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  • ItemOpen Access
    Interprofessional Approach to Refugee Health: A Practical Guide for Interdisciplinary Health and Social Care Teams
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-09-09) Jalovcic, Djenana; McGowan, Emer; Quinn, Sarah
    As global displacement reaches unprecedented levels, health and social care professionals increasingly find themselves supporting people with refugee experience whose health and wellbeing needs are complex, urgent, and often unmet. This timely and practical book provides essential guidance for professionals—particularly those new to working in this context—on how to deliver compassionate, culturally responsive, and effective care to forcibly displaced individuals and communities. Drawing on personal narratives of displacement, international research, global best practices, and firsthand professional experience, this volume addresses the many challenges refugees face in accessing appropriate health and social care, including trauma, chronic illness, mental health conditions, housing insecurity, and language barriers. Contributions from a diverse range of professionals—across nursing, occupational therapy, psychology, psychotherapy, physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, and more—highlight the interprofessional collaboration necessary to meet these multifaceted needs. Through real-life case studies, reflective prompts, and a strong focus on person-centred, equitable care, this book centres the lived experiences of refugees and emphasizes the importance of listening, learning, and adapting care to each individual’s story. A vital resource for practitioners, students, policymakers, and educators, this book bridges the gap between evidence and practice and empowers professionals to build inclusive and responsive systems of care for those affected by forced migration.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Models in Political Economy: Collective Choice, Voting, Elections, Bargaining, and Rebellion
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-09-12) Osborne, Martin J.
    This volume explores topics that lie at the core of political economy: collective choice, voting, elections, bargaining, and rebellion. It presents the main formal models used to study the behavior of individuals and groups in political contexts, from choosing public policies and participating as voters and candidates in elections, to staging revolutions. Complete mathematical proofs are provided, to clarify the assumptions and deepen understanding. Part I presents models of collective choice. The main question is whether methods exist for selecting a reasonable compromise when individuals’ preferences differ. Models of voting are studied in Part II. Included are models in which the individuals differ in their preferences as well as ones in which they differ in their information. One chapter considers the implications of individuals having ethical concerns, and another studies a model of sequential voting. Models of electoral competition, under the assumption of various motivations for the candidates, are discussed in Part III. One chapter is devoted to the application of these models to the study of redistributive policy. The book concludes with Part IV, which covers models of bargaining and rebellion. The book offers a rigorous yet accessible foundation for understanding how formal tools can illuminate political phenomena.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Representation Theory: A Categorical Approach
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-09-22) Grabowski, Jan E.
    This volume offers a fresh and modern introduction to one of abstract algebra’s key topics. Guiding readers through the transition between structure theory and representation theory, this textbook explores how algebraic objects like groups and rings act as symmetries of other structures. Using the accessible yet powerful language of category theory, the book reimagines standard approaches to topics such as modules and algebras in a way that unlocks modern treatments of more advanced topics such as quiver representations and even representations of Hopf algebras and categories. Aimed at undergraduate students with prior exposure to linear algebra and basic group theory, the book introduces categories early and uses them throughout, providing a cohesive framework that mirrors current mathematical research. Though technically sophisticated, it also includes examples and exercises designed to develop intuition and understanding. Grabowski’s inclusion of computational tools such as SageMath offers a valuable and traditionally underdeveloped bridge between abstract theory and hands-on exploration. This is a uniquely valuable guide for students ready to stretch their understanding of the subject’s conceptual depth and evolving frontiers.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Questions on the Posterior Analytics (Second Redaction)
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-09-18) of Faversham, Simon; Costa, Iacopo; Mora-Márquez, Ana María; Fernández Walker, Gustavo
