Piyut and Midrash
Piyut and Midrash
Between Poetic Invention and Rabbinic Convention
This chapter covers the phenomenon of piyut, which is one of the comprehensive designations of Jewish liturgical poetry and an archaeology of rabbinic tradition. The piyut's major classical and early post-classical creativity spans the fifth to eleventh centuries that originated in the Land of Israel and spread east and west. It mentions the work of Michel Foucault, ‘L'Archéologie du savoir’ and its methodological reflections on the complex relationships between the ‘things said’ in culture and the way their selection or re-combination organizes knowledge from a vast fund of data or the so-called cultural archive. The chapter uses Foucault's insights to clear some paths of approach to piyut. It also focuses on some of the ruptures and transformations of biblical and midrashic literature in the creation of liturgical epics in classical and early medieval piyut.
Keywords: piyut, Jewish liturgical poetry, rabbinic tradition, Land of Israel, Michel Foucault, biblical literature, midrashic literature, liturgical epics
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
