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Reviews 161 Berber North Africa, Turkish AnatoUa and Central Asia. The author underlines important socio-economic, strategic and environmental factors and highlights vital historical processes such as patterns of conquest and tribal migration, the progress of Shi'ism and thefinalriftwith the Sunni world, and the evolution of Persian identity under Islam. The 400 years of early Islamic history preceding this 'medieval' period receives only a bird's-eye-view, with more emphasis on the role of the Persian Buyids (tenth-century) and Turkic Ghaznawids (early eleventh) in the formation of a Persian cultural identity, and less attention to the Arab factor. However, despite the flourishing of Persian literature from the late tenth century, the student of Persian history to the end of the eleventh century has to rely mainly on Arabic historical sources. The role of Arabic has been profound, not only in the script and vocabulary of Persian, but also in the use of Arabic by many leading reUgious scholars to this day. But the author is right to question assumptions of recent quantitative research on the conversion of Persia to Islam, which, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, was a slow and gradual process, accelerating somewhat in the Mongol period, which also saw further consolidation of Persian Uterature and culture. In this concise book covering more than 750 years, politico-religious, institutional, and socio-economic developments are well discussed; for example, the impact of the Turks and Mongols, the importance of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in the consolidation of Persia's Shi'a character and cultural identity, and its relations with India, the Ottomans and Europe. But such aspects as art, poetry, mysticism and learning are barely touched upon, no doubt due to the nature of the series in which this volume appears and perhaps the author's own interests. This book is a lucid and authoritative introduction to a vital period in the history of Islamic Persia. The background it provides is essential for understanding the evolution of Iran in our own times. Ahmad Shboul Department of Semitic Studies University of Sydney Ogilvie-Thomson, S. J., ed., Richard Rolle: prose and verse. Edited from MS. Longleat 29 and related manuscripts, (Early English Text Society, No. 293), Oxford, O. U. P., 1988; cloth; pp. xcvi, 273; 1 plate; R. R. P. AUS$87.50. This meticulously edited collection of Richard Rolle's English writings, representing advances in several complex areas of scholarship, will be welcomed by students of Middle English prose and by readers of contemplative writings of the period. By drawing on the major collection of Rolle's English writings .^2 Reviews contained in MS. Longleat 29 and on the copy of the Meditation on the Passion written by the Longleat scribe in M S . Bodl. e. Museo 232, Sarah OgilvieThomson has provided new and authoritative texts of works previously accessible in Hope Emily Allen's edition, English writings of Richard Rolle (Oxford, 1931). As well as the Meditation from M S . Museo (Aden's Text II), these consist of the epistles, The form of living, Ego Dormio and The Commandment, the short prose pieces, Desire and delight and Ghostly gladness, and six lyrics. Additional works ascribed to Rolle in the Longleat MS., and therefore edited here, are the lyric, 'Jesus sweet now wdl I sing' and a fragment of a second Meditation on the Passion complete in B L M S . Cotton Titus xix. Based on thefirstfull collation of all known extant texts of the writings presented, this edition reveals both the achievement and limitations of earlier work carried out in the field, pre-eminently by Allen. Ogilvie-Thomson's selection of M S . Longleat as the source of her base-texts, in place of the former choice of editors, therivalcollection in northern dialect in University Library Cambridge M S . D d v 64 III, is justified by her analysis of variants. For example, she deduces that the M S . Longleat text of The form of living could be as litde as two removes from the original, whereas the text in the Cambridge M S . could be as many as nine. Collation of the M S . Longleat and the M S . Cambridge texts of The...

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