    Simon of Faversham was an English scholar affiliated with the University of Paris during the 1280s, where he most likely wrote his commentaries on Aristotle’s philosophical works. The Posterior Analytics, one of Aristotle’s most important treatises, addresses the nature of scientific demonstration. Faversham’s two extant commentaries on The Posterior Analytics are invaluable witnesses to key elements of late medieval accounts of scientific demonstration, including views on the extent and limits of demonstration, its metaphysical underpinnings, and its epistemic power. The commentary edited here, together with the accompanying translation, offers new insight into Simon of Faversham’s philosophy—a fascinating chapter in the history of late medieval thought. It also deepens our understanding of the philosophical discussions on demonstration and related topics that took place during the early period of Europe’s university history, and of the ways in which these discussions drew on earlier philosophical developments in non-European traditions, notably the Islamic philosophical tradition.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Imaginary Death
    (punctum books, 2025-09-26) Nagai, Mariko Nagai
    A man dies. He dies because he must—because without his death, there is no story, and, in the end, no history itself. So begins Mariko Nagai’s Imaginary Death, a creative nonfiction book that examines how the author’s grandfather, an ordinary man born in a small village in the early 20th century, is unmade and remade into a perfect Japanese Imperial Soldier by the era he was born into. In the kaleidoscope composed of archival documents, letters, journals, research, interviews, and photographs, Imaginary Death traces the life of a man who fought and died for the empire, whose death, obscured by lack of documentation, must be composited of many possible ways men could die in Papua New Guinea. Only forty out of four thousand men from the regimental unit survived by the end of the repatriation in 1946: his was one small death out of many. In the tradition of James Agee and Walker Evans’s seminal work on the Great Depression Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Imaginary Death is a work that is part meditation, part history, and part fragments of memory that tell a story of a Japanese soldier’s life and death during World War II. Ultimately, Imaginary Death is a textual landscape of imagination, fact, history, and dreams all intersecting to create a psychological terrain that is not limited in the same way as history or nonfiction books, but is rather a new imaginative cartography, no less real than history itself.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Mediterranean Question
    (punctum books, 2025-09-04) Chambers, Iain; Cariello, Marta
    Whose Mediterranean are we talking about? What languages are most appropriate to its reception and understanding? With two-thirds constituted by the histories and cultures of its African and Asian shorelines and hinterlands, and its principal spoken language – in all its variants and dialects – being Arabic, then the Mediterranean clearly exceeds the Western frame of explanation. Without pretending to speak for or in the name of these ignored and repressed dimensions, The Mediterranean Question explores the gap between the Mediterranean reduced to a European and Western mirror by listening and attending to some of those other histories, cultures, and lives. How to puncture prevalent European understandings of the Mediterranean? The colonizing impulse inscribed in Western historiography cannot be undone simply by adding previously repressed and unacknowledged histories. Instead, a re-examination of the premises and procedures that produced such exclusions leads to a valuable change in coordinates. An order of knowledge that creates subaltern objects of study to reconfirm European centrality and subjectivity is interrogated. Insisting on a politics of registration and listening, further critical incentives drawn from the trans-local dissemination of literature, music, cinema, and the visual arts can be deployed to query existing representations. In this more ragged and open series of maps, there lies no complete picture but rather a challenge to the violence of existing explanations. Insisting that present-day knowledge is sustained in asymmetrical relations of power, The Mediterranean Question promotes a reconfiguration of historical archives and cultural ties, casting a critical light on the deeper histories that have made the Mediterranean, Europe, and Western modernity. Proposing a series of intersecting analyses that underline the colonial constitution of the present and its mobile and creolized formation, Chambers and Cariello seek to establish new coordinates for thinking and practicing the possibilities of another Mediterranean.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Careful Village and Other 'Khashag' from Tibet: The Amdo Comedies of Menla Jyab
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-09-16) Jyab, Menla; Thurston, Timothy; Samdrup, Tsering
