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Cosmopolitan Maternalisms: Migration, Kinship, and Coorg Mothering in Modernity

Bittiandra Chand Somaiah (author), Veena Ravi Poonacha (foreword)

This women-centred study examines social reconstructions of immigrant mothering among a middle-class minority community of first-generation Coorg women “Kodavathees” in urban Karnataka, Singapore, and Sydney through conceptual lenses of new cosmopolitanisms and new maternalisms.

Cosmopolitan Maternalisms explores how Kodavathee immigrant mothering is practised with a pragmatic awareness of adapting the ways of the ancestors to the promises and pitfalls associated with living in modernity. As a member of this community, which possesses martial and agricultural traditions, and as an immigrant mother herself, Bittiandra Chand Somaiah engages in maternal conversations and in-depth qualitative interviews with forty-three mothers. The book emphasizes the socio-cultural processes associated with cosmopolitanization that accomplish mothering in general and that affect these Kodavathee mothers specifically. Cosmopolitan Maternalisms makes sense of the gendered and globalized convictions, contradictions, and aspirations shared by these mothers who are poised to slowly challenge the heteronormative maternal pedestals and patriarchal structures of middle-class transnational India.

Global South Rising?: BRICS and the Reconfiguration of Knowledge Systems

Ari Sitas and Wiebke Keim (editors)

Global South Rising? addresses a provocative question: Can BRICS reshape global knowledge hierarchies? The contributors examine the BRICS’ rise in the context of its ambition to reconfigure not only the global economy, but also intellectual power structures. As they assess the bloc’s performance, they highlight its challenges to dominant Western epistemologies and its potential to amplify the agency of the Global South. In the process, they invite readers to rethink concepts of power, knowledge, and global cooperation.

A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (hardcover)

Annemarie Schimmel

Annemarie Schimmel, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Persian literature, provides a comprehensive introduction to the complicated and highly sophisticated system of rhetoric and imagery used by the poets of Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Muslim India. She shows that these images have been used and refined over the centuries and reflect the changing conditions in the Muslim world.

According to Schimmel, Persian poetry does not aim to be spontaneous in spirit or highly personal in form. Instead it is rooted in conventions and rules of prosody, rhymes, and verbal instrumentation. Ideally, every verse should be like a precious stone — perfectly formed and multifaceted — and convey the dynamic relationship between everyday reality and the transcendental.

Persian poetry, Schimmel explains, is more similar to medieval European verse than Western poetry as it has been written since the Romantic period. The characteristic verse form is the ghazal — a set of rhyming couplets — which serves as a vehicle for shrouding in conventional tropes the poet’s real intentions.

Because Persian poetry is neither narrative nor dramatic in its overall form, its strength lies in an “architectonic” design; each precisely expressed image is carefully fitted into a pattern of linked figures of speech. Schimmel shows that at its heart Persian poetry transforms the world into a web of symbols embedded in Islamic culture.

A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (paperback)

Annemarie Schimmel

Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (hardcover)

Lily Kelting

A provocative look at how traditional food movements erase culinary pasts.

The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology.

Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory, embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India. Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert, and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage, then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage revival.

Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (paperback)

Lily Kelting

Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire

Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa

In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, “free labor” experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa profile transnational human rights campaigns. They show how the discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, revealing the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with liberal contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a “cotton queen” and courtesans, and fugitive “slaves” and concubines populates the pages, fleshing out on a granular level the interface between the personal, domestic, and international politics of “slavery in the East” in the age of empire. By extending the transnational framework of US slavery and abolition histories beyond the Atlantic, Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa recover vivid stories and prompt reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency.

Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways

Mattie Armstrong-Price

Respectability on the Line offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. The book treats the railway industry as a microcosm through which to study the history of capitalism in the liberal imperial era. Using company records, Mattie Armstrong-Price shows how executives shaped the domestic and working lives of higher-grade employees with an eye to cultivating their respectability. Meanwhile workers’ writings reveal how railway towns provided opportunities for some employees to maintain non-heteronormative living arrangements. The book tracks these histories of everyday life while also outlining stories of early trade unionism. In Britain, railway unionists established benefit funds that mimicked company-sponsored provident funds, while in colonial India workers fought to gain access to company benefits on equal terms. This comparative study shows how industrial labor was made through conflict, subversion, and accommodation across an uneven imperial field.

Religion, Orientalism and Modernity: Mahdi Movements of Iran and South Asia

Geoffrey Nash

Analyses modernity and Orientalist discourses in Iranian millenarian movements.

