Catalogue – Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

February 2021

Pinchas Roth

In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence

Studies and Texts 223; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 1 • 2021 • x, 168 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-223-9 • Cloth • $90

Jewish communities existed across the county of Provence throughout the Middle Ages. In This Land reveals the changes that those communities underwent during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the social and cultural tensions that shaped their identity.

March 2023

Judith Olszowy-Schlanger

Learning Hebrew in Medieval England: Christian Scholars and the Longleat House Grammar

Studies and Texts 230; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 2 • x, 194 pp. plus 24 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-230-7 • Cloth • $95

The fountainhead of theology, a “doorway to wisdom,” or a philological riddle: there were many reasons to learn Hebrew for inquisitive Christian minds in the Middle Ages. Although preoccupation with the meanings of the names of the Hebrew letters and their presumed inherent virtues can be traced back to the early Church Fathers, the rediscovery of classical sources and Aristotelian philosophy and the engagement with Graeco-Arabic sciences that marked the renaissance of the twelfth century also brought about an acute awareness of the need for a philological understanding of the Hebrew language.

September 2023

Edited by
James P. Carley and Charles Burnett

Hebraism in Sixteenth-Century England: Robert and Thomas Wakefield

Studies and Texts 231; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 3 • xvi, 332 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-231-4 • Cloth • $95

Robert Wakefield (ca. 1493/5–1537) and his brother Thomas (1500–1575) were pioneers in the study and teaching of Hebrew in early modern England, but the range of their learning and their accomplishments has received scant scholarly attention.

February 2025

Theodor Dunkelgrün

The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible

Studies and Texts 234; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 4 • xxvi, 554 pp. plus 8 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-234-5 • Cloth • $150

This is the first book-length study of how the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568–1573) was made. The Antwerp Polyglot has long been recognized as one of the most ambitious typographical enterprises of the sixteenth century. Upon completion, it was the most elaborate Bible ever printed, a library of biblical erudition with editions of the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin versions together with new scholarly instruments necessary to study and compare them. Yet powerful contemporaries also perceived it as a threat to the Church.

February 2025

Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg

Johann Buxtorf, Impresario of Hebrew and Jewish Books

Studies and Texts 239; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 5 • xii, 276 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-239-0 • Cloth • $125

Johann Buxtorf (1564–1629) pursued the study of Hebrew and Aramaic and the writings and rituals of Jewish tradition through a long and productive life as a professor at the University of Basel and an impresario of Jewish texts. The focus of this work is on Buxtorf’s scholarly practices – for example, the ways in which he read and made excerpts from a wide variety of Jewish texts, recycled them in his polemical Jüden schul (1603), a treatise on the customs and ceremonies of Ashkenazic Jews, and surveyed them in pioneering if incomplete bibliographies.