    This volume offers a unique glimpse into the world of khashag, a vibrant genre of Tibetan spoken comic dialogues from the area Tibetans call Amdo, with the first ever publication of 11 annotated translations of scripts by its leading performer, Menla Jyab. Emerging in the 1980s during a period of cultural revival in Tibetan communities, khashag fused traditional Tibetan expression with influences from Han Chinese xiangsheng (crosstalk), evolving into a medium of sharp societal critique and joyous entertainment. Menla Jyab, a pioneering performer, used his platform in radio, television, to craft comedies described as ‘having meaning in every line’. Drawing on a decade and a half of Tim Thurston’s research and his and Tsering Samdrup’s close connections with Menla Jyab, this groundbreaking work brings these culturally significant performances to English-speaking audiences for the first time. This richly contextualized volume explores the genre’s linguistic intricacies, performative brilliance, and cultural resonance, highlighting its role in overcoming literacy barriers to reach a broad audience. The translations, based on published scripts and transcribed recordings, are accompanied by insightful notes that illuminate the subtle interplay of humor, critique, and identity in Tibetan life. Careful Village is an indispensable resource for scholars and enthusiasts of Tibetan culture, performance studies, and oral traditions.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Sensing Violence: Reading with the Marquis de Sade
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-09-24) McMorran, Will
    What does reading fictional violence do to us as readers? To find out, this provocative and original book turns to the works of an author synonymous with sexual violence: the Marquis de Sade. Drawing on psychology, cognitive literary studies, and empirical research, it argues that reading is a fundamentally embodied act – and one that implicates us far more than we might like to think in fictional depictions of violence. This book turns not just to Sade for answers, but to his readers. Where previous studies have focussed either on Sade’s language or his philosophy, this one places the lived experience of actual readers at the heart of its investigations. Taking particular scenes from Sade’s fiction, from a young girl posing as a statue in ‘Eugénie de Franval’ to the brutal rape of the heroine of Justine, this book explores what happens not just on the page but in the minds and bodies of readers as they bring these scenes to life. Drawing on questionnaires completed by readers of those scenes, and on his own experience as a reader, teacher and translator of Sade, the author challenges the disembodied approach that has dominated Sade studies and literary criticism more broadly over recent decades. This is not just a book about Sade—it’s a radical exploration of what happens to us when we are confronted with scenes of violence. Urgent, accessible, and personal, it offers a new model for understanding reading as a matter of making sensations as well as making sense.
  • ItemOpen Access
    City of Capital and Labour: The Making and Transformation of Industrial Manchester
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-08-15) Saunders, Tom
    This compelling book explores the evolution of industrial Manchester, offering a fresh perspective on its built environment through the lens of architecture, archaeology, and social history. Richly illustrated and designed for both academic and general audiences, it sheds new light on Manchester’s transformation during the Industrial Revolution, highlighting how the city’s physical form shaped and was shaped by its socio-economic and cultural dynamics. By analysing architectural styles, building types, land use, and spatial relationships, the study identifies distinct phases of development from the early eighteenth to early twentieth century. It delves into how Manchester’s material landscape mediated industrialisation and social tensions, reflecting the emergence of both bourgeois and proletarian communities. The book argues that the city’s evolving physical structure was deeply intertwined with the capitalist logic of class relations, where architecture and urban spaces became arenas for competing social identities. Through mapping the enduring physical traces of these changes, and using a Marxist lens to examine shifting power structures in cities, the book underscores Manchester’s role as a microcosm of industrial and urban transformation. It invites readers to rediscover the city’s industrial heritage, emphasising the importance of its historic buildings in understanding the socio-economic forces that shaped modern urban life—before they are irrevocably altered by contemporary redevelopment.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Jerome’s Sources in His Translation of the Hebrew Bible
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-08-20) Rodrigue, Paul
    At the close of the fourth century CE, Jerome of Stridon—renowned Latin scholar, theologian, and priest—undertook the monumental task of translating the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible into Latin. The result of this effort, now known as the Vulgate, has long been regarded as a foundational text of Western Christianity. In this volume, Paul Rodrigue investigates the sources that Jerome may have drawn upon in the process of translation. Far from being just a rendering of the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible, the Vulgate emerges as a layered and multifaceted translation, shaped not only by the Hebrew-Aramaic text but also by a broad array of additional sources. Through a series of carefully chosen case studies, Rodrigue analyses a number of verses from the Joseph narrative in Genesis, as well as from Daniel and Esther. Each Vulgate passage is meticulously compared