Addressed to a recipient with a Greek name, the book of Luke is the longest document in the New Testament, and tells the story of a Jewish messiah who lived and ministered primarily within Jewish context, but with implications for all people.

This study explores a cluster of six letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza written by a Jewish father from Alexandria in the first half of the thirteenth century. The writer’s son ran away from home, abandoned the family shop and overall behaved in a way unbecoming for a young middle-class Jewish man. This study uses this little-studied cluster of documents to examine the ties that bound a young Jewish man to his family and community, including exchange of letters, economic considerations, familial bonds and religious expectations. The father’s letters offer a case study for approaching social ties and cultural expectations as dynamic and ongoing work performed by specific agents. The letters are useful for recovering an urban middle-class conception of masculinity prevalent in the medieval Islamic world that emphasized belonging to social networks and required men to uphold their responsibilities to those dependent upon them.

This chapter explores Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ linguistic practices through which the drive to homogeneity of cultural reformation ideology is resisted. Illustrated by a family of figures these practices traverse proper and proprietorial boundaries, tending to the production of ‘our English’ as a mobile, expanding and inclusive ‘gallimaufry’. They also carry emancipatory as well as empowering implications, which are highlighted by two discourses with which they are associated. On the one hand, the discourse of ‘manage’ (horsemanship) is turned to advocate an emancipatory poetics of ‘straying’. On the other hand, verbal ‘straying’ is associated with the biblical genre of ‘the parable’, specifically the parables referenced in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The chapter closes with an analysis of this play, which aligns Shakespearean comedy as well as his ‘straying’ linguistic practices with ‘the parable’, and in particular with the liberating, inexhaustible debt-gift economy of the plot of redemption illustrated by the referenced parables. In relation to this economy the ‘charism’ of the figures of Holofernes and Falstaff and of the author that shadows them is considered in conclusion.