Böcker utgivna av Truman State University Press

Archaeological excavation of the ancient city of Bethsaida has retrieved a wealth of information on some of the most intriguing topics from 10th century BCEto 4th century CE. This volume includes reports on archaeological and geological findings from 1997 to 2006 and the cultural and historical contexts of the findings.

Experts in the field continue to research and investigate the site of Bethsaida, and have retrieved information on some of the most critical topics in research from 10th century BCE to 4th century CE. In this volume, thirteen articles shed light on the history of the region, and look at the remains dating from the time of David to that of Jesus.

In Renaissance Italy a good execution was both public and peaceful-at least in the eyes of authorities. In a feature unique to Italy, the people who prepared a condemned man or woman spiritually and psychologically for execution were not priests or friars, but laymen. This volume includes some of the songs, stories, poems, and images that they used, together with first-person accounts and ballads describing particular executions. Leading scholars expand on these accounts explaining aspects of the theater, psychology, and politics of execution.The main text is a manual, translated in English for the first time, on how to comfort a man in his last hours before beheading or hanging. It became an influential text used across Renaissance Italy. A second lengthy piece gives an eyewitness account of the final hours of two patrician Florentines executed for conspiracy against the Medici in 1512. Shorter pieces include poems written by prisoners on the eve of their execution, songs sung by the condemned and their comforters, and popular broadsheets reporting on particular executions. It is richly illustrated with the small panel paintings that were thrust into prisoners'' faces to distract them as they made the public journey to the gallows.Six interdisciplinary essays explain the contexts and meanings of these writings and of execution rituals generally. They explore the relation of execution rituals to late medieval street theater, the use of art to comfort the condemned, the literature that issued from prisons by the hands of condemned prisoners, the theological issues around public executions in the Renaissance, the psychological dimensions of the comforting process, and some of the social, political, and historical dimensions of executions and comforting in Renaissance Italy.