with its equivalents in the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible, the Septuagint, the Latin translations of the Septuagint, the Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and—where applicable—the Targumim and rabbinic writings. This comparative approach reveals Jerome’s engagement with texts in four languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin—and highlights his responses to both Jewish and Christian exegetical traditions. Importantly, the selected translations span Jerome’s career as a translator of the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible: Daniel at its outset (392–393), Genesis mid-career (late 390s), and Esther at its close (404–405). As such, Rodrigue’s analysis offers a chronologically nuanced study of Jerome’s evolving translation method (sensus de sensu), providing invaluable insight for scholars of biblical studies, late antiquity, translation theory, and the transmission of sacred texts.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Poet as Experiencer: Wallace Stevens and Nonhuman Intelligence
    (punctum books, 2025-08-13) Groves, Adam Staley
    In The Poet as Experiencer: Wallace Stevens and Nonhuman Intelligence, Adam Staley Groves approaches Stevens, not merely as poet–thinker but rather as experiencer and theorist of what is today called “the phenomenon” (UFOs). Challenging both Stevens scholarship and our broader understanding of poetic consciousness, the book presents a radical appraisal of Stevens’s oeuvre as an extended, coded testimony of contact with nonhuman intelligence. Drawing from journals, uncollected poems, and landmark works such as Harmonium and The Necessary Angel, Groves argues that Stevens’s poetic evolution mirrors the psychological and spiritual trajectory of an experiencer grappling with anomalous phenomena long before cognitive frameworks for such were culturally available. From moths and owls to missing time and the ethics of the imagination, Groves reads Stevens’s work as a sustained effort to reckon with anomalous phenomena whose language has not yet come. Through careful textual analysis and historical correlation, Groves positions the poet within a lineage that includes Coleridge, Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, who are recast not only as theorists of the imagination but as precursors to a modern metaphysical crisis now resurfacing through the contemporary discourse on UFOs and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). Integrating rigorous literary scholarship with insights from ufology, psychology, and metaphysical philosophy, Groves investigates Stevens’s use of abstraction, the ethics of poetic imagination, and the emergence of the “true subject” as a form of ontological rupture. In doing so, the book bridges the hermetic with the historical, and the poetic with the paranormal.
  • ItemOpen Access
    'Casina' by Plautus: An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-08-28)
    'Casina' was written for audiences in ancient Rome, but tells the story of an Athenian man and his son competing for the affections of a young enslaved woman who was brought up in their household. Deception, disguise, and domestic conflict unfold as the old man’s schemes are cleverly thwarted by his wife. Likely one of Plautus’s later works, 'Casina' offers both linguistic challenge and comic brilliance, making it ideal for classroom use or independent study. This edition features the complete Latin text of the play, richly annotated with grammatical and vocabulary notes to support comprehension. A clear prose translation accompanies the original, offering accessible insight into the humor and intrigue of the play. The introduction provides historical and cultural context, situating the farce within ancient Athenian and Roman comedic traditions. This volume is designed for students with intermediate Latin skills who wish to engage directly with Plautus’s lively comic play.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Ants
    (punctum books, 2025-08-22) Nakayasu, Sawako
    The Ants is a study not of, but through, ants. In a dashing sequence of prose pieces, Sawako Nakayasu takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human. Prima facie, The Ants is a catalogue of insect observations and observations of insects. But the exposé of insect life humbles and disrupts the myopia that is human life, where experience is seen in its most raw and animal form and human “nouveau-ambitious” and “free-thinking” lifestyles become estranged, uncovered, and humbled. Found in dumpling soups and remembered in childhood vignettes, these ants trail through what Nakayasu describes as the “industry of survival,” exploring interfaces of love, ambition, and strategy. The danger is not in sentiment, but rather, in a gash, a wall, an argument, an intention. Is it more lonely to be crushed into the core of a non-mechanical pencil, to be isolated in the safety of home, or to “find” “it” “all” at the very very last moment? The Ants is the distance, the break, and the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton and endoskeleton, and Nakayasu puts her finger on it, and it, and it. This title is a new and expanded edition released as part of punctum’s Special Collections project, containing additionally seventeen bilingual English–Japanese poems from the chapbook Insect Country E: Bilingual Insects.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-08-06) Ştefănescu, Laura; Shephard, Tim; O’Flaherty, Ciara; Page, Annabelle; Doyle, Oliver
