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Dear MEDIEVAL-RELIGION Subscribers,
A new publication from University of Pennsylvania Press
Free postage to UK customers
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/a-remembrance-of-his-wonders
A Remembrance of His Wonders
Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz
David I. Shyovitz
"A Remembrance of His Wonders is an excellent achievement that deals with central research questions regarding the understanding of the wondrous in nature by the Jews of Ashkenaz. David I. Shyovitz
presents fascinating parallels between the writings of the German Pietists and contemporary Christian texts, showing that their understandings of nature are quite similar."—Israel Yuval, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an explosion of Christian interest in the meaning and workings of the natural world—a "discovery of nature" that profoundly reshaped the
intellectual currents and spiritual contours of European society—yet to all appearances, the Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were oblivious to the shifts reshaping their surrounding culture. Scholars have long assumed that rather than exploring
or contemplating the natural world, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were preoccupied solely with the supernatural and otherworldly: magic and mysticism, demonology and divination, as well as the zombies, werewolves, dragons, flying camels, and other monstrous
and wondrous creatures that destabilized any pretense of a consistent and encompassing natural order.
In A Remembrance of His Wonders, David I. Shyovitz disputes this long-standing and far-reaching consensus. Analyzing a wide array of neglected Ashkenazic writings on the natural
world in general, and the human body in particular, Shyovitz shows how Jews in Ashkenaz integrated regnant scientific, magical, and mystical currents into a sophisticated exploration of the boundaries between nature and the supernatural. Ashkenazic beliefs
and practices that have often been seen as signs of credulity and superstition in fact mirrored—and drew upon—contemporaneous Christian debates over the relationship between God and the natural world. In charting these parallels between Jewish and Christian
thought, Shyovitz focuses especially upon the mediating role of polemical texts and encounters that served as mechanisms for the transmission of religious doctrines, scientific facts, and cultural mores. Medieval Jews' preoccupation with the apparently "supernatural"
reflected neither ignorance nor intellectual isolation but rather a determined effort to understand nature's inner workings and outer limits and to integrate and interrogate the theologies and ideologies of the broader European Christian society.
David I. Shyovitz teaches history and Jewish studies at Northwestern University.
University of Pennsylvania Press | Jewish Culture and Contexts | May 2017 | 352pp | 11 illus. | 9780812249118 | HB | £50.00*
20% discount with this code: CSL17ROHW**
*Price subject to change.
**Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.
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