This Week's New Books: Death by Effigy, Exquisite Mixture, and Textual Mirrors

Death by Effigy: A Case from the Mexican Inquisition Luis R. Corteguera 240 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4439-7 | $39.95 | £26.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0705-7 | $39.95 | £26.00 A volume in the Early Modern Americas series On July 21, 1578, a small Mexican town awoke to the news of a scandal. Nailed to the door of its church was a double-faced effigy denouncing a neighbor as a Jew who should burn at the stake. Nine trials over the course of four years revealed a story of dishonor, revenge, and the Inquisition's relentless determination to defend its symbols.

Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England Wolfram Schmidgen 280 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4442-7 | $59.95 | £39.00 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0718-7 | $59.95 | £39.00 A volume in the Haney Foundation Series Exquisite Mixture examines the writing of Robert Boyle, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, and others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain who advocated mixture as a critical element of this belief in English superiority: mixture could produce superior languages, new species, flawless ideas, and resilient civil societies.

Textual Mirrors: Reflexivity, Midrash, and the Rabbinic Self Dina Stein 248 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4436-6 | $79.95 | £52.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0694-4 | $79.95 | £52.00 A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series In Textual Mirrors, Dina Stein draws on literary theory, folklore studies, and semiotics to closely examine midrashic tales in which self-reflexivity operates as a central element. Within these texts, rabbinic discourse itself becomes the object of reflection, both complicating and confirming its religious and ideological principles.

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