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The Illustrated Cairo Genizah

The Illustrated Cairo Genizah

Description

A thematic, illustrated guide to the Cairo Genizah collections at Cambridge University Library.

Almost one thousand years ago, the Jews of Old Cairo began to place their worn-out books and scrolls into a hidden storage room – a genizah – of their synagogue. Over the years, they added all sorts of writings to the pile, sacred and secular texts alike. When the chamber was emptied at the end of the 19th century, it held hundreds of thousands of paper and parchment fragments. Now known as the ‘Cairo Genizah’, it has become one of the most important sources of knowledge for the history of the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. This book offers the first illustrated introduction to the unique collections of Cairo Genizah manuscripts at Cambridge University Library.

Join Genizah experts Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee as they take you on a journey of discovery through more than 125 years of research at the University of Cambridge, showcasing over 300 stunning, full-colour manuscript images across 12 thematic chapters. From ancient Bibles to medieval magic and Renaissance printing presses, The Illustrated Cairo Genizah reveals the forgotten stories of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities at the centre of a millennium of world history.

This is for UK supply only.

Details: 340pp, 270 x 230mm, Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-4632-4772-0
Gorgias Press (2024)

Price: £45.00 

Delivery fee: UK only - £3.50 per book
                      Rest of the world (ROW) - currently not available

Contact information:
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
E-mail: [email protected]  

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Gifts & Discoveries

Gifts and Discoveries

£5.00

Description

FOR SUPPLY IN THE UK ONLY

Fully illustrated colour guide to permanent collections of Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology.
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Chiefs

Chiefs & Governors: Art & Power in Fiji Exhibition Catalogue

£10.00

Description

FOR SUPPLY IN THE UK ONLY

Chiefs & Governors: Art and Power in Fiji is the first major exhibition dedicated to Fijian art in the UK. Inspired by MAA's outstanding Fijian collections, it explores the early colonial history of Fiji, the foundation of the Museum, and the dynamism and creativity of Fijian art and culture. Co-authored by Curators Anita Herle and Lucy Carreau, it includes specialist contributions by Fergus Clunie, Jocelyne Dudding, Steven Hooper, Katrina Igglesden, Karen Jacobs, Stéphanie Leclerc-Caffarel, Andy Mills and Barbara Wills. 136 pages with 189 illustrations.

Chiefs & Governors is one of the outcomes of the Fijian Art Research Project (2001 -2014) generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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Assembling Bodies

Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination

£10.00

Description

FOR SUPPLY IN THE UK ONLY

Catalogue accompanying major exhibition at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (March 2009 - November 2010) by Anita Herle, Mark Elliott and Rebecca Empson.

ISBN No. 978-0-947595-18-0
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Pasifika Styles

Pasifika Styles: Artists Inside the Museum

£10.00

Description

FOR SUPPLY IN THE UK ONLY

Publication following major exhibition in the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (May 2006 - February 2008) edited by Rosanna Raymond and Amiria Salmond.

ISBN No. 978-1-877372-60-5 (Otago University Press)
ISBN No. 978-0-947595-17-3 (CUMAA)
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Meandering

Printed and CD Proceedings - Fouling & Cleaning in Food Processing 2014

£50.00

Description

Printed and CD proceedings of the conference on Fouling & Cleaning in Food Processing, held in Cambridge on 30 March - 2 April 2014. Soft cover volume, 350 pages, printed in black and white. Accompanied by CD holding pdf copies of published papers.

Published by the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge.

Packing and postage included.
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Collecting in the South Sea

Collecting in the South Sea: The Voyage of Bruni d’Entrecasteaux 1791-1794

£45.00

Description

FOR SUPPLY IN THE UK ONLY

This book is a study of ‘collecting’ undertaken by Joseph Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux and his shipmates in Tasmania, the western Pacific Islands, and Indonesia. In 1791–1794 Bruni d’Entrecasteaux led a French naval expedition in search of the lost vessels of La Pérouse which had last been seen by Europeans at Botany Bay in March 1788. After Bruni d’Entrecasteaux died near the end of the voyage and the expedition collapsed in political disarray in Java, its collections and records were subsequently scattered or lost.

The book’s core is a richly illustrated examination, analysis, and catalogue of a large array of ethnographic objects collected during the voyage, later dispersed, and recently identified in museums in France, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. The focus on artefacts is informed by a broad conception of collecting as grounded in encounters or exchanges with Indigenous protagonists and also as materialized in other genres—written accounts, vocabularies, and visual representations (drawings, engravings, and maps).

Historically, the book outlines the antecedents, occurrences, and aftermath of the voyage, including its location within the classic era of European scientific voyaging (1766–1840) and within contemporary colonial networks. Particular chapters trace the ambiguous histories of the extant collections. Ethnographically, contributors are alert to local settings, relationships, practices, and values; to Indigenous uses and significance of objects; to the reciprocal, dialogic nature of collecting; to local agency or innovation in exchanges; and to present implications of objects and their histories, especially for modern scholars and artists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.
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Fighting Fibres

Fighting Fibres: Kiribati Armour and Museum Collections

£36.00

Description

FOR SUPPLY IN THE UK ONLY

This book brings together artists, curators, researchers and conservators to consider the significance of coconut fibre armour from the islands of Kiribati. Taking as its focus the armour found in museum collections, it investigates the historical context that led to these unique artefacts leaving the Pacific and entering the orbit of British collectors and institutions, as well the legacies of those practices in the present.

