From its first adoption of writing at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, ancient Cyprus was home to distinctive scripts and writing habits, often setting it apart from other areas of the Mediterranean and Near East. This well-illustrated volume is the first to explore the development and importance of Cypriot writing over a period of more than 1,500 years in the second and first millennia BC. Five themed chapters deal with issues ranging from the acquisition of literacy and the adaptation of new writing systems to the visibility of writing and its role in the marking of identities. The agency of Cypriots in shaping the island's literate landscape is given prominence, and an extended consideration of the social context of writing leads to new insights on Cypriot scripts and their users. Cyprus provides a stimulating case to demonstrate the importance of contextualised approaches to the development of writing systems.

The Album of Armenian Paleography provides a comprehensive selection of some 200 definitively dated, handwritten texts, sampled from among the 30,000 manuscripts preserved in the major public collections of Europe, the Middle East, the former USSR and North America. Selected specimen pages from these manuscripts are presented in chronological order, and span the period from AD 862 to 1911. Each text is illustrated by a high-quality colour facsimile of a typical page, and is accompanied by an alphabet table for the folio in question and a sample transcription. All photographs are new, taken especially for the Album. Thanks to the large format of the volume it has been possible to show ail manuscript pages (except the very largest) in actual size. In addition, each facsimile page is accompanied by a colour enlargement of several lines of the text, enabling the reader to study the lettering in even greater detail.

In a separate section, computerized tables are used to show changes in the forms of individual letters. By following the development of letter shapes, it is possible to discern the evolutionary process of the Armenian scripts in a far more detailed and sophisticated manner than the traditional division of the Armenian hands into types: erkat'agir, bologir, notrgir, Olagir, thereby providing much more precise datings than those previously available to scholars. The foundations are thus laid for a better understanding of the chronology of Armenian manuscripts and the literature and art they contain.

This volume will be an indispensible tool for any serious student of the Armenian language, literature and art, and its innovative approach to the study of lettering will be ofinterest to paleographers and codicologists.

The written word has been a central bearer of culture since antiquity. But its position is now being challenged by the powerful media of electronic communication. In this penetrating and witty book James O'Donnell takes a reading on the promise and the threat of electronic technology for our literate future. In Avatars of the Word O'Donnell reinterprets today's communication revolution through a series of refracted comparisons with earlier revolutionary periods: the transition from oral to written culture, from the papyrus scroll to the codex, from copied manuscript to print. His engaging portrayals of these analogous epochal moments suggest that our steps into cyberspace are not as radical as we might think. Observing how technologies of the word have affected the shaping of culture in the past, and how technological transformation has been managed, we regain models that can help us navigate the electronic transformation now underway. Concluding with a focus on the need to rethink the modern university, O'Donnell specifically addresses learning and teaching in the humanities, proposing ways to seek the greatest benefit from electronic technologies while steering clear of their potential pitfalls.

Debate as Global Pedagogy: Rwanda Rising illustrates that the teaching of debate offers an ideal educational approach for the prevention and remediation of genocide. As the antithesis of propaganda, debate and argument instruction promotes the critical thinking necessary to resist processes of propaganda that enable injustice and human rights abuses. Case studies of argumentation instruction and deliberative forums worldwide demonstrate how environments of discursive complexity can be fostered through education in debate and argumentation. The central example of Rwanda recovering from genocide in 1994 with help from innovative pedagogy by iDebate Dreamers Academy provides a model for how argumentation instruction can reduce and prevent social injustices.