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Description:
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The lore of the supposed magic and medical virtue of stones goes back to the
Babylonians and peaks out in the lapidary literature of the Middle Ages. The
famous work of Marbode of Rennes, which made lapidaries a very popular type
of medieval scientific literature, was translated into numerous vernacular
languages. The Jewish tradition, missing a particular lapidary literature of its
own, absorbed non-Jewish works like that of Marbode. Several Anglo-Norman
Marbode translations could be identified as the main source of the present
edited Hebrew lapidary Ko’aḥ ha-Avanim, written by Berakhyah Ben Natronai ha-
Nakdan around 1300. The edition is accompanied by an English translation, a
source study, and a linguistic analysis of the Romance, mostly Anglo-Norman,
terms featuring within the text in Hebrew spelling.
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