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The heart of this book is a reading of the letters of Paulinus of Nola, aristocratic convert to Christianity of the late fourth‐century, and his correspondents, most notably St Augustine of Hippo. We begin with an analysis of letter writing in late antiquity; we investigate the letters as traces of fuller historical events, emphasize the importance of the letter carriers, and conclude that the letters have a sacramental function. The notion of spiritual community created and sustained by the letters is explored through discussions of Christian friendship, and of the patterns of imagistic thought which facilitate the spiritual interpretation of mundane events. Finally, we demonstrate how Paulinus’ notion of spiritual community leads to a novel conception of the self as truly relational. The impact of these letters, and of the epistolary mode, on the formation of Christian ways of life and thought is extraordinary.

This book is a companion volume to the author's The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal, but while The Economics of Ecstasy engages the theoretical issues of secrecy and concealment associated with the Kartābhajās — a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra, an Indian religious movement notorious for its alleged use of shocking sexual language and rituals, this book presents the first English translation of the sect's body of highly esoteric, mystical poetry and songs. The period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, during which these lyrics were written, was an era of change, experimentation, and transition from the older medieval styles to the new literary forms of “modern” Bengal. The original songs presented are an important part of this transitional period, reflecting the search for new literary forms and experimentation in new poetic styles. Long disparaged as an inferior, low‐class, or corrupt form of Bengali literature, these songs are concerned with contemporary social life in colonial Calcutta and with the real lives of common lower‐class men and women. With their vision of a universal “religion of humanity,” open to men and women of all classes, the Kartābhajā songs offer an alternative model of community, which made a special appeal to the working classes of colonial Calcutta. They delight in ridiculing and satirizing the foppish British rulers and pretentious upper classes, although at the same time, however, the satirical urban imagery is mingled with older Tantric connotations and employed in ingenious new ways to express profoundly esoteric and mystical religious ideas.

This book asks why so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism apparently violated their most basic principles in relying on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African American figures. As a self-described “tool of the democratic spirit”, designed to “prick the bubbles of abstract types” (William Dean Howells), literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in American magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery, and Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish “the artistic emancipation of the Negro”. Yet in practice, Howells and his fellow realists regularly employed comic typification of ethnic subjects as a feature of their representational practice. Critics have generally dismissed such lapses in realist technique as vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with the movement's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. This book argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the era's most demanding literary and graphic works.

This volume contains sixteen chapters which contain the text of lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2008–10. From romantic love in sub-Saharan Africa to the British industrial revolution, from John Donne to Arthur Miller, from surrealism to Chinese flower imagery, this book demonstrates unparalleled breadth and depth of scholarship.

This book presents work that investigates the numerous miniature baked clay images from Canaan, Israel and Judah (c.1600–600 bc). They constitute vital evidence for the imagery and domestic rituals of ordinary people, but significantly are not explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament. These terracottas are treated as a distinctive phenomenon with roots deep in prehistory and recurrent characteristics across millennia. Attention is focused on whether or not the female representations are worshippers of unknown deities or images of known goddesses, particularly in Early Israelite religion.

Proverbs 1-9 is often characterized as an anthology of materials, loosely related to the ‘instructions’ composed in Egypt and elsewhere, and possibly originating in an educational setting. This book argues that it is, instead, a sophisticated poetic work, with a basic unity of composition and message. Beginning with an examination of the Egyptian instructions, which are themselves poetic and testamentary rather than pedagogical, the study explores the way in which Proverbs 1-9 combines conventions of the instruction genre with a figurative representation of the reasons for instruction. Drawing on a traditional association of foreign women with the corruption and apostasy of Jewish youths-which was given added impetus by the post-exilic controversy over mixed marriages-Proverbs 1-9 sets a foreign seductress in opposition to a personified figure of Wisdom. The two compete for those youths who are uncommitted, and who can only hope to recognize which invitation they should accept if they have already received and internalized instruction. In this context, instruction is associated with the Torah, and is the prerequisite for the wisdom by which God's will can be recognized. These ideas, and elements of the imagery, persist into later Jewish literature, but the linking of wisdom with traditional concepts in Jewish piety goes back to Proverbs 1-9 itself.

This book is an exploration of maternal imagery and discourse in premodern South Asian Buddhism, drawing primarily on textual sources preserved in Pali and Sanskrit. It argues that Buddhism in India had a complex and ambivalent relationship with mothers and motherhood—symbolically, affectively, and institutionally. Symbolically, motherhood was a double-edged sword, sometimes extolled as the most appropriate symbol for buddhahood itself, and sometimes denigrated as the most paradigmatic manifestation possible of attachment and suffering. On an affective level, too, motherhood was viewed with the same ambivalence: In Buddhist literature, warm feelings of love and gratitude for the mother’s nurturance and care frequently mingle with submerged feelings of hostility and resentment for the unbreakable obligations thus created, and positive images of self-sacrificing mothers are counterbalanced by horrific depictions of mothers who kill and devour. Institutionally, the formal definition of the Buddhist renunciant as one who has severed all familial ties seems to co-exist uneasily with an abundance of historical evidence demonstrating monks’ and nuns’ continuing concern for their mothers, as well as other familial entanglements. Some of the topics covered in the book are Buddhist depictions of maternal love and maternal grief, the role played by the Buddha’s own mothers, Māyā and Mahāprajāpatī, the use of pregnancy and gestation as metaphors for the attainment of enlightenment, the use of breastfeeding as a metaphor for the compassionate deeds of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the relationship between Buddhism and motherhood as it actually existed “on the ground.”

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. This book holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. The book's alternative is to show that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought.