Rabbinic theology, in the various Midrashim, reveals an intense attentiveness to God as a divine relational subject in the figures of king, a father, a husband, sometime a mother, and a judge. If God is, indeed, a relational subject capable of intentionality and responsiveness seeking a partner, the perfections attributed to him by the philosophers are actually flaws and imperfections from the perspective of Rabbinic theology.

This essay introduces the collected essays in the Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology that run from the Biblical to Contemporary Periods. Jewish theology is distinguished by its textual or hermeneutical focus. The volume includes essays on both negative and positive theology and concludes with essays on “constructive Jewish theology.”

On the trade in and commodification of medieval books and fragments, both in the Middle Ages and through to the present day.

Description techniquesand methods of membrane preparation; uses and arrangement of medieval paper manuscripts; how to collate quires; how to describe decorative features of the mise-en-page; scribal characteristics, including abbreviation and correction; and binding practices

The chapter considers tropes of violence in Coriolanus and The Taming of the Shrew. It examines some of the ways these have been shaped by cross-pollination among stage, cinema, and television. For Coriolanus this includes cinema’s increase in realistic cinematic violence and the profitable rise of action hero films. The screen makes highly visible the play’s physical violence marked by signifiers of masculinity: bleeding wounds (received or given in battle) and the scars they leave.Screen versions discussed include: televised Coriolanus broadcasts, one in Italy on RAI television (1965) and the other seen internationally through the BBC Shakespeare Series (1984); stage productions by France’sNational Populaire Villeurbanne (2006), and England’s Royal Shakespeare Company (2018); and Ralph Fiennes’s film (2011). The major films of The Taming of the Shrew include two mass-market movies starring celebrity couples, Mary Pickford/Douglas Fairbanks, directed by Sam Taylor (1927) and Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1966), the BBC Shakespeare Series’ Shrew directed by Jonathan Miller (1980) and the Shakespeare Globe’s stage production (2012).

Focussing on Welles’ canon of completed Shakespeare films, this chapter uses specific sequences to identify his characteristic cinematic poetry. It argues for the interest of Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1965) as creative acts of critical interpretation, and treats them as visually dynamic Shakespearean criticism. In Macbeth, Welles’ cinematography addresses questions of the central character’s agency, describing him as both puppet and perpetrator, and tracing the chiaroscuro balance between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Othello’s much-discussed problems of production have the effect of prioritising the visual, in a tragedy demanding ‘ocular proof’, and the radical bricolage of the film’s construction has parallels with the improvisatory energy of Iago within the play. In Chimes at Midnight Welles participates in a centuries-old critical debate about the moral character of Falstaff and the question of reformation in the cycle of history plays, replacing this telos with an extended, melancholic farewell to Falstaff himself.

Reversing the familiar nostrum that religion – with its omniscient omnipotent onto-theological God - is the buttress of ethics and of all things of value; Levinas follows Kant’s enlightened claim that ethics is the real truth of religion, that the imperatives of kindness (“love thy neighbor”) and of social justice are religions highest teaching, the very essence of holiness, religion for adults. The Akedah is thus a test as much of God’s justice as of Abraham’s faith. Rituals, holidays, traditions, halakha, sacred texts, Talmudic learning, and so on, retain their worth as service to kindness and justice, else, taken sacramentally, they devolve into superstition and fanaticism.

A curatorial perspective on the current state of digitization and the implications for scholars of digital mediation of manuscript holdings.

No-one has yet quite agreed what to call it: livecast, live from, simulcast, alternative content, cinecast, cinemacast, streamed transmission, outside broadcast, digital broadcast cinema, ‘live’ theatre broadcast, captured live broadcast, event cinema, theatrofilm. But the phenomenon of cinema broadcasts, live, delayed and encore, is a new and striking area for the experience of Shakespeare theatre productions. Their various forms of transmission and consumption mark out crucial questions about the distribution and audiences for the event-object, whatever name we give it. The chapter looks at the techniques for filming live performance and the ways it makes meaning. It then examines examples from the National Theatre in London or from other theatres whose Shakespeare productions it distributes (under the label National Theatre Live), as well as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Shows how scholars can interpret a manuscript from the way in which it is described in a catalogue, with a particular focus on the booklet as the key unit of manuscript production.

This chapter is a close reading of Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus and Ralph Fiennes’s 2010 Coriolanus.Both films challenge the stock image of historical Rome in Taymor’s case by extensive allusion to other iconic films, costumes and settings; in Fiennes’s case by updating the film’s action to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.In these differing ways, both films insist on the omnipresence of violence. The chapter concludes that this apparent rejection of a stereotypical or immediately recognisable Roman setting is actually closer to the ambiguous sense of the classical seat of empire that Shakespeare’s first audiences may have harboured.Rome is less a physical place and more of an idea but it is an idea riddled with contradictions.Neither film attempts to erase these contradictions; indeed, their stress on anachrony causes both to recapitulate the uncertainties, regarding Rome, of the plays’ early audiences.

The physical make-up of manuscript books: their divisions into quires and booklets, and the manner of putting the parts of the book together.

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Othello, love collides with violent conflict, creating a range of challenges and opportunities for filmmakers and their visions of the plays. Key to the plays are questions of identity, and the borders between Shakespeare’s lovers have been interpreted in the twenty-first century in profoundly political ways, resonating with inter-racial, caste and ethnic conflict, honour killings, domestic violence and discourses of sexual politics and gender identity. This chapter surveys the range of Romeo and Juliet and Othello on screen, considering some of the lesser-known and recent adaptations alongside the landmark films. While not exhaustive, it illustrates the scope and range of possibilities the plays have offered to filmmakers from various cultures.

On the origins, dissemination, and nature of the Wycliffite Bible and its many manuscripts – especially in the first half of the fifteenth century – and how it can be shown to be, in part, supported by the nobility, certainly aimed at erudite readers.