New book in German
Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2015 1:53 pm
I just received in the morning mail a new, very scholarly, book on eunuchs in the Arab world. It looks fascinating and I'm looking forward to going through it, though at my painfully slow pace for reading German. (I took one semester of college German in 1961 and have used it seldom since.)
The book is Der unmännliche Mann: Zur Figuration des Eunuchen im Werk von al-Ğāḥiẓ (gest. 869) by Hans-Peter Pökel (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag).
Al-Jahiz (in the standard English Romanization) wrote voluminously on the eunuchs of his time. He wrote about the methods of castration, the personality of eunuchs, how to purchase the best of them and how to care for them. Among other points, al-Jahiz wrote that Slavs were improved by castration and became calmer and more intelligent, while Blacks became less so. (This despite al-Jahiz himself being the freed son of African slaves.) Al-Jahiz devoted quite a bit of space to the sexual uses of eunuchs by both men and women. Pökel has brought his various writings together in one place and discusses them and how they connect to other writers of the period. Most of al-Jahiz' books have yet to be translated into English and only a few have been translated into French. This is the first major German work that I've found.
If any of our German members here (of any others who read German better than I do) decide to report on Pökel's book, it would be greatly appreciated.
The book is Der unmännliche Mann: Zur Figuration des Eunuchen im Werk von al-Ğāḥiẓ (gest. 869) by Hans-Peter Pökel (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag).
Al-Jahiz (in the standard English Romanization) wrote voluminously on the eunuchs of his time. He wrote about the methods of castration, the personality of eunuchs, how to purchase the best of them and how to care for them. Among other points, al-Jahiz wrote that Slavs were improved by castration and became calmer and more intelligent, while Blacks became less so. (This despite al-Jahiz himself being the freed son of African slaves.) Al-Jahiz devoted quite a bit of space to the sexual uses of eunuchs by both men and women. Pökel has brought his various writings together in one place and discusses them and how they connect to other writers of the period. Most of al-Jahiz' books have yet to be translated into English and only a few have been translated into French. This is the first major German work that I've found.
If any of our German members here (of any others who read German better than I do) decide to report on Pökel's book, it would be greatly appreciated.
