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For more than a millennium, Kālidāsa’s poem “Lineage of the Raghus” (Raghuvaṃśa) has been acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of Sanskrit literature. Thousands of manuscripts transmit it, and dozens of pre-modern commentaries expound the text.
This is the second volume (out of three) of the earliest surviving commentary, that of the tenth-century Kashmirian Vallabhadeva. The text that he had before him of Kālidāsa’s poems differs in many places from that printed in other editions, which generally follow the readings of the commentator Mallinātha, who wrote four centuries later.
Notes discuss the text and report the readings of three other hitherto unpublished commentaries that predate Mallinātha, namely those of Śrīnātha, Vaidyaśrīgarbha and Dakṣiṇāvartanātha.
Editor / Translator:
"Dass die Mistforke leichter sei als die Schreibfeder und der Schweinestall besser rieche als die Stube der Studenten" – gegen diesen Irrtum kämpft 1525 Jacobus Montanus mit einhundert Musterbriefen an. Seine Schüler sollen sie aus ihrer Muttersprache ins Lateinische übersetzen. Ergänzende Formulierungshilfen aus antiken Autoren bahnen ihnen den Weg zu gelehrter Eloquenz. Obwohl unter Zeitgenossen hoch angesehen, liegt keines der Werke des westfälischen Humanisten in moderner Ausgabe vor. Die ‚Centuria epistolarium formularum‘ / ‚Hundertschaft Briefmuster‘ führt ins Zentrum seines Schaffens. Sie wird hier erstmals in kritischer Ausgabe vorgelegt. Ihre Briefe bieten alltagsnahe Einblicke in die Lebens- und Bildungswelt Westfalens, und ihre Lektüre bereitet oft Vergnügen. Eine moderne Übersetzung erleichtert den Zugang. Ein ausgiebiger Kommentar erschließt sie dem an vormoderner Alltags-, Bildungs- und Regionalgeschichte Interessierten.
Volume I: Essays / Volume 2-1: Arabic Edition / Volume 2-2: Arabic Edition / Volume 3-1: Annotated English Translation / Volume 3-2: Annotated English Translation, Appendices and Indices
An online, Open Access version of this work is also available from Brill.

A Literary History of Medicine by the Syrian physician Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (d. 1270) is the earliest comprehensive history of medicine. It contains biographies of over 432 physicians, ranging from the ancient Greeks to the author’s contemporaries, describing their training and practice, often as court physicians, and listing their medical works; all this interlaced with poems and anecdotes. These volumes present the first complete and annotated translation along with a new edition of the Arabic text showing the stages in which the author composed the work. Introductory essays provide important background. The reader will find on these pages an Islamic society that worked closely with Christians and Jews, deeply committed to advancing knowledge and applying it to health and wellbeing.
Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful by Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038)
In his Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful (Taḥsīn al-qabīḥ wa-taqbīḥ al-ḥasan) the prolific anthologist al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038) offers a thematically arranged selection of Arabic poems and prose anecdotes or sayings with contrary or paradoxical purport, such as praise of miserliness, boredom, sickness, and death, or condemnation of generosity, intelligence, youth, and music. The book is both entertaining and informative, giving insight in premodern Arab and Islamic culture. It contains a new edition of the Arabic text and a complete English translation (the first in any language) with extensive annotation, preceded by an introduction with the necessary background of the genre.
Author:
The Latin Poems of Manilius Cabacius Rallus of Sparta presents the poetic oeuvre of a forgotten poet of Renaissance Rome. A Greek by birth, Manilius Cabacius Rallus (c. 1447–c. 1523) spent most of his life far from his motherland, unable to return. Through his poems, composed in a range of metres and genres, Rallus engaged with some major events and personalities of his time, including Angelo Poliziano, Ianus Lascaris, and Pope Leo X. His poems also reflect on timeless human experiences such as helplessness in the face of fortune and nostalgia for what is lost. Han Lamers edited the Latin text of Rallus’ poems (most of them printed for the last time in 1520) and added annotations and an English prose translation.
Author:
For over sixty years, Professor Fuat Sezgin meticulously documented the literary and scientific writings and achievements of Muslim scholars. His celebrated Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), the largest bio-bibliography for the Arabic literary tradition in general, and the history of science and technology in the Islamic world in particular, is still of utmost importance for the field.
Winner of the 2023 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Art History

Written by the poet-painter Karel van Mander, who finished it in June 1603, the Grondt der edel, vry schilderconst (Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting) was the first systematic treatise on schilderconst (the art of painting / picturing) to be published in Dutch (Haarlem: Paschier van Wes[t]busch, 1604). This English-language edition of the Grondt, accompanied by an introductory monograph and a full critical apparatus, provides unprecedented access to Van Mander’s crucially important art treatise. The book sheds light on key terms and critical categories such as schilder, manier, uyt zijn selven doen, welstandt, leven and gheest, and wel schilderen, and both exemplifies and explicates the author’s distinctive views on the complementary forms and functions of history and landscape.
The Contemplacioun of Synnaris, by the Observant Franciscan William Touris, written c.1494 and evidently intended for King James IV of Scotland, is a significant and much copied work of Older Scots, although the earliest surviving witness is the English print by Wynkyn de Worde (1499).
The Contemplacioun was the very first work of Older Scots literature to be translated and to be printed. The poem’s seven sections comprise a course of meditations for Holy Week. Richard Fox, bishop of Durham, commissioned the English print, in which the stanzas were preceded by Latin sententiae, biblical, medieval and ancient. The work retained sufficient interest to re-emerge in separate versions in both Scotland (1568) and England (1578), drastically revised for Protestant readers.
A Critical Edition of Chrysopoeia and Other Alchemical Poems, with an Introduction, English Translation and Commentary
Author:
In Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441–1524) and Renaissance Alchemy, Matteo Soranzo offers the first in-depth study of the life and works of Augurello, Italian alchemist, poet and art connoisseur from the time of Giorgione. Analysed, annotated and translated into English for the first time, Augurello’s poetry reveals a unique blend of late medieval alchemical doctrines, Northern Italian antiquarianism and Marsilio Ficino’s Platonism, enriching conventional narratives of Renaissance humanism.
Author:
As the University of Erfurt collapsed in the early 1520s, Hessus faced losing his livelihood. To cope, he imagined himself a shape-changing Proteus. Transforming first into a lawyer, then a physician, he finally became a teacher at the Nuremberg academy organized by Philip Melanchthon. Volume 5 traces this story via Hessus's poems of 1524-1528: "Some Rules for Preserving Good Health" (1524; 1531), with attached "Praise of Medicine" and two sets of epigrams; "Three Elegies" (1526), two praising the Nuremberg school and one attacking a criticaster; "Venus Triumphant" (1527), with poems on Joachim Camerarius’s wedding; "Against the Hypocrisy of the Monastic Habit" (1527), with four Psalm paraphrases; and "Seventeen Bucolic Idyls" (1528), updating the "Bucolicon" of 1509 and adding five idyls.