Open Book Publishers

The Book of Judith tells the story of a fictitious Jewish woman beheading the general of a powerful army to free her people. The parabolic story was set as an example of how God will help the righteous. Judith’s heroic action not only became a validating charter myth of Judaism itself but has also been appropriated by many Christian and secular groupings, and has been an inspiration for numerous literary texts and works of art. It continues to exercise its power over artists, authors and academics and is becoming a major field of research in its own right.

The Sword of Judith is the first multidisciplinary collection of essays to discuss representations of Judith throughout the centuries. It transforms our understanding across a wide range of disciplines. The collection includes new archival source studies, the translation of unpublished manuscripts, the translation of texts unavailable in English, and Judith images and music.

CONTENTS
Introductions:
1. Kevin R Brine: The Judith Project
2. Deborah Levine Gera: Introduction to Jewish Textual Traditions
3. Elena Ciletti and Henrike Lähnemann: Introduction to Christian Traditions
Part 1: Writing Judith.
1.1. Jewish Textual Traditions:
4. Barbara Schmitz: Holofernes' Canopy in the Book of Judith
5. Deborah Levine Gera: Shorter Medieval Hebrew Tales of Judith
6. Susan Weingarten: Food, Sex and Redemption in the ‘Scroll of Judith’
7. Ruth von Bernuth and Michael Terry: Shalom bar Abraham's Book of Judith in Yiddish
1.2. Christian Textual Traditions
8. Marc Mastrangelo: Typology and Agency in Prudentius' Treatment of Judith
9. Tracey-Anne Cooper: Judith in Late Anglo-Saxon England
10 John Nassichuk: The Prayer of Judith in Late-Mediaeval French Mystery Plays
11. Kathleen M. Llewellyn: The Example of Judith in Early Modern French Literature
12. Robert Cummings: Du Bartas's La Judith and Hudson's History of Judith
13. Henrike Lähnemann: The Cunning of Judith in Late Medieval German Texts
14. Janet Bartholomew: The Role of Judith in Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified (1666)
Part 2: Staging Judith
2.1. Visual Arts
15. Elizabeth Bailey: Judith and Humilitas in the Speculum Virginum
16. Roger J. Crum: Judith between the Private and Public Realms in Renaissance Florence
17. Sarah Blake McHam: Donatello’s Judith as the Emblem of God’s Chosen People
18. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona: Costuming Judith in Italian Art of the 16th Century
19. Elena Ciletti: Judith Imagery as Catholic Orthodoxy in Counter-Reformation Italy
2.2. Music and Drama
20. Kelley Harness: Judith, Music, and Female Patrons in Early Modern Italy
21. David Marsh: Judith in Baroque Oratorio
22. Paolo Bernardini: Judith in the Italian Unification Process 1800-1900
23. Alexandre Lhâa: Marcello and Peri’s Giuditta (1860) at the Teatro alla Scala
24. Jann Pasler: Politics, Biblical Debates, and French Dramatic Music
on Judith after 1870
25. Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza: Judith and the “Jew-eaters” in German Volkstheater

Kevin R Brine, the founder and director of the Judith Project is an independent scholar and visual artist. He is Member of the Board of Overseers of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of New York University, and the co-founder, with Clifford Siskin of The Re-Enlightenment Project at New York University and The New York Public Library. Mr. Brine co-edited, with Garland Cannon, Object of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions and Influence of Sir William Jones (1746-1797) (1995). Mr Brine’s paintings are published in Kevin R Brine: The Porch of the Caryatids: Drawings, Paintings and Sculptures (2006).
Elena Ciletti is a professor of art history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, where she teaches Renaissance through Eighteenth Century art in Europe, women artists and their patrons, and African-American art. Among her publications are the essays "Patriarchal Ideology in Renaissance Iconography of Judith," in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance (1991) and “’Gran macchina è bellezza:’ Looking at the Gentileschi Judiths,” in The Artemisia Files (2005). She is working on a book-length study of Artemisia Gentileschi and the imagery of Judith in Catholic Reformation culture.
Henrike Lähnemann holds the Chair of German Studies at Newcastle University. Her main areas of research are medieval German literature in the Latin context, manuscript studies and the interface of text and image. In 2006, she published a monograph on medieval German versions of the Book of Judith ('Hystoria Judith. Deutsche Judithdichtungen vom 11. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert) which will come out in a revised English edition with Open Book Publishers in 2010.