bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Priestly Ideology of War in Numbers 31
Authors: Niditch Susan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Numbers 31 is an intriguing and neglected biblical text with which scholars often confess frustration. One scholar calls the passage “Midrash” and appears to use the term disparagingly (Gray: 417-19) while another admits that “it is not easy to make out what the real subject-matter of this long section is supposed to be” (Noth 1968:228).
Numbers 31 is usually discussed as an example of a banning text, but its ideology of war differs from the ban as sacrifice and the ban as God’s justice in important and intriguing ways that identify a world-view different from those explored thus far.
Toward an Ideology of Nonparticipation
Authors: Niditch Susan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Hebrew Scriptures allude to peace, its writers no less desirous of an end to violence and war than any of us. The beautiful oracle imagining a day when all wars have ceased, found in the eighth-century BCE prophets Isaiah and Micah, testifies to this desire.
This prophecy, however, is set far in the future, “at the end of days” (Mic 4:1; Isa 2:2). Only then can one expect disarmament, a life of agrarian plenty, nonaggression among former enemies—generations not schooled in war. The reality acknowledged by biblical writers of all periods differs.
Introduction
Authors: Russell James C 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This inquiry applies recent observations from the behavioral sciences, medieval history, the history of religions, and Indo-European studies, as well as from what has become known as “metahistory,” to the pivotal religious transformation which occurred as a result of the encounter of the Germanic peoples with Christianity. This transformation is examined primarily from the entrance of the Visigoths into the Eastern Roman Empire in 376 until the death of St. Boniface in 754. It is proposed that Christianization efforts among the Germanic peoples resulted in a substantial Germanization of Christianity.
A Great Intellect in Repose
Authors: Bryant John 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
“The first duty of a critic … is to remember that, behind every book there is a man—or rather, that there is a man in every book.” Fitz-James O’Brien, one of Herman Melville’s friendlier literary associates, wrote this critical imperative as part of a general assessment of Melville’s career occasioned by the publication in 1857 of The Confidence-Man. In all, O’Brien was pleased with his friend’s progress. He was controlling earlier excesses and had a reasonable claim to becoming Amer ica’s great “prose-poet.” “Behind” or rather “in” Melville’s books was a creative “man” whose only errors were on the side of the Imagination. This was surely a “personality,” O’Brien concluded, that would “inspire” the age.1 The poignancy of O’Brien’s critique lies in the irony of this misplaced prophecy, for in 1857 Melville was on the verge of professional failure, and if he inspired any age, it was not his but ours. Nor does O’Brien seem cognizant of what critics now perceive to be the failure—whether willful or involuntary—of Melville’s form and language.
Ahab: Personifying the Impersonal
Authors: Bryant John 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In “The Candles” (ch. 119) when Ahab bellows out his mastery over the “speech less, placeless power” of the corposants (St. Elmo’s Fire), he dramatizes the absurdity of his being: “In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here’’ (MD, 507). Ahab’s speech comes at a chiastic moment when Ishmael’s and Ahab’s rhetorical paths cross: Loquacious Ishmael has silenced himself into an objective reporter, reducing his contribution to parenthetical stage directions, while Ahab noisily struts and frets the boards. The crossing of these personalities marks the spot that allegorizes Melville’s problem in voicing the voiceless. Here, Ahab’s defiance of the “speechless” and Ishmael’s silence “meet and mate.” Melville’s misuse of personification accentuates the issue. By having Ahab address the cor posants as “you,” he imputes a consciousness to the electricity, and a meaning. They are the embodiment of an impersonal universe. But the corposants are balls of static, things not persons, although Ahab insists they are personifications. Ahab has it wrong. What is Melville up to?
From Logos to Canon: The Making of a Saint’s Life
Authors: Heffernan Thomas J 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One of the most imaginative and prolific writers of the Middle Ages also happened to be one of the most influential early medieval sacred biographers. Gregory of Tours was born in Arverni (the present Clermont-Ferrand) in 538-39 and died in Tours on November 17 in 593-94. Gregory, named Gregorius Florentius at birth, was descended from a distinguished Gallo-Roman family closely related to the most illustrious houses of Gaul. His education, he tells us, was in church schools and principally confined to a study of Scripture. Given such a clerical education in this region of Gaul in the late sixth century, it is fair to conclude that his knowledge of the classics was limited.1 Although he frequently lamented his lack of training in rhetoric and secular literature, he appears to have read voraciously and was continually busy at his writing.
