This paper is a case study examining the choice and interaction of stylistic devices employed in The Schoole of Vertue, Francis Segar and Robert Crowley’s manual of good manners for children issued between 15.
2 After discussing the sources used for the study, a range of philosophical, material and societal aspects are addressed by looking at how the societies in early India engaged themselves with music. 1 The objective is to study the relationship between an art form and the society, by looking at ‘art in society’, not ‘society in art’ to see how music was conditioned by early Indian social factors. This would help us infer the nature of musical thought that evolved in early India. But the approach presented here deals with the traces of music in the literary sources (the Sanskrit epics: the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata) which cover the representations of music and musicians. Observing the historiographical trends that have emerged in the historical studies of music, it can be seen that there is scarcity of sources to study the kind of music that was practised in this time period. The aim of this study is to understand the ‘idea’ of music that existed in early India in the first millennium bce.
It is possible that the distinction between prayer and incantation simply represents professional divisions between the kalû (lamentation priest) and the āšipu (exorcist), but it is not easy to define the conditions in which the various types of prayers and incantations were employed. The eršahunga is typically composed in the Emesal dialect of Sumerian associated primarily (but not exclusively) with prayer and cultic texts, while exorcistic incantations are composed in the main Sumerian dialect (Emegir) of literary texts both of these genres appear in the first millennium with Akkadian translations. It is not clear when one would recite an eršahunga-prayer or a dingir-šà-dib-ba incantation, since both types of texts attempt to appease a god who is angered by some unspecified or unknown transgression. The eršahunga, ‘lament to still the heart’, is paralleled by incantations known as dingir-šà-dib-ba gur-ru-da ‘(incantations) to appease the angry god’, composed as a confessional of unwitting sins. The problem of appeasing an angry god, for instance, was a theme common to both liturgy and incantations. There is a need for a review of both Sumerian and Akkadian prayer which addresses the relationship between prayer and incantation, since both genres can appear together in certain types of apotropaic rituals. Ludwig has collated the British Museum tablets for her own review of this volume.Maul's introduction to the eršahunga-prayers offers a brief survey of the genre, although the discussion is somewhat too specialized for the general reader unfamiliar with Assyriology. The present reviewer has not checked the copies, since M.-C. The texts appear in autograph copies and transliterations, with lucid translations, useful philological notes, and a comprehensive glossary. Stefan Maul has presented Assyriology with a model study of an important genre of liturgical texts, the so-called eršahunga-prayers designed to still the heart of an angry god.