Bøger udgivet af Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection

In 1826, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau began a tour of England, Wales, and Ireland. His letters home were part memoir, part travelogue and political commentary, part epistolary novel. His rhetorical flare and acute observations provoked German poet Heinrich Heine to describe him as the ¿most fashionable of eccentric men¿Diogenes on horseback.¿

The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca was created at a pivotal transitional moment, bridging an era when pictorial manuscripts dominated and one that witnessed the rising hegemony of alphabetic texts. The Historia was composed using both systems, yet, as Dana Leibsohn notes, neither was fully trusted. Leibsohn analyzes the choices made by the patron, don Alonso de Castañeda, and tlacuilos enlisted to create the manuscript. How does one create a history? Which narratives are included, and which are strikingly absent? Which modes of representation are called upon to convey certain types of information? Leibsohn argues how the very practice of history-keeping itself sustains or challenges a current reality. Central to the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca is the creation, representation, and understanding of landscape. In the recording of ancestral migrations, don Alonso delineates territory, noting boundaries and their histories, and also reveals relationships with a sacred landscape, detailing how relationships with territory were constantly re-inscribed. In this sense, Script and Glyph is a particularly appropriate volume for Dumbarton Oaks, as it crosses the boundaries of Pre-Columbian and Landscape areas of study. The volume is beautifully illustrated with color images from the manuscript itself.

One of the most important middle Byzantine saints' lives, The Life of St. Basil the Younger presents the life of a holy man who lived in Constantinople in the first part of the tenth century. The first critical edition in any language, this volume provides the Greek text facing the annotated English translation, as well as an introduction.

In a rigorous exploration of how secularism and identity emerged as conflicting concepts in the modern world, Akeel Bilgrami elaborates a notion of secular enchantment with a view to finding in secular modernity a locus of meaning and value, while addressing squarely the anxiety that all such notions are exercises in nostalgia.