• Employs historical and discourse analysis to probe the conflict between orthodox and heterodox religious movements in 19th- and 20th-century Iran.
• Links the conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy to the impact of modernity on Iran’s society and religion and to colonisation on India’s Muslims.
• Broadens the scope of this conflict to include Palestine, Central Asia and Turkey.
• Presents a postcolonial analysis of the new movements and their broader relationship to the Islamic world during the age of imperialism.

Religion, Orientalism and Modernity explores the emergence of the revolutionary Babis and reformist Baha’is and their conflict with mainstream Shi’a Muslims in Iran, and of the parallel Ahmadi movement in North India. It gives fresh insights into the writings that defined these innovatory movements, penned on the one hand by their proponents, and on the other by western interpreters.

Comparing these movements shows that, together, they define important aspects of Islamic modernity. A focus on two case studies (Babis and Baha’is in Iran, and Ahmadis in India) reveals similarities and differences in their responses to a perceived need for change and renewal of religious authority.

Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas

Nikita Kaur Simpson

In Tension, Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid development in the Himalayas on the minds and bodies of the Gaddi people who inhabit them through attention to the multifaceted state of distress they call “tension.” This “tension” takes many forms: Kamzori, or weakness, in the bodies of elderly women; “Future tension” accumulating in the minds of young girls; or Opara, or black magic, afflicting whole families. Through her long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Simpson follows the ways in which Gaddi people tie this distress to broader structural changes, such as land dispossession and caste, class, tribal and gender inequality, which are growing alongside modernity and prosperity. In doing so, she shows how “tension” acts as an everyday diagnostic of the problems of cultural, economic and environmental change as they shape intimate life. At once a lived historical account, a cartography of care relations, and a multi-sensory exploration of the intimate experiences of atmosphere and body, Tension puts forth a novel theory of distress, that inequality is often determined by who is made to feel, hold, and absorb distress.

Shelter for the Night: On Afghanistan, Language, and Detours

Fatima Mojaddedi

Shelter for the Night is an ethnographic meditation on language and psychic life in 2010s Afghanistan, where militarized violence has collapsed social worlds. Across Kabul and the countryside, in poetic and probing style, the book unpacks the precarious relationship between language, violence, and the self. As social and political worlds fracture through militarized violence, economic speculation, interpersonal sabotage, and ruptures in shared understanding, people are set on unexpected detours to discontinuity. Encounters in political life, love, and translation become fragmented, difficult to parse, and entangled in symbolic violence. Yet amid the harsh realities of contemporary life in Kabul, Mojaddedi finds moments of wonder and rich inner lives of reflexivity, understanding, and social connection. From narratives of modernist ambition and political violence to tragic romance and urbanite translators and their rural interlocutors, Shelter for the Night looks at the challenges of articulating the unspeakable to make a bold claim for the importance of thinking about the contemporary world starting from Afghanistan.

The Divine Names: A Mystical Theology of the Names of God in the Qurʾan

ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī (author), Yousef Casewit (translator), Philippa Byrne (foreword)

A Sufi scholar’s philosophical interpretation of the names of God.

The Divine Names is a philosophically sophisticated commentary on the names of God. Penned by the seventh-/thirteenth-century North African scholar and Sufi poet ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī, The Divine Names expounds upon the one hundred and forty-six names of God that appear in the Qurʾan, including The All-Merciful, The Powerful, The First, and The Last. In his treatment of each divine name, al-Tilimsānī synthesizes and compares the views of three influential earlier authors, al-Bayhaqī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Barrajān.

Al-Tilimsānī famously described his two teachers Ibn al-ʿArabī and al-Qūnawī as a “philosophizing mystic” and a “mysticizing philosopher,” respectively. Picking up their mantle, al-Tilimsānī merges mysticism and philosophy, combining the tenets of Akbarī Sufism with the technical language of Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Avicennan philosophy as he explains his logic in a rigorous and concise way. Unlike Ibn al-ʿArabī, his overarching concern is not to examine the names as correspondences between God and creation, but to demonstrate how the names overlap at every level of cosmic existence. The Divine Names shows how a broad range of competing theological and philosophical interpretations can all contain elements of the truth.

The Book of Monasteries

al-Shābushtī (author), Hilary Kilpatrick (translator), Wiebke Denecke (foreword)

A literary tour of Christian monasteries of the medieval Middle East.

