Is Astra ready to accept her destiny? A gripping novel for 'Hunger Games fans of all ages' says Library Journal. War is breaking out in Kadingir. Still struggling to accept her role as a long prophesied icon of unification between Is-Land and Non-Land, Astra Ordott is on a journey across the wind sands to join her father and his people - the mystics of Shiimti, who claim to hold the secret of truly healing the damaged relationship between human beings and the Earth. Astra's desperate to get there quickly, but when her guide and companion, the shepherd Muzi, leads her off course into the path of a vicious sandstorm, she is forced to confront what the gods of their devastated world might be telling her: that there will be no refuge from her destiny.

Dramatically urgent from the get-go, many of Jacqueline Osherow's poems approach inconsistencies and mysteries in Biblical texts. From traditional poetic forms (sonnet, terza rima, villanelle, sestina, acrostic, loose ottava rima) to an austere free verse, Osherow mixes humor and seriousness while maintaining a conversational tone. These poems deal with Jewish tradition and the land of Israel in revelatory new ways. Jacqueline Osherow is the author of four previous poetry collections. Her work has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Best American Poetry (1995 and 1998) and The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women. Awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. She is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Utah.

"The book is made even more valuable by the inclusion of an extensive anthology of translated Mandaean texts, complete with notes. This collection of writings presents the spiritual world of Mandaeanism with fragments of mythical-theological texts and pages of ethical and historical meditations."--BOOK JACKET.

The Culture of Animals in Antiquity provides students and researchers with well-chosen and clearly presented ancient sources in translation, some well-known, others undoubtedly unfamiliar, but all central to a key area of study in ancient history: the part played by animals in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. It brings new ideas to bear on the wealth of evidence – literary, historical and archaeological – which we possess for the experiences and roles of animals in the ancient world. Offering a broad picture of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean as part of a wider ecosystem, the volume is on an ambitious scale. It covers a broad span of time, from the sacred animals of dynastic Egypt to the imagery of the lamb in early Christianity, and of region, from the fallow deer introduced and bred in Roman Britain to the Asiatic lioness and her cubs brought as a gift by the Elamites to the Great King of Persia. This sourcebook is essential for anyone wishing to understand the role of animals in the ancient world and support learning for one of the fastest growing disciplines in Classics.

The ‘Science of properties’ represents a large and fascinating part of Arabic technical literature. The book of ʿĪsā ibn ʿAlī (9th cent.) ‘On the useful properties of animal parts’ was the first of such compositions in Arabic. His author was a Syriac physician, disciple of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, who worked at the Abbasid court during the floruit of the translation movement. For the composition of his book, as a multilingual scholar, he collected many different antique and late antique sources. The structure of the text itself—a collection of recipes that favoured a fluid transmission—becomes here the key to a new formal analysis that oriented the editorial solutions as well. The ‘Book on the useful properties of animal parts’ is a new tile that the Arabic tradition offers to the larger mosaic representing the transfer of technical knowledge in pre-modern times. This text is an important passage in that process of acquisition and original elaboration of knowledge that characterized the early Abbasid period.

Christine de Pizan is in danger when she is sent to the Priory of Poissy to catch the killer of a young nun in this vividly imagined historical mystery set in fourteenth-century France. Paris, 1399. Scribe Christine de Pizan is sent to the Priory of Poissy by the palace to copy a manuscript for the prioress. But the prioress already has many copyists, and Christine senses that something is amiss. Her suspicions are confirmed when the prioress reveals that one of the sisters has been found murdered in the cloister. Fearing for the welfare of the king's young daughter who resides at the abbey, she is eager for Christine to find out who killed the young nun - and why. As Christine investigates, she uncovers dark mischief and closely guarded secrets, but can she unmask a killer? This compelling medieval mystery will appeal to fans of KAREN MAITLAND, SUSANNA GREGORY and CANDACE ROBB.

This volume offers the user a guide to the neglected field of how-to books. How do I make soap? How do I dye textiles? What ingredients do I need for a effective remedy? How can one find and mine mineral resources, how does one make pewter cups or a good meal? Practical information of this kind, on distillation, medicine, dyeing, cosmetics, glassmaking, ceramics, metallurgy and many other subjects, flooded the book market in the first centuries of printing. As varied as these subjects are the research questions that we might ask: How do you learn practical skills from a book? Why were these books so popular, who used them and how, and can they even be considered to be a clearly defined genre? The aim of this volume, which emerged from a conference at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, is to find out which patterns characterise the genre of how-to books or “Rezepte-Büchlein”. It also aims to contribute to the clarification of terms for a genre, that operates under labels such as “Books of Secrets” and "recipe books" or, in German-speaking countries, "Kunst- und Wunderbuch" or “nützlich büchlein”. Some key issues addressed in the book include the traces of book use, the media shift from manuscript to print, the interaction between text and image, and the praxeological dimension of practical books. Self-help literature not only made it possible for interested laypersons to obtain information from all possible fields of knowledge, largely independent of institutional and educational environments; as "tracts for action" they differed from other genres in that they were consistently oriented towards implementation.

This volume centers on dreams in Greek medicine from the fifth-century B.C.E. Hippocratic Regimen down to the modern era. Medicine is here defined in a wider sense than just formal medical praxis, and includes non-formal medical healing methods such as folk pharmacopeia, religion, ’magical’ methods (e.g., amulets, exorcisms, and spells), and home remedies. This volume examines how in Greek culture dreams have played an integral part in formal and non-formal means of healing. The papers are organized into three major diachronic periods. The first group focuses on the classical Greek through late Roman Greek periods. Topics include dreams in the Hippocratic corpus; the cult of the god Asclepius and its healing centers, with their incubation and miracle dream-cures; dreams in the writings of Galen and other medical writers of the Roman Empire; and medical dreams in popular oneirocritic texts, especially the second-century C.E. dreambook by Artemidorus of Daldis, the most noted professional dream interpreter of antiquity. The second group of papers looks to the Christian Byzantine era, when dream incubation and dream healings were practised at churches and shrines, carried out by living and dead saints. Also discussed are dreams as a medical tool used by physicians in their hospital praxis and in the practical medical texts (iatrosophia) that they and laypeople consulted for the healing of disease. The final papers deal with dreams and healing in Greece from the Turkish period of Greece down to the current day in the Greek islands. The concluding chapter brings the book a full circle by discussing how modern psychotherapists and psychologists use Ascelpian dream-rituals on pilgrimages to Greece.