Sacred Biography as Historical Narrative: Testing the Tradition, Gibbon to Gadamer
Authors: Heffernan Thomas J 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
These quotations from Lee and Boccaccio highlight the gulf which separates the medieval from the modern sensibility on the issue of authority and judgment. For Boccaccio, and, no doubt, the majority of medieval men and women, the evidence of the senses was at best only a corroborating proof, and a secondary one at that, in the search to determine the truth. The “real” was always unapparent, hidden beneath some surface. Such a fideistic attitude is nowhere more pronounced than in the lives of the saints, where human flesh and blood have become the dwelling place for the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. The saint is the medieval symbol for this interplay between the known and the unknown. Within this medieval system of belief, it followed that if a narrative pretended to describe the saint’s life, it had to confront this intersection of the human and the divine. Such a narrative was thus concerned simultaneously with the historical-the story of the saint’s life-and the metahistorical-the divine in-dwelling.
Virgin Mothers
Authors: Heffernan Thomas J 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The young Mary, recently espoused, responds with a question indicative of her expectation that her marriage to Joseph would involve normal marital sexuality. If, for the moment, we read her question as an actual response, literally that is, apart from Luke’s interest in depicting Christ as the messianic fulfillment of the Isaian prophecy (Isaiah 7:14), and its dense “labryinth of Old Testament reminiscence,” its historical importance for the development of conventions concerning celibacy becomes more apparent.1 Mary’s query provokes the fullness of the angelic prophecy: female virginity is the ideal vessel for the reception of the Spirit. But her question was perceived as fraught with nuance: from the Protoevangelium of James (ca. 140?) to the English Speculum Sacerdotale (ca. 1415), exegetes read her question as a troubled, doubtful one: “sche was trowbiled in hure-self, and no3t for the vision of the angel but for his wordis.”2 Her virginity, they believed she knew, would exact a great price: risk of losing her spouse, the denial of family and children, and the burden, however blessed, of being the bearer of the Christ, Theotokos.3
Rationality, Ritual, and Science
Authors: Penner Hans H 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Seventy years ago, the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics gave seventy six double column small-print pages to the topic of magic. Twenty of those pages described the magic of Greece and Rome, and concluded: “Magic was one of those vices of intellectual youth which the Greco Roman world never quite outgrew” (vol. 8, p. 289). About twenty years ago the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences spent no more than seven pages of large-print double columns to the subject of magic. It is obvious that Nur Yalman was not very excited about the topic. He wrote that “In recent years there is a lack of interest in magic.” In fact, “Magic is not a uniform class of practices and beliefs which can be immediately discerned in every society” (vol. 9, p. 521). It would seem that we could draw the same conclusion that Levi-Strauss did regarding “totemism”: magic does not exist; it is the product of scholars’ minds. The new Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by the late Mircea Eliade, seems to reach this conclusion in spite of the fact that it dedicates thirty three double-column pages to the subject.
Science and Magic, Miracle and Magic in Formative Judaism: The System and the Difference
Authors: Neusner Jacob 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The received definition of the difference between miracle and magic, long familiar in the history of religion, allows us to differentiate, also, between science and magic. The difference, many have maintained, is convention al. It is that, in any given system, persons know the difference between acts of religion (that is, miracles), and those of superstition (namely, magic) by reference to the source and standing of the one who does a deed deemed out of the ordinary. The extraordinary deeds of the true God (or the agents thereof, that is, angels or holy persons) are miracles. The extraordinary deeds of a false god (with the same qualification) are magic. The difference, then, is social and systemic, the distinction merely a conventional usage of society. The distinction makes a difference, in particular, in exchanges between systems - for example, Elijah and the prophets of Baal. It connotes the simple judgment that what my side does is a miracle; and by the way, it works; what your side does is magic, whether or not it works.
Jewish Magic from the Renaissance Period to Early Hasidism
Authors: Idel Moshe 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The aim of this essay is to propose a primary typology of the elite magic of the Jews since the late fifteenth century and to trace the history of its development in a succinct way. Two major types of magic will be present ed here: the Italian, which emerged from Arabic sources initially intro duced into Kabbalah by Spanish authors of the late thirteenth and four teenth centuries (it seems to have been neglected by fifteenth-century Spanish Kabbalists, but reemerged at the end of the fifteenth century in Italy); and the Spanish, which was disclosed in Kabbalistic writings since the 1470s in Spain and afterward in the Ottoman empire and elsewhere. After explaining the theories of each type of magic, an attempt will be made to survey the activities of a series of important Jewish figures who undertook magical acts, basing themselves on the theoretical assump tions of either of the types. In other words, we witness the conspicuous manifestation of magical activity within Jewish culture, mostly on the esoteric level, occurring exactly at the same time, in two important cen ters of Jewish culture.
