"Charlemagne, claimed by the Church as a saint, by the French as their greatest king, by the Germans as their compatriot, by the Italians as their emperor, heads all modern histories in one way or another; he is the creator of a new order of things, " wrote the historian Sismondi in 1821. In this fascinating book, available for the first time in an English translation, Robert Morrissey explores a millennium's worth of history and myth surrounding Charlemagne (768-814).

Charlemagne's persona -- derived from a blending of myth, history, and poetry -- assumes a constitutional value in France, where for more than ten centuries it was deemed useful to trace national privileges and undertakings back to Charlemagne. His plasticity, Morrissey argues, endows Charlemagne with both legitimizing power and subversive potential. Part 1 of the book explores a fundamental cycle in the history of Charlemagne's representation, beginning shortly after the great emperor's death and continuing to the end of the sixteenth century. Part 2 of the book discusses the remythologizing of Charlemagne in Renaissance and Reformation France through the late nineteenth century.

At a time when a new Europe is being created and when France continues to redefine and reinvent itself, Morrissey's detailed study of how history has been reappropriated is particularly valuable.

In this concise but wide-ranging study, Luc Brisson describes how the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the Renaissance. He argues that philosophy was responsible for saving myth from historical annihilation. Although philosophy was initially critical of myth, mythology was progressively reincorporated into philosophy through allegory. Brisson reveals how philosophers employed allegory and how it enabled myth to take on a number of different interpretive systems throughout the centuries: moral, physical, psychological, political, and even metaphysical.
"This wonderful book confirms Brisson's status as one of the major authorities in the field of classical antiquity. Overall, and with this excellent translation, the book is invaluable."--"Choice"
"A compressed overview with moments of great insight. . . . Its strengths lie in the details Brisson is able to work into this brief treatment."--Peter Struck, "Journal of Religion"

"In olden days, in a village peopled by animal creatures, lived Wild Cat (another name for Lynx). He was old and mangy, and he was constantly scratching himself with his cane. From time to time, a young girl who lived in the same cabin would grab the cane, also to scratch herself. In vain Wild Cat kept trying to talk her out of it. One day the young lady found herself pregnant; she gave birth to a boy. Coyote, another inhabitant of the village, became indignant. He talked all of the population into going to live elsewhere and abandoning the old Wild Cat, his wife, and their child to their fate ..." So begins the Nez Perce's myth that lies at the heart of "The Story of Lynx", Claude Levi-Strauss's accessible examination of the mythology of American Indians. In this wide-ranging work, the author considers the many variations in a story that occur in both North and South America, but especially among the Salish-speaking peoples of the Northwest Coast. He also shows how centuries of contact with Europeans have altered the tales. Levi-Strauss focuses on the opposition between Wild Cat and Coyote to explore the meaning and uses of "gemellarity", or twinness, in Native American culture. The concept of dual organization that these tales exemplify is one of non-equivalence: everything has an opposite or other, with which it coexists in unstable tension. In contrast, Levi-Strauss argues, European notions of twinness - as in the myth of Castor and Pollux - stress the essential sameness of the twins. This fundamental cultural difference lay behind the fatal clash of European and Native American peoples. This work addresses and clarifies all the major issues that have occupied Claude Levi-Strauss for decades, and in it he explicitly connects history and structuralism.

Perhaps the most contested patch of earth in the world, Jerusalem's Old City experiences consistent violent unrest between Israeli and Palestinian residents, with seemingly no end in sight. Today, Jerusalem's endless cycle of riots and arrests appears intractable even unavoidable and it looks unlikely that harmony will ever be achieved in the city. But with Jerusalem 1900, historian Vincent Lemire shows us that it wasn't always that way, undoing the familiar notion of Jerusalem as a lost cause and revealing a unique moment in history when a more peaceful future seemed possible. In this masterly history, Lemire uses newly opened archives to explore how Jerusalem's elite residents of differing faiths cooperated through an inter-community municipal council they created in the mid-1860s to administer the affairs of all inhabitants and improve their shared city. These residents embraced a spirit of modern urbanism and cultivated a civic identity that transcended religion and reflected the relatively secular and cosmopolitan way of life of Jerusalem at the time. These few years would turn out to be a tipping point in the city's history a pivotal moment when the horizon of possibility was still open, before the council broke up in 1934, under British rule, into separate Jewish and Arab factions. Uncovering this often overlooked diplomatic period, Lemire reveals that the struggle over Jerusalem was not historically inevitable and therefore is not necessarily eternal. Jerusalem 1900 sheds light on how the Holy City once functioned peacefully and illustrates how it might one day do so again.

"Jewish stories," writes Adam Biro, "resemble every people's stories." Yet at the same time there is no better way to understand the soul, history, millennial suffering, or, crucially, the "joys" of the Jewish people than through such tales--"There's nothing," writes Biro, "more revelatory of the Jewish being."

With "Is It Good for the Jews?" Biro offers a sequel to his acclaimed collection of stories "Two Jews on a Train." Through twenty-nine tales--some new, some old, but all finely wrought and rich in humor--Biro spins stories of characters coping with the vicissitudes and reverses of daily life, while simultaneously painting a poignant portrait of a world of unassimilated Jewish life that has largely been lost to the years. From rabbis competing to see who is the most humble, to the father who uses suicide threats to pressure his children into visiting, to three men berated by the Almighty himself for playing poker, Biro populates his stories with memorable characters and absurd--yet familiar--situations, all related with a dry wit and spry prose style redolent of the long tradition of Jewish storytelling.

A collection simultaneously of foibles and fables, adversity and affection, "Is It Good for the Jews? "reminds us that if in the beginning was the word, then we can surely be forgiven for expecting a punch line to follow one of these days.

British colonists in 1830s India lived in terror of the Thugs. Reputed to be brutal criminals, the Thugs supposedly strangled, beheaded and robbed thousands of travellers in the goddess Kali's name. The British responded with equally brutal repression of the Thugs and developed a compulsive fascination with tales of their monstrous deeds. Did the Thugs really exist, or did the British invent them as an excuse to seize tighter control of India? Drawing on historical and anthropological accounts, Indian tales and sacred texts, and detailed analyses of the secret Thug language, Martine van Woerkens reveals for the first time the real story of the Thugs. Many different groups of Thugs actually did exist over the centuries, but the monsters the British made of them had much more to do with colonial imaginings of India than with the real Thugs. Tracing these imaginings down to the present, van Woerkens reveals the ongoing roles of the Thugs in fiction and film from "Frankenstein" to "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". A gripping tale of murder, crime and deception, "The Strangled Traveller" is riveting histroy and enlightening reading.