The Book of Monasteries takes readers on a tour of the monasteries of the Middle East by presenting the rich variety of poetry and prose associated with each monastery. Starting with Baghdad, readers are taken up the Tigris into the mountains of south-eastern Anatolia before moving to Palestine and Syria, along the Euphrates down to the old Christian center of Ḥīrah and onward to Egypt. For the literary anthologist al-Shābushtī, who was Muslim, monasteries were important sites of interactions with Christian communities that made up about half the population of the Abbasid Empire at the time.

Each section in this anthology covers a specific monastery, beginning with a discussion of its location and the reason for its name. Al-Shābushtī presents poems, anecdotes, and historical reports related to each. He selects heroic and spectacular incidents, illustrations of caliphal extravagance, and events that gave rise to memorable verse. Important political personalities and events that were indirectly linked with monasteries also appear in the collection, as do scenes of festive court life and gruesome murders. Al-Shābushtī uses these accounts not to teach history but to offer a meditation on the splendor of Abbasid culture as well as moral and philosophical lessons: the ephemerality of power; the virtues of generosity and tolerance; the effectiveness of eloquence in prose and poetry; the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Monasteries offers an entertaining panorama of religious, political, and literary life during the Abbasid era.

Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert

Khalaf Abū Zwayyid, ʿAdwān al-Hirbīd and ʿAjlān ibn Rmāl (authors), Marcel Kurpershoek (translator), Rocio Quispe Agnoli (foreword), Philip F. Kennedy (editor)

A collection of poems from a changing Bedouin world.

Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert features poetry from three poets of the Ibn Rashīd dynasty—the highwater mark of Bedouin culture in the nineteenth century. Khalaf Abū Zwayyid, ʿAdwān al-Hirbīd, and ʿAjlān ibn Rmāl belonged to tribes based around the area of Jabal Shammar in northern Arabia. A cultural and political center for the region, Jabal Shammar attracted caravans of traders and pilgrims, tribal shaykhs, European travelers (including T.E. Lawrence), illiterate Bedouin poets, and learned Arabs. All three poets lived at the inception of or during modernity’s accelerating encroachment. New inventions and firearms spread throughout the region, and these poets captured Bedouin life in changing times. Their poems and the accompanying narratives showcase the beauty and complexity of Bedouin culture, while also grappling with the upheaval brought about by the rise of the House of Saud and Wahhabism.

The poems featured in Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert are often humorous and witty, yet also sentimental, wistful, and romantic. They vividly describe journeys on camelback, stories of family and marriage, thrilling raids, and beautiful nature scenes, offering a window into Bedouin culture and society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In Deadly Embrace: Arabic Hunting Poems

Ibn al-Muʿtazz (author), James E. Montgomery (translator), A.E. Stallings (foreword), Richard Sieburth (editor)

A collection of poems about nature and power.

To Ibn al-Muʿtazz and his Abbasid contemporaries, the hunt was more than a diversion—it was the theater for their poetic and political endeavors, captured here in fifty-nine Arabic hunting poems, or ṭardiyyāt. The poems of In Deadly Embrace describe hunting expeditions with animals trained to hunt, including saluki hounds and birds of prey. Many were composed after these outings, when the hunting party gathered to enjoy the game they caught.

Poetry was central to Abbasid society and served as a method of maintaining networks of patronage and friendship; the poems in this collection reflect these power dynamics and allowed Ibn al-Muʿtazz—prince of the realm and in line for the caliphate—to explore his own relationship to social and political power and to demonstrate his fitness to rule.

Ibn al-Muʿtazz was an influential poet and literary theorist of the Modernist school of poetry. In Deadly Embrace merges the Modernists’ new techniques and styles with age-old themes: military prowess and wisdom, fitness to rule and comradeship, the camaraderie of the hunt and the cult of heroic masculinity. Groundbreaking and evocative, the poems paint vivid pictures of hunting scenes while posing deep questions about our attentiveness to the natural world and the relationship of the human to the nonhuman.

The Rules of Logic

Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī (author), Tony Street (translator), Paul Thom (foreword), Joseph E. Lowry (editor)

A classic textbook on the study of logic.

In the Muslim East, logic was an integral part of the syllabus of schools and found to be especially helpful for legal studies. It was in this milieu that The Rules of Logic was composed by Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī, a scholar of the Shāfiʿī school of law.

