Well, we’re preparing to launch into the new academic year at Brigham Young University. Today, while on campus for our fall college and department meetings, I was pleased to discover two new arrivals in my office — volumes 12 and 13 of The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides, a publication series that I launched many years ago with Gerrit Bos, who is now Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany:
Maimonides, On the Regimen of Health: A New Parallel Arabic-English Translation, by Gerrit Bos, with Critical Editions of Medieval Hebrew Translations by Gerrit Bos and Latin Translations by Michael R. McVaugh (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019)
Maimonides, On the Elucidation of Symptoms and the Response to Them (Formerly Known as On the Causes of Symptoms): A New Parallel Arabic-English Edition and Translation with Critical Editions of the Medieval Hebrew Translations, by Gerrit Bos (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019)
Actually, I received two copies of each book.
Why?
Several years ago, at the time of my enforced departure from the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (or METI), which I had conceived and founded, the settlement negotiated on my behalf with the new regime at the Maxwell Institute by my then dean stipulated that I be identified in each future volume as “Founding Editor” and that I receive two copies of each published book.
I had assumed that, when the Maxwell Institute handed METI over to the Dutch publishing company E. J. Brill, the negotiated arrangement would come to an end. However, to my considerable surprise, it has not. I’m still listed as “Founding Editor” and Brigham Young University’s role in the conception, founding, and leadership of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative is still prominently recognized on a full page in the front matter of each book. So it seems that the practice will likely continue. Which will be a nice gesture.
The new volumes are, as I said above, further publications in a group of books called “The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides,” a subsidies of the broader METI project that is devoted to that specific aspect of the career of the greatest rabbi and the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages (who lived from 1135 to 1204 AD). “From Moses to Moses,” goes a very old Jewish saying, “there’s been no one like Moses.”
Posted from Park City, Utah
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