Remco Breuker
Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918-1170
History, Ideology, and Identity in the Koryŏ Dynasty
Leiden: Brill (2010)

This book offers a radically different view of the Koryŏ state. Until now scholarship failed to recognize the complicated historical descent, byzantine international relations and multiple incommensurable worldviews of the early Korean Koryŏ state (918-1170). Instead, it subjected these to reductionist categories favouring reified particulars over broader views. Asking how Koryŏ meaningfully dealt with its environment, Remco Breuker rejects the reduction of Koryŏ intellectual abundance to analytical categories, and emphasizes the functional importance of Koryŏs pluralism in allowing the notion that realities were scattered, inconsistent and plural. Here is a convincing argument that Koryŏs pluralism decisively contributed to the formation of a region-transcending communal identity that enabled Koryŏ to engage in a civilizational competition with neighbouring Chinese and Manchurian states, while maintaining a dynamic but stable society domestically.

Het rijk der lichten
(Your republic is calling you)
Dutch translation from Korean by
Remco Breuker and Imke van Gardingen

The North Korean spy Kim Giyoung seems to have been forgotten by the government - for twenty years now. In these years he built a life for himself in the South Korean capital of Seoul. He is married, has a daughter and a job in the film industry. Heineken, sushi and Quentin Tarantino are part of his life now. Then he receives an unexpected e-mail, summoning him to return to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. Giyoung is aware that many spies that return are being executed. But by ignoring the call he also puts himself in danger. He is to make the hardest decision of his life while slowly the hours tick away.

Kim Young-ha was born in 1968 in Gangwon-do, South Korea. He studied in the United States at Iowa State University and travelled extensively through Europe. His astonishing 'urban' debut, I have the right to destroy myself, has been succesfully made into a film. Kim Young-ha is being regarded as the greatest young Korean writer of this moment. He has received many literary awards.

Adam Łajtar and Jacques van der Vliet
Qasr Ibrim: the Greek and Coptic inscriptions

The Journal of Juristic Papyrology Supplements, vol. XIII
Warsaw: Raphael Taubenschlag Foundation, 2010
IX+336 pp. ISBN 978 83 925919 2 4

The natural citadel of Qasr Ibrim in Northern Nubia occupied for thousands of years a strategic position between Egypt and the Middle Nile region (the present-day Sudan). In Late Antiquity, it was the political centre of an independent kingdom, Nobadia. Following the Christianization of the region in the sixth century, it became the see of a bishop, for whom a magnificent stone-built cathedral was erected. Towards the year 700, Nobadia became politically integrated into the southern kingdom of Makouria, which had its capital in Old Dongola, but Qasr Ibrim remained the residence of a ‘viceroy’, the eparch of Nobadia, who played a pivotal role in the contacts between Christian Nubia and Islamic Egypt. The capture of Qasr Ibrim by Shams ad-Dawla, Saladin's brother, in 1173, was a dramatic event that inaugurated the decline of the Christian kingdoms of Nubia.

This book brings together the Greek and Coptic inscriptions found at Qasr Ibrim during the excavations of the British Egypt Exploration Society, undertaken between 1963 and 2008. It contains over 90 inscriptions from the period between the sixth and the twelfth centuries, a majority of which are stone monuments that are edited here for the first time. Each inscription is reproduced, translated and provided with a full commentary; extensive indices enhance the accessibility of the material. Most of the inscriptions are of a funerary nature (tombstones), including a series of epitaphs commemorating bishops, whereas others include building inscriptions and apotropaic texts. Together they present a vivid picture of the mainly clerical élite of this Christian centre at a crossroads between Africa and the Mediterranean, revealing patterns of commemoration and in-group status maintenance.