Andrew Gow

The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600

The German legend of the Red Jews, a medieval conflation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel with the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, articulated throughout the Middle Ages and well into the sixteenth century a fundamentally antisemitic strain of popular apocalypticism. This undigested piece of medievalia disappeared as more strictly biblical narratives of the End replaced medieval myth. As a result, the Red Jews have not been noticed by modern historians - though they were a universally-known feature of German apocalyptic belief for over three centuries.

Pope Eugenius IV and Jewish Money-Lending in Florence: The Case of Salomone di Bonaventura during the Chancellorship of Leonardo Bruni

Pope Eugenius IV and Jewish Money-Lending in Florence: The Case of Salomone di Bonaventura during the Chancellorship of Leonardo Bruni Author(s): Andrew Gow and Gordon Griffiths Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 282-329 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2862915 Accessed: 10/11/2009 19:15

Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late-Medieval and Reformation History

Professional Experience Director of Graduate Studies, University of Tennessee, 2009-2011. Founding Director, The Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003-2008. Chair, Medieval Studies Interdisciplinary Program, 2003-2008. MARCO Project Steering Committee, 2000-2003. Editor-in-Chief, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, Brill Academic Publishers, 2000 Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee 1998 Assistant Professor of History, University of Tennessee, 1994-98. University of Arizona: Lecturer, 1993-94.

Is the weekend dead? Pedagogical reflections on leisure philosophies, praxis and social change in academic work/life

This pedagogical essay examines learning about leisure philosophies by contrasting counter-hegemonic praxis to dominant contemporary ideologies of work in the neoliberal age. Principles of shabbat and Slow Foods were engaged to explore concepts of leisure and time in a senior leisure philosophies course; a teaching memoir contextualizes emergent insights to work/life imbalance among students and professors. We draw on Paulo Freire and Mark Kingwell to suggest conscientization emerged through an experiential and reflective interplay of principles and actions. Critique reflects on concerns involving intellectual labour and the academic workforce in the modern knowledge economy. Humanistic recognition that leisure can foster better living through awareness of being and understanding time as life can contribute to a good life, social change and justice in the academic workplace and beyond. What we learned draws attention to structural dimensions of political economy relevant to a broader understanding of leisure and wellbeing in Canada.

Christianity: “A Manner of Dividing the Sensible”

Anidjar’s Blood can be read, with Amy Hollywood, as a political intervention designed to alienate and creatively reuse the familiar terms ‘blood’ and ‘Christianity’ to mean quite different things, namely a set of biologically, emotionally, and politically charged metaphors circulating within and fuelling a hegemonic cultural world system. While this is a clear possible reading throughout, Anidjar provides an explicit key to justify these meanings only on page 258, allowing that he has used each term as ‘catachresis’— to command our attention but also to redirect it. Contrary to Francis Landy’s wish that Andijar provide an accounting of how (actual) blood in (actual) Christian tradition relates to blood in Judaism, I suggest that Anidjar’s project requires nothing of the sort, working as it does at an entire level of abstraction above the plane of paratactically organized and comparable ‘religions’.

Yaacov Deutsch. Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe , trans. Avi Aronsky. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 320 pp.

ophy in the last decade of his life: he was immersed in an attempt to have the Mishneh Torah accepted as widely as possible, so as to transform it from a yet another halakhic work (however brilliant) to the Halakhah itself. Halbertal’s discussion of the Guide itself is exceptionally clear and informed by his wide reading in the extensive scholarly literature on the book. He introduces the reader to four different ways of reading the Guide: skeptical (basically nothing can be known about God, and, if human immortality depends upon such knowledge, then life after death is impossible), mystical (philosophy is a tool for achieving mystical illumination and experience), philosophical (Judaism must be reinterpreted in naturalistic terms), and conservative (philosophy supports traditional Jewish beliefs). Each of these readings has its enthusiastic partisans. Nothing in these chapters will be unfamiliar to seasoned students of the Guide, but even such readers will find great pleasure in Halbertal’s lucid account of the main points of the book, as understood through the various approaches. Moshe Halbertal’s sympathetic presentation of these interpretations may well help reduce some of the partisanship with which Maimonides is often presented. To repeat: if you are going to read only one book about Maimonides, make it Moshe Halbertal’s stunningMaimonides. Even if you have read many other books by and about Maimonides, you have much to learn here.

Canada's Jews: A People's Journey (review)

governor of Martinique, as asserted on page 195. Nevertheless, in comparison with other popular books on this subject matter, the author has done a good job sorting fact from fiction. In sum, this book provides a useful introduction to a topic that has drawn considerable public and scholarly attention in recent years. Travers’s work places maritime depredations into the larger context of international rivalries and conflicts. One hopes that this book will find an eager and interested readership.

Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany.

During the 16th century close to 30 German dukes, landgraves, margraves and counts, plus one Holy Roman emperor, were known as mad - so mentally disordered that serious steps had to be taken to remove them from office or to obtain medical care for them. This book is the first to study these princes, and a few princesses, as a group and in context. The result is a flood of new light on the history of Renaissance medicine and of psychiatry, on German politics in the century of Reformation, and on the shifting Renaissance definitions of madness.