Skip to main content

Reference Books

Old book bindings
Disclaimer: Some links on this pager are Amazon Affiliate links and as such, I earn from qualifying purchases.  The books here are books that I can personally recommend and have either referenced in blog posts or used in the past for coursework.

General

The historian Lecouteux has put together what amounts to a dictionary of stones and gems. It is extensively researched and pulls from a number of ancient sources, though the names used often aren't the colloquial names for the stones.

Christianity

Ehrman and Plese have put together a collection of the apocryphal Gospels, including the fragments, in a single volume set 

Renowned scholar Bruce Metzger's work examining the development of New Testament canon

Malleus Maleficarum

By the same editor who created the two-volume set below, this is an English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum

This is a two volume set of a heavily annotated and thoroughly researched version of the Malleus Maleficarum. Volume 1 is the Latin text and volume 2 is the English

Malleus Maleficarum is a weird book that didn't necessarily reflect any common views of its time period and as such can be hard to understand. This book examines the Malleus Maleficarum in its medieval context and explains the twisted perspective it's working from.







Popular posts from this blog

Not an Apple

Genesis 3 is probably one of the most famous parts of the Old Testament. It's where the devil convinced Eve to eat an apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Except not. The Hebrew is pretty clear. The נָחָשׁ mentioned in the first verse is just the Hebrew word for "serpent". It has nothing to do with the figure who would later become identified as the Christian Satan. And it wasn't an apple.          Again, the Hebrew text is reasonably clear. The word used is פְּרִי which literally just means "fruit". Like in English, this can be an actual fruit or metaphorical for the "fruit of ___". Hebrew has a separate word for "apple" תַּפּוּחַ which does not show up (as far as I'm aware) in Genesis. So how did we get the whole "Apple" thing? Because languages are fun! The "apple" translation comes from people working with and getting confused by the Latin translation of the Old Testament. In Latin, the word...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mithras: Introduction

Mithras, the focus of the cult The Mysteries of Mithras was a prominent mystery religion in the Roman Empire from early A.D.  to the 4th century. In theory, it came from Persia, being the roman version of the Persian fire/sun god Mithra. This theory was espoused by Franz Cumont, though there is much debate about this. Plutarch claims that it was started by the pirates of Cicilia in Asia minor and, because of archeological evidence showing that the most important cult in this area was dedicated to Perseus, David Ulansey, in his The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, takes this to mean that Mithras is a version of Perseus and uses this to develop his theory on the astrological focus of Mithraism. Because of the nature of a mystery religion, the adherents wrote nothing down, at least, nothing that survived. There exists a text referred to as the “Mithras Liturgy” from the Greek Magical Papyri and it should be taken into account, but its legitimacy is questioned. The only information ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Golden Apple

Apples feature in a lot of stories and folklore. The most famous one is probably the golden apple that started the Trojan war. Eris, goddess of discord, took a golden apple, wrote " τῇ καλλίστῃ" (to the most beautiful) on it, and threw it into a group of goddesses: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. They all wanted it, claiming the title of "most beautiful" for themselves, so they had this sort of ancient beauty contest, for lack of a better term. The judge was a man named Paris, a prince of Troy. Each goddess promised him various things in order to be declared the most beautiful. Aphrodite won. She promised him a woman, Helen, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world. Aphrodite took Helen and gave her to Paris. Whether this was a choice on Helen's part or whether she was taken against her will varies by source. There was a problem, aside from the obvious issues with kidnapping. Before she was "Helen of Troy", she was "Helen of Sparta", marrie...
Post a Comment
Read more