Magic and Messiah
Authors: Kee Howard Clark 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the academic study of the origins of Christianity there have been in recent years several efforts to link the messianic claims made on behalf of Jesus with the phenomenon of magic in the wider Greco-Roman world. Notable among these attempts are John M. Hull’s Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition1 and Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician.2 The implicit assumption in both these works is that such terms as magic, miracle, sign, and wonder are interchangeable. Accordingly, magic is considered to be operative wherever any of these terms is used or wherever one hears of healing activity linked with the demonic or with other pow ers perceived as lying outside the ordinary human realm. Because there are reports in the Gospels that link Jesus’s healing work with the demonic, and because his name is invoked in the Greek magical papyri, along with other divinities of the Greco-Roman world, it seems to some schol ars self-evident that Jesus as healer should be perceived as carrying out a role as a magician.
Light on a Dark Subject and Vice Versa: Magic and Magicians in the New Testament
Authors: Garrett Susan R 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In what respect did the Egyptians sin in not believing Moses, since the magicians wrought like signs, even although they were done rather in ap pearance than in truth? For if I had been there then, should I not have thought, from the fact that the magicians did like things to those which Moses did, either that Moses was a magician, or that the magicians wrought their signs by divine commission? For I should not have thought it likely that the same things could be effected by magicians, even in appear ance, which he who was sent by God performed.
Magic, Miracle, and Popular Practice in the Early Medieval West: Anglo-Saxon England
Authors: Jolly Karen Louise 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Magic and its religious antithesis, miracle, form two poles within a cul ture’s perception of the world around them, allowing them to distinguish the unacceptable from the acceptable. Yet between these two extremes lay a spectrum of practices that were neither clearly magic nor clearly reli gion. These practices were the result of the processes of conflict and assimilation continuously at work within that culture. The extant litera ture of the early medieval west made the magic-religion distinction very clear; yet other literary and nonliterary sources evidenced a variety of practices that fell between these two poles. Moreover, the definition of these extremes, and hence the reasons for the ambiguous practices, were based on a view of knowledge different from our own: the distinction between magic and religion was the same as that between magic and science because scientia, according to the vocabulary of the time, includ ed both religious truth as well as learned or “natural” knowledge. The basis of the distinction between magic and scientia was not how they functioned, but the source of power-God or the devil.
Witchcraft and the Occult as Boundary Maintenance Devices
Authors: Ben-Yehuda Nachman 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
I shall examine in this paper the issue of societal moral boundaries vis-a vis witchcraft and the occult. I shall argue that in a simple society that differentiates into a myriad of symbolic-moral universes, and in one that is infinitely more complex and characterized by the existence of a variety of these universes (e.g., see Berger and Luckmann, 1966), the emergence of witchcraft and the occult may be thought of as markers of symbolic moral boundaries, and as devices for the maintenance of these bound aries.
The Coupling Convention: Novel Views of Love and Marriage
Authors: duCille Ann 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Contending Forces tells a terrible tale of slavery, arson, pillage, lynching, rape, forced impregnation, and sexual blackmail. It also, as these lines suggest, is a novel self-consciously aware of the dictates of its romantic form. Accordingly, it tells its horror story through the formula of female virtue pitted against patriarchal plunder: piety, if not absolute purity, is eventually rewarded by love and marriage. Is love, then, even in the African American novel, the “subject par excellence,” as Leslie Fiedler maintains?
Literary Passionlessness and the Black Woman Question in the 1890s
Authors: duCille Ann 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Nineteenth-century British thought, as Christina Crosby has noted, is marked by a fascination with women, the “ceaseless posing of ‘the woman question.”’Much the same holds true on the other side of the Atlantic. However, nine-teenth-century American thought is marked as well by the ceaseless posing of “the race question.” Concerned, like most black Americans, with issues of racial identity and social equality, black female artists and intellectuals writing at the turn of the century recognized that for them and their sisters the race question did not exist separate and distinct from the woman question and vice versa. Their commitment to uplifting the black race, therefore, was inextricably linked to a commitment to improving the social, cultural, moral, and material conditions of women. This particularized, gendered sense of racial purpose and politics often put black women writers at odds with a nationalist, masculinist ideology of uplift that demanded female deference in the cause of elevating black men. At the same time, however, racial discrimination within the woman’s movement positioned black women on the outskirts of mainstream suffrage and temperance activism. Central to the literary interventions of black women writers, then, was the need to redefine who “women” were in the process of laying claim to womanhood, while also renegotiating gender relations within their own increasingly patriarchal black communities, as they claimed the right to participate in the American body politic and to control the politics of their own bodies.
