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REVIEWS 303 Theotokos, or methods of organizing knowledge, for example, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. The second part of the book leads us into a completely different historical and cultural situation: the “sporadic and irregular tradition” (136) of a particular Slavic text Izmirlieva refers to as The 72 Names of the Lord before the appearance of Cyrillic printing, and the commercial success of later redactions beginning with the birth of Cyrillic printed books, in 1520. The text belonged to a cluster of similar lists, and was produced, in the early modern period, as part of verbal amulets, in the form of miniature codices or rolls. The names of God in this Slavic version of the list are actually seventy or eighty, a proof that the topos of the divine names, and the number seventy-two were “lumped together mechanically for the sake or producing a Christian equivalent to the Kabbalistic amulet” (126). The analysis of the obscure genesis, transmission, and functioning of such lists leads Izmirlieva into a field which she defines as “heteropraxis”—a “religious eclecticism that marks the ultimate margin of organized religious life” (74). This field is constructed chapter by chapter through the study of numerical and textual tropes, phonological linguistic evidence , cross-language transmission. trends in humanist inquiry, and the intricacies of early modern book-printing. The result is a thrilling journey through text, space, and time that connects Judaic representative practices, Kabbalistic hermeneutics, and verbal magic, the Balkans and Provence, Jerusalem and Thessaloniki, the age of the apostles, the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. The result is a vivid picture of the idiosyncratic and syncretic nature of “heteropraxis ,” or what others, avoiding the question of orthodoxy, might call “popular religion.” The second justification for Izmirlieva’s project is best observed in the epilogue , where she bring together high theology and heteropraxis, open and closed lists of divine names, Orthodox Christianity, and religious syncretism. The author takes us into ethical philosophy and confronts the problem of divine onomastics with Emmanuel Levinas’s dual model of “totality” and “infinity” (154). The same trope , the list of the meaningful names of the Lord—in one case deliberately left open, in the other given the symbolic and finite number of seventy-two—acquires different significance because Areopagitical theology obeys a philosophy of desire, a yearning for “something else entirely” (155), while the “heteropraxis” belongs to a philosophy of “need,” most broadly one of protection. Izmirlieva interprets the differences against the broad framework of such “formative principles of religious practice” (157) in order to seek the neutral ground between theology and “heteropraxis.” On the basis of its methodology , this enjoyable book deserves to draw the attention of readers having interests beyond the temporal and spatial limits of Byzantine and medieval East European history, society, and culture. It is a nice example of how interdisciplinary research is able to construct problems that contribute to understanding the multiple connections and divergences between the various levels of religious experience. BORIS TODOROV, History, Yonsei University Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2007) xix + 248 REVIEWS 304 pp., ill. In this volume, Rayna Kalas takes as her starting point the complicated problems with the word “frame” in the modern discussion of the Renaissance. As Kalas explores, distinct removable frames for paintings were a development of the late Renaissance; earlier artwork was generally continuous with the object painted, or bounded by functional borders, such as those of a triptych. The word “frame” has a long and fascinating history, one which entails a transformation from an original sense of use and “making” to a more recent sense of delineation. All sorts of issues are implicated in this transformation, such as the “framing” of history and aesthetics, the emergence of the concept of the artist as autonomous maker, and shifting ontologies of creation. And really, that is only the beginning; this exploration could easily be extended to the making of gender and genre, the reframing of antiquity, for example. Even here, it should probably be extended to the language of the “frame” in nearby and relevant languages, such as French, Italian and Dutch. This volume confines...

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