Kristin Scheible's Books

Reading the Mahāvamsa

The Literary Aims of a Theravada Buddhist History

By: Kristin Scheible

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Reading the Mahāvamsa

The Literary Aims of a Theravada Buddhist History

By: Kristin Scheible

Vamsa is a dynamic genre of Buddhist history filled with otherworldly characters and the exploits of real-life heroes. These narratives collapse the temporal distance between Buddha and the reader, building an emotionally resonant connection with an outsized religious figure and a longed-for past. The fifth-century Pali text Mahavamsa is a particularly effective example, using metaphor and other rhetorical devices to ethically transform readers, to stimulate and then to calm them. Reading the Mahavamsa advocates a new, literary approach to this text by revealing its embedded reading advice (to experience samvega and pasada) and affective work of metaphors (the Buddha's dharma as light) and salient characters (nagas). Kristin Scheible argues that the Mahavamsa requires a particular kind of reading. In the text's proem, special instructions draw readers to the metaphor of light and the nagas, or salient snake-beings, of the first chapter. Nagas are both model worshippers and unworthy hoarders of Buddha's relics. As nonhuman agents, they challenge political and historicist readings of the text. Scheible sees these slippery characters and the narrative's potent and playful metaphors as techniques for refocusing the reader's attention on the text's emotional aims. Her work explains the Mahavamsa's central motivational role in contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhist and nationalist circles. It also speaks broadly to strategies of reading religious texts and to the internal and external cues that give such works lives beyond the page.

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Page Count

239

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231542607

ISBN 13

9780231542609

"In His Image and Likeness"

Political Iconography and Religious Change in Regensburg, 1500–1600

By: Kristin Zapalac

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"In His Image and Likeness"

Political Iconography and Religious Change in Regensburg, 1500–1600

By: Kristin Zapalac

In this ground-breaking book, Kristin Zapalac brings together the methods of social, intellectual, and art history to achieve a new understanding of how the Protestant Reformation altered the terms of political discourse in a German free imperial city. In Zapalac's view, visual and verbal images, many of them having their origins in conceptions of the sacred, were more central to sixteenth-century political thought within the city walls than was the rationalized language of law. Drawing on a wealth of sources including bookbindings, sermons, wills, frescoes, decrees, and woodcuts, she traces the impact of religious change on the languages of judgment and authority used in the city of Regensburg, and thereby sheds light on the nature of political thought in early modern Germany.

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Page Count

303

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501746405

ISBN 13

9781501746406

Reading the Mahāvaṃśa

The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History

By: Kristin Scheible

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Reading the Mahāvaṃśa

The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History

By: Kristin Scheible

Reading the Mahāvamsa advocates a new, literary approach to this text by revealing its embedded reading advice (to experience samvega and pasada) and affective work of metaphors (the Buddha's dharma as light) and salient characters (nagas).

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Page Count

223

Publisher

South Asia Across the Disciplines

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231171382

ISBN 13

9780231171380

Book's by Kristin Scheible

Reading the Mahāvamsa

Reading the Mahāvamsa

"In His Image and Likeness"

"In His Image and Likeness"

Reading the Mahāvaṃśa

Reading the Mahāvaṃśa

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