The Rules of Logic is the most widely read introduction to logic in the Arabic-speaking world. It has probably enjoyed a longer shelf-life than any other logic textbook ever written, having been in use by madrasah students from the early eighth/fourteenth century up until the present day. Building on the theories of Avicenna, al-Rāzī, and other pioneers of logic, al-Kātibī discusses the many pitfalls of building arguments and setting out unambiguous claims in natural language. The enduring nature of the text is a testament to al-Kātibī and his impact on concepts of formal discourse and argument. Accompanied by an informative commentary on the text by translator Tony Street, The Rules of Logic brings to an English readership an influential text that has shaped the work of scholars of logic for centuries.

Sufis and Sharīʿa: The Forgotten School of Mercy

Samer Dajani

Establishes the existence of an important school of Sufi thought developed by Ibn ʿArabī.

• Gives the first detailed analysis of the legal thought of Ibn ʿArabī, one of the most influential Muslims in general, and Sufis in particular.
• Shows that Ibn ʿArabī had created his own madhhab (legal methodology) with a focus on mercy and ease for Muslims.
• Explores the influence of Ibn ʿArabī, al-Tirmidhī and al-Shaʿrānī on legal thought.
• Includes some of al-Shaʿrānī’s eight illustrations, his work being the only work of Islamic legal theory that includes drawings.

This book is not about Sufism. It is about the nature of the Sharīʿa. In the first three centuries of Islam, many scholars believed that juristic differences were rooted in the Sharīʿa’s inherent flexibility. As this pluralistic attitude began to disappear, a number of Sufis defended and developed this idea through the centuries. They aimed to preserve the leniency and simplicity of the Sharīʿa against the complications and restrictions created by many jurists.

This book focuses on four major Sufi figures whose contributions to legal theory were strongly shaped by their mystical thought: Ibn ʿArabī, al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, al-Shaʿrānī and Aḥmad ibn Idrīs. It gives a detailed analysis of their legal thought, revealing that they belonged to the same tradition and developed each other’s ideas, and also highlights their influence on other major Sufis all the way up to the 19th century. This is the first study to give a full picture of the role that Sufi thought played in the revivalist Islamic movements of the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries.

The Islamic State in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Strategic Alliances and Rivalries

Amira Jadoon and Andrew Mines

The deadly attack on Kabul’s airport in August 2021 shocked the world and brought concentrated attention to the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISK). New questions quickly arose: How did this ISIS affiliate become such a force in Afghanistan and Pakistan? And why is it now a lethal threat to the Taliban? Addressing these questions, Amira Jadoon and Andrew Mines draw on original data and newly available primary sources to dissect ISK’s inner workings and explain its rise and resilience.

Killing in the Name of the State: State-Sponsored Assassination in International Politics

Luca Trenta and Kiril Avramov (editors)

How do governments approach, understand, and even justify assassination? What methods have been used historically, and how do they differ from current practice? What are the consequences of assassination for international politics, diplomacy, and international law? These are the fundamental questions animating this ground-breaking exploration of the adoption and deployment of assassination as an instrument of statecraft.

Muslim Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Diversity and Pluralism, Past and Present

Stephane Pradines and Farouk Topan (editors)

Explores the role of Islam in forming and transforming interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World from a longue durée perspective.

• Highlights the centrality of Muslim cultures in understanding interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean.
• Explores the role of Islam in forming and transforming global interactions and local agencies across the Indian Ocean.
• Offers intra-Muslim perceptions of beliefs, practices and activities, both religious and other.
• Presents 15 case studies across Ethiopia, Gujarat, Java, Kerala, the Malay-Indonesian archipelago, Maldives, Oman, Tanzania, Zanzibar and the Persianate cultural zone.

This book examines the role of Muslim communities in the emergence of connections and mobilities across the Indian Ocean World from a longue durée perspective. Spanning the 7th century through the medieval period until the present day, this book aims to move beyond the usual focus on geographical sub-regions to highlight different aspects of interconnectivity in relation to Islam. Analysing textual and material evidence, contributors examine identities and diasporas, manuscripts and literature, as well as vernacular and religious architecture. It aims to explore networks and circulations of peoples, ideas and ideologies, as well as art, culture, religion and heritage. It focuses on global interactions as well as local agencies in context.

The Archaeology of Modern Worlds in the Indian Ocean

Mark William Hauser and Julia Jong Haines (editors)

Case studies that show the importance of the Indian Ocean region to the emergence of modernity and globalization.

This volume brings together a diverse range of specialists working in multiple areas of the Indian Ocean world, providing broad geographical coverage and comparisons across sites. Contributors use a historical archaeological approach, which bridges everyday life in the recent past with large-scale processes of globalization, to examine topics related to colonialism, labor, race, ethnicity, diaspora, human-environment relationships, and heritage.

