BiblioVault

Parvin Etesami in the Literary and Religious Context of Twentieth-Century Iran

A Female Poet’s Challenge to Patriarchy

Zhinia Noorian

Leiden University Press, 2022

Pearls of Meaning

Studies on Persian Art, Poetry, ..f.sm and History of Iranian Studies in Europe.J.T.P. de Bruijn

J.T. P. de Bruijn

Leiden University Press, 2020

Pearls of Meanings offers a collection of essays by J. T. P. (Hans) de Bruijn, a pivotal and leading scholar of Persian studies. The volume covers a number of essential domains of Persian culture, with a particular emphasis on poetry and Sufism. Poetry and the reception of Persian literature in Europe both play pivotal roles in these essays, thereby representing the studies of a generation of Persian cultural scholars such as A. Reland (1676–1718), C. H. Ethé (1844–1917), J. F. von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), and E. G. Browne (1862–1926). Pearls of Meanings is an essential cornerstone for scholars working in Persian studies.

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The Persian Whitman

Beyond a Literary Reception

Behnam M. Fomeshi

Leiden University Press, 2019

Walt Whitman, a world-renowned poet and the father of American free verse, is read by diverse audiences around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have studied Whitman’s interaction with and influence in social, political, and literary movements of different countries. Despite his work’s continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in this country has remained unexplored, and, particularly due to contemporary political circumstances, Iranian reception of Western literature is a field still under-researched. The Persian Whitman examines Whitman’s reception in Iran and explores a new phenomenon born in dialogue between the Persian culture and the American poet.

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Philippine Confluence

Iberian, Chinese and Islamic Currents, C. 1500-1800

Edited by Jos Gommans and Ariel Lopez

Leiden University Press, 2020

Situated at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Spanish Philippines offer historians an intriguing middle ground of connected histories that raises fundamental new questions about conventional ethnic, regional and religious identities. This volume adds a new global perspective to the history of the Philippines by juxtaposing Iberian, Chinese and Islamic perspectives. By navigating various underexplored archival resources, senior and junior scholars from Asia, Europe and the Americas explore the diverse cultural, religious, and economic flows that shaped the early modern Philippine milieu. By zooming in from the global to the local, this book offers eleven fascinating Philippine case studies of early modern globalization.

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A Pictographic Naxi Origin Myth from Southwest China

An Annotated Translation

Duncan Poupard

Leiden University Press, 2023

Starting in the late nineteenth century, unusual pictographic books began to flow from a remote corner of Southwest China into the libraries of the Western world. What made these books so attractive? For one, they possessed the air of mystery that came with being “magical” books almost indecipherable to all but a select few ritual specialists, but perhaps more importantly, they were written in what looked like an ancient form of picture writing. In these books, written in the Naxi dongba script of southwest China, the events unfold on the page visually. This book offers a full translation of a central Naxi origin myth in a level of detail never before seen: readers are invited to delve into this unique script in both its original form and digital recreation, alongside historic and updated translations and an accompanying explanation of each individual graph.

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A Place of Placelessness

Hekeng People's Heritage

Renyu Wang

Leiden University Press, 2017

Tulou, the traditional fortified multifamily dwellings prevalent in southern Fujian, China, are the focus of this three-pronged biography of environments in the Hekeng River Valley. This book explores every aspect of the historical settlement environments surrounding a tulou, incorporating oral histories and interviews to create a complete picture of the cultural, architectural, agricultural, and economic influences that build up these lineage societies. Highlighted also are the tensions between political systems and families in keeping these heritage sites alive.

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Place

Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography

Ali Shobeiri

Leiden University Press, 2021

A new theoretical perspective on place in photography.

Drawing on theoretical insights from geography and philosophy, Ali Shobeiri examines how six fundamentals of photography—the photographer, camera, photograph, image, spectator, and genre—manifest unique, contingent notions of “place.” The geophilosophy that emerges offers a new language for understanding how “place” encapsulates everything that invites and resists location, identity, story, function, and meaning.

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The Political Mobilization of the Christian Community in Malaysia

Pui Yee Choong

Leiden University Press, 2024

'The Political Mobilization of the Christian Community in Malaysia' outlines how the Malaysian Christian community defends its religious rights without being construed as anti-Islam.

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The Potters’ Perspectives

A Vibrant Chronological Narrative of Ceramic Manufacturing Practices in the Valley of Juigalpa, Chontales, Nicaragua (cal 300 CE–present)

Natalia R. Donner

Leiden University Press, 2020

The work of Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) should have revolutionized the way the field of archaeology thinks about the passage of time and constructs narratives throughout it. Braudel’s more general theories deeply affected archaeological theory, yet his three different timescales, as well as his insights into duration as the inner dialectic between different temporalities, remain largely unexplored by practicing archaeologists. Even today, ceramic chronology-building in archaeology still relies on two main variables: time-space and pottery styles. This book seeks to upset that paradigm, proposing instead a radical new approach to creating chronology. This endeavor begins in the valley of Juigalpa, in central Nicaragua, using materials—especially ceramics—as complex palimpsests, through which a chronology that includes five different intervals based on ceramic technologies is presented, from the first traces of human practices in 300 CE through to the present.

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Principles for Progress

Essays on Religion and Modernity by `Abdu'l-Bahá

Translated and with an Introduction by Sen McGlinn

Leiden University Press, 2018

This book presents three of the works of Abduʾl-Bahā, son of the founder of the Bahāʾi Faith, which deal with social and political issues.

In The Secret of Divine Civilization (1875) Abduʾl-Bahā supports the administrative and broader social reforms of Mirzā Hosayn Khān, but looks mainly for organic reform through the efforts of Iranian intellectuals to awaken and educate the masses. In this work, Abduʾl-Bahā gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among these intellectuals—indeed most of his appeals are directed specifically to them. A Traveller’s Narrative (1889/90) is an authoritative statement of the overarching concepts of Bahā’i social and political thinking. The Art of Governance (1892/93) was written as Iran entered a prerevolutionary phase, and ideas that we recognize today as the precursors of political Islam were spreading. It sets out the principles underlying the ideal relationship between religion and politics and between the government and the people.

In addition to presenting the first parallel text translations of these works, the Persian texts incorporate notes on variants in the early published sources. An introduction outlines the intellectual and political landscape from which Abduʾl-Bahā wrote, and in which his readers lived.

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Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture

A Critical Consideration

Edited by Matthew A. Cohen and Maarten Delbeke

Leiden University Press, 2019

Prior to the advent of modern structural engineering, architects and builders used proportional systems to imbue their works with a general condition of order that was integral to notions of beauty and structural stability. These mostly invisible intellectual frameworks ranged from simple grids and symbolic numbers, to sly manipulations of geometry and numbers that required privileged knowledge and arithmetical calculations to access. Since the origins of architectural history, proportional systems have served as objects of belief and modes of iconographical communication. Whether they are capable of fulfilling more tangible functions remains a matter of debate today, but as the contributors to this volume show, these ancient and diverse belief systems continue to infiltrate architectural thinking in subtle and sometimes surprising ways today.

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