As well as exploring the historical milieux surrounding its collection, the book includes essays from expert conservators that discuss the challenges of caring for coconut fibre armour. Other contributions include case studies focusing on the construction and variety of the armour and helmets, and the findings of a comprehensive survey which has tracked down and documented every piece of Kiribati armour held in UK museum collections. Finally, the book considers the significance of coconut fibre armour in the present, with particular reference to the work of a group of I-Kiribati artists whose creativity and innovative research has led to the production of a contemporary suit of armour inspired by the armour of the past.
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Pacific Presences

Pacific Presences – Volume 1: Oceanic Art and European Museums

£36.00

Description

FOR SUPPLY IN THE UK ONLY

Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices.

This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders’ perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively.

Volume I focuses on the historical formation of ethnographic museums within Europe, the making of those institutions’ Pacific collections, and the activation and re-activation of those collections, over time and in the present.
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Pacific Presences

Pacific Presences – Volume 2: Oceanic Art and European Museums

£67.00

Description

FOR SUPPLY IN THE UK ONLY

Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices.

This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders’ perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively.

Volume II illustrates the sheer variety of Pacific artefacts and histories in museums, and similarly the heterogeneity of the issues and opportunities that they raise. Over thirty essays explore materialities, collection histories, legacies of empire, and contemporary projects
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Resonant Histories

Resonant Histories: Pacific Artefacts and the Voyages of HMS Royalist 1890-1893

£43.00

Description

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This book explores a complex relational assemblage, a collection of 1481 Pacific artefacts brought together by Captain Edward Henry Meggs Davis, during the three voyages of HMS Royalist between 1890-1893. The collection is indicative not just of a period of colonial collecting in the Pacific, but also the development of ethnographic collections in the UK and Europe. This period of history remains present in the social and cultural lives of many Pacific Islanders today.

Using the collections as a starting point the book is divided into two parts. The first provides the historical background to the three voyages of HMS Royalist, discussing each voyage, its aims and outcomes, and the role that Davis played within this. Davis’ motivations to collect and the various means of collecting that he employed are then explored within this historical context. Finally the first part considers what happened to the collection once it was sent from the Pacific to England, where and how it was sold, and how the collection was a part of and subject to the networks of museums, and private collectors in the UK and Europe during the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century. It offers a detailed view of the contents and development of the collection, and what the collection can tell us about British ethnographic collecting at the end of the nineteenth century.

The second part of the book explores the traces left by the ship amongst the Pacific Islands communities it visited. Focusing on three Pacific Islands- Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Kiribati- the chapters in this section interrogate the contemporary relevance of this period of colonial history for Islanders today, exploring current social, political and environmental issues
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Style and meaning

Style and Meaning: Essays on the Anthropology of Art

£40.00

Description

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Anthropology’s engagement with art has a complex and uneven history. While material culture, ‘decorative art’, and art styles were of major significance for founding figures such as Alfred Haddon and Franz Boas, art became marginal as the discipline turned towards social analysis in the 1920s. This book addresses a major moment of renewal in the anthropology of art in the 1960s and 1970s. British anthropologist Anthony Forge (1929-1991), trained in Cambridge, undertook fieldwork among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s and 1960s, and wrote influentially, especially about issues of style and meaning in art. His powerful, question-raising arguments addressed basic issues, asking why so much art was produced in some regions, and why was it so socially important?

Fifty years later, art has renewed global significance, and anthropologists are again considering both its local expressions among Indigenous peoples and its new global circulation. In this context, Forge’s arguments have renewed relevance: they help scholars and students understand the genealogies of current debates, and remind us of fundamental questions that remain unanswered.

This volume brings together Forge’s most important writings on the anthropology of art, published over a thirty year period, together with six assessments of his legacy, including extended reappraisals of Sepik ethnography, by distinguished anthropologists from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
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Tiki

Tiki: Marquesan Art and the Krusenstern Expedition

£43.00

Description

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Created across the six islands of a remote archipelago in eastern Polynesia, the art of the Marquesas is one of the world’s most distinctive and remarkable art traditions. Though exhibited in major museums around the world, Marquesan art is nevertheless poorly understood, and the formation of collections still largely unresearched.

This book documents and explores the most extensive early collection from the archipelago. In May, 1804, participants in the first Russian voyage round the world, usually known as the Krusenstern expedition after the principal commander, spent twelve days at the island of Nuku Hiva. Inspired by the science and collecting associated with the voyages of Captain James Cook, the mariners interacted with Islanders, and made extensive collections of artefacts. While the lives of the collectors and exchanges among scientists led to these artefacts being widely dispersed, the research reported here has identified some 200 objects collected during the voyage which are now in museums in Russia, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The outcome of years of work in museum stores and archives, Tiki reassembles a collection of exceptional importance. A set of essays contextualise these precisely-provenanced artefacts historically, and in the life and environment of the Marquesas Islands. For the first time, this heritage is made accessible to Islanders themselves, and to interested scholars and curators.
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Voyagers

Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific

£18.99

Description

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From an award-winning scholar, the extraordinary sixty-thousand-year history of how the Pacific islands were settled.
Thousands of islands, inhabited by a multitude of different peoples, are scattered across the vastness of the Pacific. The first European explorers to visit Oceania, from the sixteenth century on, were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving so many miles from the nearest continents. Who were these people? Where did they come from? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such immense tracts of ocean?

In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas. From the third millennium BC, the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia were settled by Austronesian peoples of the western Pacific littoral. Later movements of Polynesian peoples took them even further afield, as far as Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and – eventually – New Zealand, up to AD 1250.

Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from linguistics, archaeology, and the re-enactment of voyages, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the sea-going technologies that enabled them, and the societies that they left in their wake.
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