Peering through the conferenceshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Shazar has published a Hebrew translation of Ephraim Kanarfogel's Peering through the Lattices: Mystical, Magical, Miraculous, Martyrological, Moribund, Dimensions in the Tosafist Period. In honour of this event, there will be an event at the Shazar offices on May 26th, with Profs Avraham Grossman, Yossef Hecker, Moshe Idel and the author.

Bar Ilan University is having a major conference devoted to Rashbam, Rabbi Samuel ben Meir of Ramerupt or thereabouts, in memory of Eliezer Touito. Non-fancy schedule here. It amazes me, the amount of attention that scholars of medieval biblical exegesis lavish on a fairly limited corpus. I must admit that it also frustrates me that despite all this enthusiasm for studying Rashbam's biblical exegesis, his Talmudic commentaries and, to an even greater degree, his Halakhic writings have received virtually no attention whatsoever. Anyway, Hanna Liss has recently published a new book on Rashbam titled Creating Fictional Worlds. I haven't finished reading it, so I'll hold off on criticism, but the basic idea is that Rashbam was responding to the Christian culture surrounding him, but not in the way people like the late Touito thought. The real backdrop is not the scholastic biblical exegesis that was being written in Latin, but rather the romances being written in the vernacular (French). I look forward to being convinced of this intriguing suggestion.