameworks of Germanic alliterative verse: the positional theory and the word-foot theory. I argue that the word-foot theory is more successful, especially in deriving…[Read more]

This paper compares psychostasia and/or kerostasia concepts from Indo-European, Semitic and adjacent cultures, and relates them to Cognitive Metaphor Theory. In the context of metaphysical weighing, the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all associated lightness with goodness and/or a favourable outcome; Hinduism does likewise. The…[Read more]

The trend of Carolingian royal advice literature, Fürstenspiegel, or specula principum offers advice to kings on how to rule well and examples of ruling poorly. Interpretations of these texts have often focused on traditional ideas of the Carolingian reforms, for example the focus on classical models of rule in Sedulius Scottus’ De rectoribus ch…[Read more]

Thijs Porck, “I can read Hollandsch very fairly. The Correspondence between James Murray (1837-1915) and Pieter Jacob Cosijn (1840-1899)”, in Language Use, Usage Guides, and Linguistic Norms, ed. Luisella Caon, Marion Elenbaas & Janet Grijzenhout (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021), 107-129.

Despite the epistemological importance of the scholarly journal, few thorough histories of individual academic journals have been written, especially of journals in the arts and humanities. This article uses both archival material and oral histories to construct a multifaceted history of Leeds Studies in English (LSE) from the beginning of its…[Read more]

When considering the establishment of overseas viking encampments, some of the most detailed and vivid contemporary descriptions of this activity originate from the Frankish realm, a region which nevertheless remains precariously positioned in wider comparative investigations of the viking world. To address this imbalance, this chapter assembles…[Read more]

This preface introduces in the main issues of the volume.

What is the contribution of Psalm 45 within its canonical context? What is Psalm 45 doing in, and what is it doing for, the First Korahite Collection (Pss. 42–49)? These are the questions this article engages. In common with scholarship on the “shape and shaping” of the Psalter, the article seeks a form of coherency across the First Korahite Colle…[Read more]

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when a new style of Persian poetry was developing in the Persianate world, several erudite literary critics appeared in India, whose meticulous critiques of Persian poetry was unprecedented in the long history of Persian literature. A close study of the works produced by these critics reveals their vast…[Read more]

Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ṣūrī’s Treatise on the qibla, written in the 1030s C.E., and its Qaraite rebuttal, most likely written over the course of the following decade, preserve the most substantial and extensive surviving account of the centuries-old debate between Jews and Samaritans about the chosen place, the permanent location of the sanctuary and the…[Read more]

This article explores how public health was transformed in Egypt soon after its occupation by Great Britain in 1882. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Egyptian state had invested substantially in health to boost the nation’s economic and military strength, and, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, to address E…[Read more]

This working paper presents a full and annotated translation of two titles by 19th-century Ottoman author-cum-statesman Ziya Pasha: (1) a newspaper article written in exile, modern in terms of format and reformist in terms of tenor and providing an staunch and iconoclastic critique of Ottoman language and literature, and (2) the versified preface…[Read more]

This working paper presents a full and annotated translation of two titles by 19th-century Ottoman author-cum-statesman Ziya Pasha: (1) a newspaper article written in exile, modern in terms of format and reformist in terms of tenor and providing an staunch and iconoclastic critique of Ottoman language and literature, and (2) the versified preface…[Read more]

This working paper presents a full and annotated translation of two titles by 19th-century Ottoman author-cum-statesman Ziya Pasha: (1) a newspaper article written in exile, modern in terms of format and reformist in terms of tenor and providing an staunch and iconoclastic critique of Ottoman language and literature, and (2) the versified preface…[Read more]