Description
Book SynopsisIn Beyond Faith: Belief, Morality and Memory in a Fifteenth-Century Judeo-Iberian Manuscript, Michelle M. Hamilton sheds light on the concerns of Jewish and converso readers of the generation before the Expulsion. Using a mid-fifteenth-century collection of Iberian vernacular literary, philosophical and religious texts (MS Parm. 2666) recorded in Hebrew characters as a lens, Hamilton explores how its compiler or compilers were forging a particular form of personal, individual religious belief, based not only on the Judeo-Andalusi philosophical tradition of medieval Iberia, but also on the Latinate humanism of late 14th and early 15th-century Europe. The form/s such expressions take reveal the contingent and specific engagement of learned Iberian Jews and conversos with the larger Iberian, European and Arab Mediterranean cultures of the 15th-century.
Trade Review"...Along with the contemporary scholars whom Hamilton frequently cites, her book provides a wide and deep understanding of the figures on whom the discussion touches. Her intention and execution are excellent... Hamilton has restored to Iberian history a distinctive group of influential scholars whom biographical study long missed." Arthur M. Lesley (Independant Scholar), Renaissance Quarterly, Volume LXIX, No. 1
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ix List of Illustrations xi Introduction xii 1 Prooftexts: God and Knowledge in the Visión deleitable 1 2 The Polemics of Sacrifice: Isaac and “Nuestro Padre” Abraham 58 3 Material and Translation: The Jewish Tradition and Fifteenth-Century Humanism 88 4 The Art of Memory and Forgetting: The Judeo-Andalusi and Scholastic Traditions 136 5 The Wisdom of Seneca: Humanism and the Jews 166 6 The Place of the Dead: The Vernacular Dance of Death and the Legacy of the Judeo-Iberian Middle Ages 205 Conclusion: Textual Truths 249 Bibliography 255 Index 289
