A Buddhist, a Catholic, and a Jew walk into a bookstore, each looking to learn more about a seminal figure in their religious tradition—a founder, theologian, and villain, respectively. They will soon be in luck when three unique biographies go on sale. While many books have been written over the centuries describing the historical life and spiritual legacy of the Buddha, St. Augustine, and the genocidal Haman from the book of Esther, the scholars behind three forthcoming books present fresh perspectives on their subjects.
Bryn Mawr humanities professor Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, centers her book, Augustine the African (Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, Aug.), on the immensely influential theologian’s North African birth, Berber heritage, and life amid the tensions of Roman politics, Visigoth invasions, and contesting Christian theologies.
Western art may have portrayed him as a white man after his works found their way to Europe, but, Conybreare argues, his core ideas on life, grace, and free will were shaped by his life as an African who spent only scant years in Rome. Even the book’s cover suggests looking at Augustine’s life from an unexpected vantage point. It's with a satellite photo showing Italy and the north coast of Africa, but it's flipped: Africa is on top.
“Augustine was culturally appropriated” long before anyone came up with a label, says Robert Weil, VP and executive director at Liveright. He edited the book after acquiring it at auction, positioning it as a trade title that he says will appeal to scholars and to “anyone interested in religion.” With an announced first printing of 17,000, Weil is feeling confident: "I think we're going to run out of stock."
The book—packed with geography, history, philosophy, theology, and a touch of travelog, as the author takes readers along on her research journey—has lucky timing. The galleys were ready just as a former leader of the Augustinian religious order, Cardinal Robert Prevost, was elected and installed as Pope Leo XIV. “Even if he had not been elected pope, I could see this book has Page One potential,” says Weil. “We're in tough times. The age of Augustine was very tough, right? People will connect with it.”
Another great global figure in religious history may not actually exist in history. That's the idea explored by University of Michigan professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies Donald S. Lopez Jr. in The Buddha: Biography of a Myth (Yale Univ., Sept.).
Jennifer Banks, senior executive editor for religion and the humanities at the press, says she was intrigued when Lopez brought her the proposal with a new twist. He traces what little has been recorded of the life of the man who became the enlightened Buddha, but “if one examines all the historic references and earlier biographies,” Banks says, “it becomes evident we really don't have a lot of evidence that he existed.”
In the book, Lopez asserts that “those who seek to demythologize the Buddha, stripping away the superhuman in an effort to reveal the human, should know they do so at their peril,” adding, “That man cannot be found.” Instead, the author writes that his goal is to “celebrate the human imagination and its power to conjure a figure of such marvel, to see the various lives of the Buddha, not as a cacophony of contractions but as chorus together that inspires us to remythologize The Buddha and allow ourselves to delight in myth, to be moved, to be inspired, to be liberated.”
A third forthcoming biography takes the opposite tack, making the case that a Biblical figure many consider to be mythical was actually a living force in the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Haman, A Biography (Princeton, Sept.) by historian Adam J. Silverstein, a professor of Islamic and Near Eastern Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, traces the evolution of one of the Bible’s most loathsome characters.
Silverstein’s book unpacks the various versions of Haman as part of a larger exploration of Near Eastern history and religious culture that indicates just how powerful the eye of the beholder is in shaping the study of faith and comparative religion. The author “uncovers material suggesting that there were literary stories featuring a Haman-like character in circulation in pre-Biblical Greek times, and eventually, those responsible for the Hebrew Bible picked up on some these stories,” explains Princeton University Press acquiring editor Fred Appel. “There's always a malicious character who wants to harm good people but gets his comeuppance in the end."
Haman is best known to Christians and Jews as the evil courtier whose plot to have all the Jews killed was foiled by the brave queen in the Book of Esther. For Muslims, Silverstein explains, the Haman figure has several doppelgängers woven into the Quran. Just as Judas is the archvillain of the New Testament, for Muslims, Haman is represented in “a new cast of enemies comprised of such opponents of the Prophet as Abū Jahl and Abū Lahab,” and each is seen as an “enemy of God.”
The evolution of portrayals of Haman in popular culture illustrates the character’s status as a blank slate for characterizing evil actors. Over time, Silverstein writes, “Haman was seen as a Christian (by Jews); a Jew (by other groups of Jews, and by Christians and Samaritans); a Catholic (by Protestants); and a Pharaonic Egyptian (by Muslims).” For some, he adds, Haman is “one of the most evil characters who ever existed, and for others, one of the most maligned characters who never existed.”
