The series Handbooks of the Bible and Its Reception (HBR) provides comprehensive introductions to individual topics in biblical reception history. Based on the multi-volume reference work Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (EBR), HBR offers broad and in-depth analyses of selected issues found in EBR. The Handbooks address a wide range of interdisciplinary matters, including reception of the Bible in various contexts and historical periods; in diverse geographic areas; in particular cultural, social, and political contexts; and in relation to important biblical themes, topics, and figures. HBR is an indispensable tool for scholars and students in the field of biblical reception. Further information on "The Bible and Its Reception".

The premise of Fallen Animals is that some how and in some way The Fall of Adam and Eve as related in the Bible has affected all living beings from the largest to the smallest, from the oldest to the youngest, regardless of gender and geography. The movement from the blissful arena of the Garden of Eden to the uncertain reality of exile altered in an overt or nuanced fashion the attitudes, perceptions, and consciousness of animals and humanity alike. Interpretations of these reformulations as well as the original story of the Paradise Garden have been told and retold for millennia in a variety of cultural contexts, languages, societies, and religious environments. Throughout all those retellings, animals have been a constant presence positively and negatively, actively and passively, from the creation of birds, fish, and mammals to the agency of the serpent in the Fall narrative. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is but one example of the ambivalence which has characterized the human-animal relationship over the centuries, both across, and within, cultures, societies and traditions. The book examines the interpretations, functions and interactions of the Fall - physical, moral, artistic and otherwise - as represented through animals, or through human-animal interactions.

This first volume of a two-volume Handbook treats a challenging, largely neglected subject at the crossroads of several academic fields: biblical studies, reception history of the Bible, and folklore studies or folkloristics. The Handbook examines the reception of the Bible in verbal folklores of different cultures around the globe. This first volume, complete with a general Introduction, focuses on biblically-derived characters, tales, motifs, and other elements in Jewish (Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ashkenazi), Romance (French, Romanian), German, Nordic/Scandinavian, British, Irish, Slavic (East, West, South), and Islamic folkloric traditions. The volume contributes to the understanding of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the New Testament, and various pseudepigraphic and apocryphal scriptures, and to their interpretation and elaboration by folk commentators of different faiths. The book also illuminates the development, artistry, and "migration" of folktales; opens new areas for investigation in the reception history of the Bible; and offers insights into the popular dimensions of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities around the globe, especially regarding how the holy scriptures have informed those communities' popular imaginations.

Religion and literature is the study of interrelationships between religious or theological traditions and literary traditions, both oral and written, with special attention to religious or theological underpinnings of, influences upon, and reflections in, individual "texts" (oral and written) or authors' oeuvres. Religion and Literature: History and Method by Eric Ziolkowski considers the origins and history of, and methods employed in, that scholarly enterprise, focusing on the dual construals of "literature" in religious studies (as a body of sacred writings and as writing valued for artistic merit); the problematics of defining "religion"; the transformation of theology and literature as a "field" (pioneered by Nathan A. Scott Jr. et al.) to religion and literature; the affiliated fields of myth criticism, and of biblical reception; and the institutionalization, globalization, and future of the study of religion and literature.

Ziolkowski explores the religious implications of the figure of Don Quixote in Western literature from Cervantes to the present.While scholars and critics in the past have often called attention to the secularizing tendency of modern literature, to the numerous fictional adaptations of the Christ figure on the one hand, and the innumerable literary descendants of Don Quixote on the other, this study is the first to examine a lineage of characters in whom the images of the alleged savior and the mad knight are combined.After considering Don Quixote as the first modern novel, and taking into account its relationship to religion, society, and censorship in seventeenth-century Spain, Ziolkowski traces the history and fate of Don Quixote, the character, through a series of religious transformations over the centuries, focusing on three novels that adapt the Quixote figure: Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote. Ziolkowski argues that, given the increased secularization and decline of religious consciousness over the last several centuries, any pursuit of religious values or ideas becomes questionable and this appears "quixotic" insofar as it stands in contradiction to the sociohistorical context. He concludes that religious existence, for the few who pursue it in suffering, which means that the religious person feels temporally displaced for adhering to a seemingly obsolete faith and lifestyle.

Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts is a collection of fourteen essays that illuminate the broad and often underappreciated variety of the nineteenth-century Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard's engagements with literature and the arts. These essays, contextualized with an insightful introduction by Eric Ziolkowski, explore Kierkegaard's relationship to literature (poetry, prose, and storytelling), the performing arts (theater, music, opera, and dance), and the visual arts and film. The collection is rounded out with a final comparative section that considers Kierkegaard in juxtaposition with a romantic poet (William Blake), a modern composer (Arnold Schoenberg), and a contemporary singer-songwriter (Bob Dylan). Kierkegaard was as much an aesthetic thinker as a philosopher, and his philosophical writings are complemented by his literary and music criticism. Bringing together insights from an international group of Kierkegaard scholars, Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts will offer much of interest to scholars concerned with Kierkegaard as well as teachers, performers, and readers in the various aesthetic fields discussed.