    This volume explores how everyday texts in Renaissance Italy engaged with music, sound, and hearing. Of the 358 known editions printed in 1501, only a few contained formal music notation or specialist theory. Yet a surprising wealth of musical knowledge emerges from religious texts, classical commentaries, lifestyle guides, poetry, and more. These sources—rarely penned by professional musicians—reflect the broader cultural presence of music in early 16th-century life, touching on themes like music’s moral influence, its role in education, and its scientific understanding. Drawing from an ambitious cross-disciplinary survey, this groundbreaking study repositions everyday references to music as vital to understanding Renaissance musical culture. It challenges scholars to look beyond elite and theoretical traditions, and instead engage with the rich, often-overlooked world of non-specialist musical discourse. Set against the backdrop of 1501—a landmark year when Ottaviano Petrucci revolutionized music printing—this book offers a compelling snapshot of how music was understood and discussed by ordinary readers in Renaissance Italy. By sounding out these diverse voices, the project reimagines the contours of music history and opens new avenues for musicological inquiry.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Surveillance and Control of Dengue Vectors in the United States and Territories
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-04) Barrera, Roberto
    'Surveillance and Control of Dengue Vectors in the United States and Territories' offers a comprehensive exploration of the challenges and strategies involved in managing dengue vectors, particularly Aedes mosquitoes, in the US and its territories. With over 13 million dengue cases reported in the Americas in 2024 alone, this timely book synthesizes critical information on vector species, transmission cycles, and effective surveillance and control methods. Dr. Roberto Barrera, a seasoned expert in mosquito ecology and Vector-Borne diseases, presents evidence-based recommendations for public health officials, researchers, and community stakeholders. This essential guide not only addresses the complexities of dengue transmission but also emphasizes the importance of integrated vector management and community engagement in preventing outbreaks. Whether you are a public health professional, a student, or simply interested in vector ecology, this book serves as a vital resource for understanding and combating dengue in an ever-evolving landscape.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Characters in Film and Other Media: Theory, Analysis, Interpretation
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-29) Eder, Jens
    Characters are central to the creation and experience of films and other media. Their cultural significance is profound, but they also raise a wide range of questions. This book provides a comprehensive theory that guides the analysis and interpretation of characters across four dimensions: as represented beings with physical, psychological, and social characteristics; as artefacts with aesthetic structures; as meaningful symbols; and as symptoms of socio-cultural origins and effects. Integrating insights from film, media, and literary studies as well as philosophy, psychology and sociology, the book offers a broad range of approaches for understanding characters and the emotional responses they evoke. Richly illustrated and offering practical tools, along with case studies of numerous characters from different genres of films, this book will be invaluable to scholars and students of film and media studies and related disciplines, as well as artistic practitioners.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be
    (punctum books, 2025-07-25) Vossen, Emma; Karabinus, Alisha; Kocurek, Carly A.; Mejeur, Cody
    Historiographies of Game Studies offers a first-of-its-kind reflection on how game studies as an academic field has been shaped and sustained. Today, game studies is a thriving field with many dedicated national and international conferences, journals, professional societies, and a strong presence at conferences in disciplines like computer science, communication, media studies, theater, visual arts, popular culture, and others. But, when did game studies start? And what (and who) is at the core or center of game studies? Fields are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are, and their borderlands can be hotly contested spaces. In this anthology, scholars from across the field consider how the boundaries of game studies have been established, codified, contested, and protected, raising critical questions about who and what gets left out of the field. Over more than two dozen chapters and interviews with leading figures, including Espen Aarseth, Kishonna Gray, Henry Jenkins, Lisa Nakamura, Kentaro Matsumoto, Ken McAllister, and Janet Murray, the contributors offer a dazzling array of insightful provocations that address the formation, propagation, and cultivation of game studies, interrogating not only the field’s pasts but its potential futures and asking us to think deliberately about how academic fields are collectively built.
