The Book of Judith tells the story of a fictitious Jewish woman beheading the general of the most powerful imaginable army to free her people. The parabolic story was set as an example of how God will help the righteous. Judith's heroic action not only became a validating charter myth of Judaism itself but has also been appropriated by many Christian and secular groupings, and has been an inspiration for numerous literary texts and works of art. It continues to exercise its power over artists, authors and academics and is becoming a major field of research in its own right. The Sword of...

The Book of Judith tells the story of a fictitious Jewish woman beheading the general of a powerful army to free her people. The parabolic story was set as an example of how God will help the righteous. Judith's heroic action not only became a validating charter myth of Judaism itself but has also been appropriated by many Christian and secular groupings, and has been an inspiration for numerous literary texts and works of art. It continues to exercise its power over artists, authors and academics and is becoming a major field of research in its own right. The Sword of Judith is the first...

The economic crisis of 2008 led to an unprecedented focus on the world of high finance--and revealed it to be far more arcane and influential than most people could ever have imagined. Any hope of avoiding future crises, it's clear, rest on understanding finance itself.
To understand finance, however, we have to learn its history, and this book fills that need. Kevin R. Brine, an industry veteran, and Mary Poovey, an acclaimed historian, show that finance as we know it today emerged gradually in the late nineteenth century and only coalesced after World War II, becoming ever more...