Women, Men, and Marriage in the Ideal Estate
Authors: duCille Ann 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Perhaps nowhere are the contradictory impulses of the 1890s more dramatically revealed than in the variety of fiction that flowered throughout the decade. Both informed by and part of what Frances Harper called the “grandly constructive” political activism of the Woman's Era/ many of the novels of the period address issues much on the minds of intellectuals such as Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Anna Julia Cooper. Of particular concern to these writers was the moral, social, and political status of African American women and, as this excerpt from “A Double Standard” suggests, the nature of malefemale social relations. As I argued in chapter 2, nineteenth-century black women writers such as Hopkins and Harper employed the convention of coupling and the concept of passionlessness in advancing an often sophisticated critique of the insidious interplay of racial and sexual ideology, as they sought both to revise patriarchal standards of female respectability and to extend to black women the protection of idealized femininity.
Introduction : The Family, the State, and the Novel in the Early Republic
Authors: Samuels Shirley 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One of the first pictorial representations of America, the Philipp Galle portrait of America as a muscular Indian woman (1592), suggests both the threat of the Medusa and the story of Judith and Holofernes, two related allegories of politicized violence conjoined with sexual desire (Fig. 1). Her body appears seductive and yet indifferent to its seductive force-the eyes gaze up and out of the picture’s frame, eluding our look. Incongruously graceful long hair covers her genitals; the spear clutched in her left hand is not quite balanced by the severed head dangling from her right. This woman’s powerful body evokes the recurrent origin story of national victories secured through the ability of a woman to behead her enemy; and it makes visible the castration panic marking such stories. The peculiar fetishism of this new world order involves the symbolic substitution of a woman’s body for the male enterprise.
The Family In The Novel: Cooper And The Domestic Revolution
Authors: Samuels Shirley 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
John Adams expresses a familiar version of the story of the American Revolution when he portrays England as the quintessential bad mother on the verge of murdering her children. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, using the same analogy to describe the threat of the Indians, implies that England is guilty of malicious indifference rather than evil intent, but his language reveals a similar congruence of anxieties in the Revolutionary period. For both Adams and Crevecoeur the connection with the “mother country” has become a “habitual affection,” a phrase that at once mitigates the loss of affection and emphasizes the frailty of an affection that would make familial violence seem “coolly, and philosophically” necessary.
Gide’s Bent
Authors: Lucey Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Gide's Bent investigates the place of sexuality in the writings of André Gide, one of the first "out" modern writers. Focusing on his writing of the 1920s and 1930s, the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and also the years of his most notable left-wing political activity, Gide's Bent interrogates both the political content of his reflections on his homosexuality and the ways his sexuality inflected his political interests. Provocative examination of one of the first openly homosexual writers, André Gide.
Corydon and L!Ecole Des Femmes: Mimesis, The Mantis, The Gynaeceum
Authors: Lucey Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Academy? ... Yes, perhaps, accept becoming a member if I can do it without making solicitations, groveling, paying visits, etc. And immediately afterward, as my first act as an Immortal, a preface to Corydon, declaring that I consider that book to be the most important and the most serviceable of my writings (French doesn’t really have the word I want, and I don’t even know if this English word expresses exactly what I mean: of greater usefulness, of greater service for the progress of humanity). I believe this and it would not be difficult to prove it. (Journals, 4:256)1 It seems that both Corydon and Retour de l’U.R.S.S. occupied a special place in Gide’s heart {he links the two in a journal entry from November 1947),2 as somehow his two riskiest books, the two books most successful at giving offence. And Gide seems to view as one of Corydon’ s major ongoing successes precisely its continuing power to shock. The first part of the journal passage just quoted is thus a delightful fantasy of Corydon in 1946 providing the grounds for a disruption of one of French culture’s most vulnerable ceremonial institutions, by insisting on Gide’s sexuality, insisting on the publicity of what many in the public or the Academy knew or could have known if they hadn’t imagined ignorance to be more comfortable. But as for Corydon (a set of four dialogues about homosexuality published partially in a tiny 1911 private edition, fully in a 1920 private edition, and finally publicly in 1924) being Gide’s most important and socially useful book, a claim he made several times late in his life, such a claim seems a little hard to swallow. How could a declared homosexual writer who had, while still somewhat closeted, written as apparently homophobic and misogynistic a book as Corydon, later in life claim that book as his most important for the good it might do for gay men? That question has been the burden carried by most of the scarce recent writing on the book; it is a question I try here to acknowledge without answering it. Instead, I offer a reading of Corydon aimed at illustrating how this question comes to be posed so acutely by this particular text.
The Emperor’s Image
Authors: Finney Paul Corby 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Once Pliny had ordered Trajan’s bust to be brought into his courtroom, the imperial image continued to play a role in the persecution of early Christians right through to the Constantinian legitimation of Christianity in the early fourth century. But the kind of a role it played is still a matter for debate: did caesar’s image have a bearing on evolving early Christian attitudes toward the visual arts or, more specifically, did it have a retarding effect on the development of a portraiture genre within the early church?