Non Western

AVAILABLE MAY 2011

Food for the Flames: Idols and Missionaries in Central Polynesia

256 pages, hardback, 280 x 216 mm, 300 colour illustrations
PRICE: £50.00
ISBN: 978 1 907372 16 2

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By David Shaw King, foreword by David Attenborough

Twenty-five years after Captain Cook, the London Missionary Society sent its first representatives to the South Seas. Their goal was to eradicate heathenism and idolatry, but unwittingly, they became agents for the preservation of Polynesian culture through their diligent recording of language and religious practices. They even preserved a number of religious artifacts, which they sent back to England for exhibition in the Mission Museum in London.

This book focuses on these artifacts, the idols that avoided the flames. With the scientist’s belief in letting the evidence speak for itself, the author, a biochemist, has mined a wide range of primary sources to bring together a wealth of new information on a generally unpopular subject, the missionary endeavour. Eighty five colour plates illustrate missionary subjects, Polynesian ‘temples’, and numerous idols. The majority of this material is published here for the first time.

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MESROP OF XIZAN: An Armenian Master of the Seventeenth Century

Illuminator, painter, scribe, clerk, teacher, doctor of theology, restorer and binder, Mesrop was one of the greatest Armenian artists of his and following generations. He was prolific, working for at least forty-two years in Sos (New Julfa) from 1608 to 1651. This book will be the first serious study of the forty-six of his manuscripts that have survived. The focus of the book, however, is The Four Gospels, one of the few manuscripts painted entirely by Mesrop’s hand and one of the most extensively illuminated in his oeuvre. More

Remembering Forward: Paintings of Australian Aborigines Since 1960

Remembering Forward presents works by nine of the most prominent Australian Aboriginal artists: Paddy Bedford, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Queenie McKenzie, Dorothy Napangardi, Rover Thomas, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula. More

Hakob’s Gospels: The Life and Work of An Armenian Artist of the Sixteenth Century

In the winter of 1586, Hakob Jughayets'i, one of Armenia's most celebrated illuminators, completed work on a Gospel Book with an extensive and extraordinary programme of narrative miniatures and marginal figures. More

Provenance: Twelve Collectors of Ethnographic Art in England 1760–1990

Detailed biographies describe the lives of twelve collectors of tribal art in Britain, active between 1770 and 1990. These men were rarely field collectors and only occasional travellers, but they were vigorous hunters, for whom the pursuit, handling and possession of such objects was what mattered. More

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