  • ItemOpen Access
    'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-22) Wagner, Esther-Miriam; Arad, Dotan
    The manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library contain a corpus of dozens of documents from the archive of Moses ben Judah. A leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, he was also a prominent businessman and in contact with individuals from Cairo to Sicily. This collection of documents at the Bodleian likely did not emerge from the Cairo Genizah, but from another depository, and appears to have been buried at some point. The documents, which include letters and deeds, shed light on the world of the Jewish elite of a Mediterranean city at the end of the Middle Ages, their communal and business life, connections between Jewish communities, and intellectual trends and tastes among educated Jews. They improve our understanding of the lives of Alexandrian Jews in the late Middle Ages and provide new data about the local leadership and its relations with the Nagidate (the central Jewish leadership) in Cairo, the cantors, the poll tax and its effects, and more. We hear about tensions within this society and the growing presence of European (Italian, Greek, Iberian, and conversos) Jews within the complex social mosaic of Egyptian Jewry in the late Mamluk period. The documents inform us about Alexandria’s Jewish community and the commercial networks of the Mediterranean world, in which Jews traded alongside Christians and Muslims. This volume makes an important contribution to the study of Judaeo-Arabic at a watershed moment. Sources from the late Mamluk period show Judaeo-Arabic at a linguistic border between Classical and Late Judaeo-Arabic. The volume will therefore further readers’ knowledge of historical linguistics of Arabic in general, and Judaeo-Arabic in particular. The phrase ‘Wisdom and Greatness in One Place’ in the title of the book is a quotation from the Babylonian Talmud (Giṭṭin 59a), the meaning of which is that it is rare to find combined in one man political leadership and intellectual pre-eminence.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-02) Madhok, Rajan; Heller, Richard F.; Abegglen, Sandra; Burns, Tom; Neuhaus, Fabian; Sandars, John; Sinfield, Sandra; Gitanjali Singh, Upasana
    Higher education is in crisis. Students are disengaged, lecturers are burned out, and universities seem more preoccupied with rankings and revenue than with knowledge and wellbeing. But rather than dwell on the problems, this book focuses on solutions—on hope. Bringing together a diverse range of educators and practitioners, this collection showcases real-world innovations that challenge the status quo and offer glimpses of a more humane and inspiring educational future. From rethinking systems and curriculum design to fostering imaginative collaboration and exploring the role of technology, the book highlights practical, hopeful interventions that are already making a difference. This is not a manifesto of complaints but an invitation to reimagine education. The contributors offer fresh perspectives from around the world, illustrating how small but meaningful changes can transform learning spaces, empower educators, and inspire students. For academics, teachers, administrators, and anyone invested in the future of education, this book serves as both a source of inspiration and a call to action. It is an evolving ecosystem of ideas—grounded in practice, rich with possibility, and rooted in radical hope. Now is the time to create the change we wish to see.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Reading: Performance and Materiality in Hebrew and Aramaic Traditions
    (Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-21) Patmore, Hector M.; Najman, Hindy; Schorch, Stefan; Verrijssen, Jeroen; van der Schoor, Hanneke
    This volume contains the proceedings the 'Reading: Performance and Materiality in Hebrew and Aramaic Traditions' colloquium, hosted at the University of Oxford in 2023, and jointly sponsored by the Oriel Centre for the Study of the Bible and the European Research Council project, 'TEXTEVOLVE.' The aim of the colloquium was to investigate Jewish approaches to the reading of texts, with a focus on reading practices that were applied to Hebrew and Aramaic texts in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It explored, in particular, how these were shaped by material and non-textual aspects (oral traditions, performative context, philological values, etc). Among the questions it addressed were: How did non-textual components determine reading? To what extent did materiality shape or limit readings? How did reading practices shape the texts themselves? What values guided how texts were modified and variant texts evaluated? What determined which form or version of a text was read and according to what conventions? The responses to these questions collected in this volume highlight the tensions between authority and creativity, preservation and innovation, understanding and misapprehension, knowledge and ignorance, which shaped Jewish practices of reading.