The book of Qohelet. A digital scholarly edition of the hebrew text

The objective of the present dissertation is a born-digital critical edition of the Hebrew Old Testament book of Qohelet. The edition is based on an extensive collation of variant readings from indirect sources – the Septuagint, the Peshitta, the works of St. Jerome (the Vulgate and the Commentary), and the Targum – as well as from direct sources such as the Qumran fragments and Hebrew medieval manuscripts. The ultimate goal of the edition is (a) to reproduce the earliest textual form, the Archetype, that can be reconstructed on the basis of the available evidence; and (b) to propose a rehabilitation of the Original of the Author by resorting, when necessary, to conjectural emendation. We date the Archetype to the II century BCE, corresponding to the date of Hebrew fragments from Qumran, while we place the Original between the V and III centuries BCE. Unlike previous critical editions of Qohelet, ours follows the so-called eclectic model, which involves the reconstitution of a critical text and the preparation of an apparatus of secondary variants. Our edition includes, moreover, new data, taken both from primary literature, such as the recently published Göttingen Septuagint, and from up-to-date studies and critical commentaries on the text of Qohelet. The work is made up of five main parts: an introduction, which sets forth the rationale of the edition and the methodology adopted; the collation, where the variants are listed in their original language; the commentary, where they are extensively discussed; the critical text accompanied by the apparatus, which presents a selection of authentic Hebrew variants taken from the collation; and finally, a translation of the critical text. The edition uses the mark-up language of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). It is realized in pdf, via LaTeX, and will be available in digital form, via the TEI-Publisher editor.

Cheering the soul: Ibn Qāḍī Baʿlabakk’s Mufarriḥ an-Nafs. Arabic edition, english translation, study and glossaries

The Mufarriḥ an-nafs (Soul-Cheerer), attributed to Badr ad-Dīn Muẓaffar Ibn Qāḍī Baʿlabakk, who served under the Ayyubids as the Chief Medical Officer of Damascus in the mid-13th century, was written as a comprehensive guide for physicians outlining different approaches to cheering the soul. The tractate is divided into ten chapters, which explore the nature of the soul, its distinction to the body as well as their connection through sensorial perception. Ibn Qāḍī Baʿlabakk distinguishes the bodily senses – hearing, vision, smell, taste, touch – and the inner senses, which he sees as stimulated through activities such as hunting and engagement in poetry and the sciences. The seventh chapter of the Mufarriḥ an-nafs includes an extended encyclopedia on materia medica as well as dispensatory of simple and compound drugs, which is devoted to treating the soul and remains unparalleled in the history of Islamicate medicine. My doctoral dissertation offers a complete recension and translation of the Mufarriḥ an-nafs based on a stemma codicum drawn from the seventeen extant text witnesses. The dissertation contextualizes the work, its author as well as sources, and features a text commentary that seeks to enable the reader to easily place and understand the Mufarriḥ an-nafs within the tradition of Galenic medicine. The glossaries on materia medica found at the end of the dissertation are aimed at facilitating access to the pharmacological dispensatory included in the seventh chapter.