Lucrarile Simpozionului International Cartea, Romania, Europa. Editia a 11-1, 20-24 septembrie 2009.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Travaux de Symposium International Le Livre, la Roumanie, l'Europe - Book review

Lucrarile Simpozionului International Cartea, Romania, Europa. Editia a 11-1,20-24 septembrie 2009. Edited by JULIETA ROTARU. Sectiunea a treia: Studii Euroasiatice si Afroasiatice--De la mit la ritual. Bucharest: EDITURA BIBLIOTECA BUCURESTILOR, 2010. Pp. 461-738.

Travaux de Symposium International Le Livre, la Roumanie, l'Europe. Troisieme edition, 20-24 septembre 2010. Vol. 3: Etudes euro- et afro-asiatiques, III A: La Veda-Vedanga et l'Avesta entre oralite et ecriture. Edited by JAN E. M. HOUBEN and JULIETA ROTARU. Bucharest: EDITEUR BIBLIOTHEQUE DE BUCAREST, 2011. Pp. 11-532.

The proceedings of a symposium on "the book" held in Bucharest would probably not be the first place one would look for serious and extensive scholarship on Vedic ritual, mythology, and literature. Yet in this case one would be wrong. The two volumes under review contain numerous articles from an international group of Vedic scholars gathered as a section of the two larger symposia held in 2009 and 2010, and these gatherings, with their Vedic subgroup, have and do continue yearly.

The first of the volumes under review, 937 pages in total, contains the proceedings of the entire symposium, with sections also devoted to [here I will give the subtitles in their English versions--the book itself is titled and subtitled in Romanian, French, and English] "History and Book Civilization," "Biblioteconomy [sic] and Information Sciences," and "Oriental Latinity." The nearly three hundred pages and twenty-five articles of the Euroasiatic and Afroasiatic myth and ritual section contain articles not only on Indological topics, but also on Central Asia, especially Mongolia and Tibet (which may also be of interest to readers of this journal), as well as Albania and assorted other areas. Nonetheless, more than a third of the articles (nine) take Indian, especially Vedic, ritual and mythology as their focus.

The second volume under review, of 755 pages, contains the proceedings only of Section III, of the four sections of the symposium, and the Indological articles have been separated (as MA, more than 500 pages) from those concerned with Central Asia and the Balkans (IIIB, which bears the subtitle "Reconfiguring the Divine and Divinity," again with many articles of potential interest to our readers). The Indological section is more narrowly focused than in the previous volume, on "orality and writing," and Old Iranian has been sneaked in the backdoor, with several articles...