Case studies from Zanzibar, Mauritius and the Mascarene islands, India, Indonesia, Java, and other locations emphasize networks and connections across the Indian Ocean. Contributors apply a variety of disciplinary methods, including bioanthropology, analysis of medieval illustrations and colonial documents, architectural history, and anthropology of built space. They discuss the material history of domestic areas, religious structures, and colonial outposts; the structure of the slave trade; and the everyday implications of disease and health management within laboring populations.

This volume decenters European narratives and actors to show the important ways this region shaped the modern world. By highlighting the experiences of ordinary people in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia, the research in these chapters contributes to a better understanding of histories in the Global South over the last four hundred years.

Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda

Anneeth Kaur Hundle

In 1972, Ugandan president Idi Amin expelled close to 80,000 South Asians of Ugandan heritage from the country by dictatorial decree. In Insecurities of Expulsion, Anneeth Kaur Hundle revisits this weighty historical event, arguing that it is neither an exceptional nor a parochial event, neither a result of primordial Afro-South Asian racial conflict nor an opening into a redemptive search for Afro-South Asian interracial solidarities. Hundle explores the aftermaths and continuous nature of the expulsion event, examining its effects and affects; the images, representations, and differentiated experiences and memories of the event; and the tense and ambivalent practices of citizenship, sovereignty, and governance that have emerged in the decades following the expulsion. She examines Afro-Asian entanglements in what she describes as transcontinental Uganda through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender, and sexuality. Throughout, Hundle argues for stronger attention to knowledge production on global Afro-South Asian connections and the continued dynamics of community, citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms during shifting imperial, postcolonial, nationalist, and geopolitical times.

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: The Essentials

Thomas L. Pangle

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History brings together the works of Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), one of the greatest philosophers of history, who, prior to his death, did not execute a treatise setting forth his philosophy of world history.

All that remains are fragmented and truncated manuscript materials and meticulous student transcripts from his lectures on the philosophy of world history, which are assembled in this book to present what Hegel might call the “essential phases” or “moments” in his philosophy of world history as an articulated, unfolding, organic whole.

Drawing from historical-critical editions, Thomas L. Pangle has compiled a range of passages that provide the fullest and clearest expression of Hegel’s teachings on the philosophy of history as divine reason expressing itself dynamically in the whole of existence. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History provides lucid, vivid, and concrete access to Hegel’s political philosophy, as the most ambitious and thorough attempt to demonstrate that world history overall, starting with ancient China and India, exhibits God’s providence for humanity as a truly rational divine plan.

Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Volume I: Elements

Matthew T. Kapstein (editor)

In Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Volume I, Matthew T. Kapstein and an international team of specialists provide a comprehensive introduction to the material and aesthetic features of the wide range of Tibetan books, described in detail and illustrated with copious full-color photographs.

With a documented history of over thirteen centuries, Tibetan books have long served as a medium of culture and learning throughout Central and East Asia. Major collections of Tibetan manuscripts and printed books—for Tibetan works were put into print even before the age of Gutenberg—are found in libraries and museums far from the traditional centers of Tibetan learning. Yet the history, production, and design of these works remain poorly understood.

Topics covered in volume I include the manufacture of paper and ink, format and layout, scripts and scribal conventions, illumination and decoration, woodblock printing, book storage, preservation, and the use of contemporary digital technologies for the documentation of traditional works. Volume I of Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books is an essential resource for all students of Tibetan civilization, as well as for scholars, collectors, and others interested in the diverse book cultures of Asia. Volume II was published simultaneously with Volume I and is also now available.

Winner of the Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism of the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Volume II: Elaborations

Matthew T. Kapstein (editor)

Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Volume II explores the major categories of traditional Tibetan books, introducing their specific features and the main approaches to their study.

In five major sections, it surveys manuscript collections including Buddhist scriptural canons, official and administrative documents, works on technical subjects—medicine, veterinary practice, liturgical chant, and the arts of divination—and Tibetan books from China and Mongolia. Two case studies exemplify the roles of paleographic and iconographic analysis in the examination of antique manuscripts.

Like Volume I, the second volume of Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books has been written by the foremost experts in the field, whose wide-ranging essays are illustrated with numerous full-color images of original works. Addressing students and scholars of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan history and culture in their varied dimensions, this volume will also interest scholars and other readers oriented more broadly to the global history of the book. Volume I was published simultaneously with Volume II and is also now available.