Copeland, Rita . Forthcoming.
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Ambiguity and Intention in Ancient and Medieval Rhetorical Thought
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Partial Answers 22(2).
Abstract
In the ancient rhetorical tradition and its medieval afterlife, the question of letter and intention (scriptum et voluntas) provides a theoretical framework for considerations of the literal sense. Is the word — as encountered in writing, in an authoritative text — to be the repository of the author’s intention? Or is that intention to be found somehow behind the word, in action or voice, or perhaps hovering around the word in a spiritual meaning to be inferred by reading beyond or against the letter? These are problems that haunt any field that takes its theoretical vocabulary from rhetoric, especially law, theology, and textual interpretation. But there is another question, subsidiary to that of scriptum et voluntas, that proves to be even more difficult to pin down: ambiguity. Legal rhetoric does not like ambiguity, because it gets in the way of clear arguments and outcomes. Theologians are wary of ambiguity. But poetry and poetic theology can veritably embrace and even weaponize ambiguity as a kind of escape clause from arguments that might bind too much. Because ambiguity troubled rhetorical theorists, studying its fortunes as a necessary element of rhetorical thought gives us insights into the real social problems that teachers, speakers, and writers expected their audiences to encounter on the ground. In this way, ambiguity can be an index of the most resistant questions of social experience and language practice. This essay begins with the problems of scriptum et voluntas and ambiguitas in the rhetorical theory of the ancient Roman West, surveying these complexities up through the fourth century CE and Augustine’s Christian rhetoric. Then crossing the centuries to the Ciceronian “revival” of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, we turn to the roles of ambiguitas in medieval rhetorical and legal thought, and finally to the exploitation of ambiguity in poetic theology.
January 2024: In the ancient rhetorical tradition and its medieval afterlife, the question of letter and intention (scriptum et voluntas) provides a theoretical framework for considerations of the literal sense. Is the word — as encountered in writing, in an authoritative text — to be the repository of the author’s intention? Or is that intention to be found somehow behind the word, in action or voice, or perhaps hovering around the word in a spiritual meaning to be inferred by reading beyond or against the letter? These are problems that haunt any field that takes its theoretical vocabulary from rhetoric, especially law, theology, and textual interpretation. But there is another question, subsidiary to that of scriptum et voluntas, that proves to be even more difficult to pin down: ambiguity. Legal rhetoric does not like ambiguity, because it gets in the way of clear arguments and outcomes. Theologians are wary of ambiguity. But poetry and poetic theology can veritably embrace and even weaponize ambiguity as a kind of escape clause from arguments that might bind too much. Because ambiguity troubled rhetorical theorists, studying its fortunes as a necessary element of rhetorical thought gives us insights into the real social problems that teachers, speakers, and writers expected their audiences to encounter on the ground. In this way, ambiguity can be an index of the most resistant questions of social experience and language practice. This essay begins with the problems of scriptum et voluntas and ambiguitas in the rhetorical theory of the ancient Roman West, surveying these complexities up through the fourth century CE and Augustine’s Christian rhetoric. Then crossing the centuries to the Ciceronian “revival” of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, we turn to the roles of ambiguitas in medieval rhetorical and legal thought, and finally to the exploitation of ambiguity in poetic theology.
Gleave, Robert . Forthcoming.
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Interpretations of Literality: Muslim Legal Hermeneutics and Whitman’s Five Questions
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Partial Answers 22(2).
Abstract
Jon Whitman, in his opening contribution to the collections of essays Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, poses questions about interpretive communities’ assessment of the “literal sense” of canonical texts, about the criteria for downplaying parts of these texts in the process of allegorization, about the influence of enhanced allegorization on changes in the interpretive communities, and the continuities of idiom and orientation behind such changes. This essay discusses the answers that can be derived from the Muslim tradition, and, in particular, from the system of Muslim legal hermeneutics known as uṣūl al-fiqh, to these questions, and explores how these questions can illuminate interdisciplinary understanding of the functions of the literal sense in contrasting intellectual traditions.
January 2024: Robert Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. From January 2023 until January 2026 he is British Academy/Wolfson Professor with the research project “The Foundations of Modern Shi’ism: The End of Akhbārism and the Beginnings of Uṣūlism.” His research focuses on Islamic legal theory and practice, particularly legal hermeneutics, and the history of Shi’ite legal thought and institutions. He has directed a number of international research projects exploring these issues. His most recent research projects (concluded in 2022), were Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shi’ite Islam, funded by the European Research Council, and Islamic Law on the Edge, in collaboration with Dr Adday Hernandez-Lopez of Complutense University, Madrid, examining neglected and marginalized areas of Islamic legal studies.
Cohen, Mordechai Z. . Forthcoming.
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Abraham Ibn Ezra’s “Way of Peshat” in Light of Shifting Christian Conceptions of the Literal Sense
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Partial Answers 22(2).
Abstract
The reputation of Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089 or 1092/93–1164 or 1167) as a key proponent of the peshat (“plain sense”) of Scripture has been questioned due to his tendency (1) to adjust his exegesis to conform with rabbinic halakhic (religious-legal) traditions and (2) his philosophical readings, especially in the Psalms. Drawing upon evidence from his own Sefardic intellectual heritage and by analogy with the complexities of the Christian conception of the “literal sensew” brought to light in recent scholarship, this study aims to clarify the broader definition of peshat conceived by Ibn Ezra that incorporated interpretive considerations beyond the simplest philological construal of the biblical text.
January 2024: Mordechai Z. Cohen is Professor of Bible and Associate Dean at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and Director of the Chinese-Jewish Conversation at Yeshiva University in New York. His research focuses on Jewish Bible interpretation in its Muslim and Christian cultural contexts, as well as a comparison with traditional interpretation of Chinese classical texts. Among his publications are Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor (Brill Academic Publishers 2003; 2nd edition 2008), Opening the Gates of Interpretation (Brill Academic Publishers 2011), The Rule of Peshat (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020), and Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning (Cambridge University Press 2021).
Greenstein, Edward L. Forthcoming.
““My hand I place over my mouth”: Interpreting Gestures in the Poetry of Job”.
Partial Answers 22(2).
Abstract
The Book of Job, like other ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts, makes relatively frequent use of gestures in its discourse. The interpretation of these gestures is often moot. Is a particular gesture physical, which is to say literal, or (also) symbolic, which is to say figurative? How is a gesture’s meaning in a particular context to be divined? Job’s placing his hand over his mouth, for example, is almost universally understood to reflect his self-censure, his silencing of himself. Comparing other instances of this gesture, in Job and elsewhere, leads to a very different nuance of meaning. Silencing oneself is not self-censure but rather an indication of a desire to listen or hear more. This and other gestures in Job will be discussed with attention to the criteria by which meaning, in such instances, is (or is not) determined.
January 2024: Edward L. Greenstein is professor emeritus of Bible at Bar-Ilan University. He has held professorships at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Tel Aviv University and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School, Yale, Princeton, the Hebrew University, and elsewhere. Recipient of the EMET Prize ("Israel’s Nobel") in the field of Humanities-Biblical Studies, Greenstein has authored and edited numerous works, most prominently Job: A New Translation (Yale University Press, 2019). He is currently writing commentaries on Job, Lamentations, and Ruth, as well as other books.
Cohen, Jeremy . Forthcoming.
“Rashi, Honorius Augustodunensis, and the Shulamite: The Nexus of Exegesis and Interreligious Confrontation Early in the 12th Century”.
Partial Answers 22(2).
Abstract
This essay explores the convergence of new emphases on the literal-historical sense in biblical exegesis, the burgeoning of interreligious polemic, and aspects of the commonality of Jewish and Christian cultural experiences early in the 12th century. It probes instructive similarity and difference in the Song of Songs commentaries of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, 1040–1105) and Honorius Augustodunensis (d. after 1140), particularly in the Song’s praise of the Shulamite in 6:10–7:11. Their commentaries signal the importance of contemporary interreligious debate, of Christian hopes to convert the Jews, and of expectations for the ultimate salvation of exiled Israel at the end time. Most impressively, they reflect a shared landscape characterized by growing awareness of the other and the need to situate the other on one’s own map of the world.
January 2024: Jeremy Cohen is professor emeritus in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, where he held the Spiegel Family Foundation Chair for European Jewish History. He has authored seven books, edited or co-edited another eight, and published some fifty articles – on the multifaceted interactions of Jews and Christians from antiquity until early modern times: interreligious polemics, biblical exegesis, historiography, martyrology, and more. These works include The Friars and the Jews (1982), Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict (1991), From Witness to Witchcraft (1996), Living Letters of the Law (1999), Sanctifying the Name of God (2004), Christ Killers (2007), and The Salvation of Israel (2022)
Kramer, Michael P. Forthcoming.
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The Raison d’être of “The New Colossus”
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Partial Answers 22(2).
Abstract
Combining textual analysis, cultural contextualization, and the history of ideas, this essay excavates the complex “literal sense” of Emma Lazarus’s iconic sonnet, “The New Colossus.” Beginning with the deliberate misreading of the statue’s intended and acknowledged signification and noting the poem’s network of contrarieties, the essay dwells on the contrast between the “wretched refuse” on Ward’s Island and decadent Gilded Age exhibition where the poem was first read; it goes on to argue that the poem disables the connection between progress and poverty, reinvigorates the rhetoric of asylum, points to the Hebraic roots of American history, and reimagines American modernity as a benign merging of contrarieties.
January 2024: Michael P. Kramer is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University. He has authored and edited numerous works on Jewish and American literature. His most recent book is an annotated translation of S.Y. Agnon’s And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight.