front cover of Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550
Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550
Anne L. Williams
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
*Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300.1550* is the first book to reclaim satire as a central component of Catholic altarpieces, devotional art, and veneration, moving beyond humor™'s relegation to the medieval margins or to the profane arts alone. The book challenges humor™'s perception as a mere teaching tool for the laity and the antithesis of ™'high™' veneration and theology, a divide perpetuated by Counter-Reformation thought and the inheritance of Mikhail Bakhtin (*Rabelais and His World*, 1965). It reveals how humor, laughter, and material culture played a critical role in establishing St. Joseph as an exemplar in western Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Its goal is to open a new line of interpretation in medieval and early modern cultural studies by revealing the functions of humor in sacred scenes, the role of laughter as veneration, and the importance of play for pre-Reformation religious experiences.
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People under Power
Early Jewish and Christian Responses to the Roman Empire
Michael Labahn
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
This volume presents a batch of incisive new essays on the relationship between Roman imperial power and ideology and Christian and Jewish life and thought within the empire. Employing diverse methodologies that include historical criticism, rhetorical criticism, postcolonial criticism, and social historical studies, the contributors offer fresh perspectives on a question that is crucial for our understanding not only of the late Roman Empire, but also of the growth and change of Christianity and Judaism in the imperial period.
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Survival Guide for Scientists
Writing - Presentation - Email
Ad Lagendijk
Amsterdam University Press, 2008
During the course of Dutch physicist and Spinoza Prize-winner Ad Lagendijk’s long and influential career, he has published more than 300 articles, supervised over thirty doctoral dissertations, and given countless presentations and conference addresses. Over the years, his incisive consultations, tips, and rules for scientific study have proven themselves so beneficial to the emerging scientists under his watch that he has been inundated with requests for a written version. Aimed primarily at undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, this essential guide presents Lagendijk’s practical how-to advice on topics such as writing scientific texts, presenting data and research information, and the writing and reading of collegial emails. Each section is organised by a collection of short rules, outlined and numbered in a logical order as selfexplanatory pieces of information – allowing the reader the freedom to study any number of them in any desired order. But it doesn’t stop there: many of the hints, in particular those referring to presentations, are of invaluable use for a much broader audience of professionals, up to consultants and (public) managers.Survival Guide for Scientists is complimented by www.sciencesurvivalblog.com where Lagendijk and others explore ways of making scientific writing more effective.
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Electrifying Europe
The Power of Europe in the Construction of Electricity Networks
Vincent Lagendijk
Amsterdam University Press, 2008

Nowadays most consumers are aware of the European dimensions of their electricity supply. But what ideas lie behind this European network? In constructing electricity networks, Europe performed a Janus-faced function. On the one hand, a European network would bolster economic growth and peace. On the other, economic growth through electrification would increase military potential.
By combining a wide array of rarely used sources, this book unravels how engineers, industrialists, and policymakers used ideas of Europe to gain support for building a European system. By focusing on transnational and European actors, this book is a valuable addition to existing national histories of electrification. It is an original contribution to the history of technology, while also making the role of technology visible in more mainstream European history.

The empirical chapters show how ideas of European cooperation in general became intertwined with network planning during the Interwar period, although the Depression and WWII prevented a European electricity network from being constructed. The subsequent chapters describe the influence of the Marshall Plan on European network-building, focusing on both its economic and military aspects. The last chapter portrays how the Iron Curtain was contested. The troubled expansion of networks and capacity in Western Europe provided an underpinning for political rapprochement with the East in the 1970s and 1980s. Political and economic turmoil after 1989 accelerated this process, leading to an interconnected European system by 1995.

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Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China
The Uncanny New Village
Lili Lai
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This book presents a new perspective on attempts by the contemporary Chinese government to transform the diverse conditions found in countless rural villages into what the state's social welfare program deems 'socialist new villages'. Lili Lai argues that an ethnographic focus on the specifics of village life can help destabilize China's persistent rural-urban divide and help contribute to more effective welfare intervention to improve health and hygienic conditions of village life.
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Order, Materiality, and Urban Space in the Early Modern Kingdom of Sweden
Riitta Laitinen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Our corporeality and immersion in the material world make us inherently spatial beings, and the fact that we all share everyday experiences in the global physical environment means that community is also spatial by nature. This book explores the relationship between the seventeenth-century townspeople of Turku, Sweden, and their urban surroundings. Riitta Laitinen offers a novel account of civil and social order in this early modern town, highlighting the central importance of materiality and spatiality and breaking down the dichotomy of public versus private life that has dominated traditional studies of the time period.
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Productive Fandom
Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures
Nicolle Lamerichs
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
To dismantle negative stereotypes of fans, this book offers a media ethnography of the digital culture, conventions, and urban spacesassociated with fandoms, arguing that fandom is an area of productive, creative, and subversive value. By examining the fandoms ofSherlock, Glee, Firefly, and other popular television-based franchises, the author appeals to fans and scholars alike in her empirically grounded methodology and insightful analysis of production hierarchies, gender, sexuality, play, and affect.
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Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography
The Case of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (1946-2000)
Bregt Lameris
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Rich in detail, this is a study of the interrelationships between film historical discourse and archival practices. Exploring the history of several important collections from the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam, Bregt Lameris shows how archival films and collections always carry the historical traces of selection policies, restoration philosophies, and exhibition strategies. The result is a compelling argument that film archives can never be viewed simply as innocent or neutral sources of film history.
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America
Bert Lamers
Amsterdam University Press

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Fiat G.91
Arno Landewers
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The Fiat G.91 was an Italian jet fighter aircraft. It was the winner of the NATO competition in 1953 for a light fighter as standard equipment for Allied air forces. It entered in operational service with the Italian Air Force in 1961, with the West German Luftwaffe in 1962, and later with the Portuguese Air Force. It was in production for nineteen years. 756 aircraft were completed, including the prototypes and pre-production models. The assembly lines were finally closed in 1977. The Fiat G.91 enjoyed a long service life that extended over 35 years. It was widely used by Portugal in the Portuguese Colonial War in Africa.
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Beijing Garbage
A City Besieged by Waste
Stefan Landsberger
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Why do central and local government initiatives aiming to curb the proliferation of garbage in Beijing and its disposal continue to be unsuccessful? Is the Uberization of waste picking through online-to-offline (O2O) garbage retrieval companies able to decrease waste and improve the lives of waste pickers? Most citizens of Beijing are well aware of the fact that their city is besieged by waste. Yet instead of taking individual action, they sit and wait for the governments at various levels to tell them what to do. And even if/when they adopt a proactive position, this does not last. Official education drives targeting the consumers are organized regularly and with modest success, but real solutions are not forthcoming. Various environmental non-governmental organizations are at work to raise the level of consciousness of the population, to change individual attitudes towards wasteful behavior, but seemingly with little overall effects.
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Claude III Audran, Arbiter of the French Arabesque
Barbara Laux
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Claude III Audran, Arbiter of the French Arabesque is the first substantial biographical study of Claude III Audran, a late 17th- and early 18th-century master of ornament and a proponent of cutting-edge design who took inspiration from contemporary sources. This work investigates Audran’s accomplishments and the factors that impacted the longevity and arc of his successful career, taking into consideration the contextual variables that influenced and shaped his work. Audran’s achievements bridge an important period with the eclipse of the Guild Maîtrise and the rise of the Académie royale. Audran subcontracted young artists, such as Watteau, Lancret, and Desportes, in order to circumvent restrictions on guild practice enacted by the crown. Looking at his commissions not only reveals the elite taste of his patrons, including Louis XIV, but also Audran’s ability to use elements from popular culture to animate his arabesques, which created hallmarks of rococo interior design.
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Decentralisation in Africa
A Pathway out of Poverty and Conflict?
Thomas Lawo
Amsterdam University Press

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Work and Care under Pressure
Care Arrangements across Europe
Blanche Le Bihan
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
In many European countries tensions have arisen between the demands of the labor market and the caregiving responsibilities workers must fulfill at home. Examining these tensions, Work and Care under Pressure focuses on two groups of people who must juggle work and caregiving: parents of young children who work nonstandard hours and working adults who care for older parents. Based on empirical evidence from six European countries, this volume sheds light on the social effects of national policies and the choices made by caregivers. It is an essential resource for researchers, scholars, and policy makers interested in social policy.
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The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815
A Reader of Primary Sources
Christina Lee
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521--with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan--and 1815--the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that in the Spanish imagination were extensions of its Latin American colonies. This reader provides a selection of documents relevant to the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific between European, Spanish Americans, and Asians while highlighting the role of natives, mestizos, and women. A-first-of-its-kind, each of the documents in this collection was selected, translated into English, and edited by a different scholar in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies, who also provided commentary and bibliography.
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The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815, Volume 2
A Reader of Primary Sources
Christina Lee
Amsterdam University Press

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Memories of Tiananmen
Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989-2019
Francis Lee
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book analyzes how collective memory regarding the 1989 Beijing student movement and the Tiananmen crackdown was produced, contested, sustained, and transformed in Hong Kong between 1989 and 2019. Drawing on data gathered through multiple sources such as news reports, digital media content, vigil onsite surveys, population surveys, and in-depth interviews with activists, rally participants, and other stakeholders, it identifies six key processes in the dynamics of social remembering: memory formation, memory mobilization, memory institutionalization, intergenerational transfer, memory repair, and memory balkanization. Memories of Tiananmen demonstrates how a socially dominant collective memory, even one the state finds politically irritable, can be generated and maintained through constant negotiation and efforts by a wide range of actors. While the book mainly focuses on the interplay between political changes and Tiananmen commemoration in the historical period within which the society enjoyed a significant degree of civil liberties, it also discusses how the trajectory of the collective memory may take a drastic turn as Hong Kong's autonomy is abridged. The book promises to be a key reference for anyone interested in collective memory studies, social movement research, political communication, and China and Hong Kong studies.
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Nazism and Neo-Nazism in Film and Media
Jason Lee
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
This timely book takes an original transnational approach to the theme of Nazism and neo-Nazism in film, media, and popular culture, with examples drawn from mainland Europe, the UK, North and Latin America, Asia, and beyond. This approach fits with the established dominance of global multimedia formats, and will be useful for students, scholars, and researchers in all forms of film and media. Along with the essential need to examine current trends in Nazism and neo-Nazism in contemporary media globally, what makesthis book even more necessary is that it engages with debates that go to the very heart of our understanding of knowledge: history, memory, meaning, and truth.
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Tokyo Commute
Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line
Robert Lee
Amsterdam University Press, 2011
A unique take on modern life in Japan’s capital city. A Japan of trains, every day to and fro, carriage scenes and theatre, vistas from the window, advertising posters. Each to be savoured through a specific Tokyo line – the Odakyu. Pitched as creative text and line-graphics, Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line offers on-track and off-track observations. A gallery of mirrors, musings, memories. This is less documentary than iconography, a poetics of Japanese routine and etiquette. It offers a wry diary of month-and-weekday observations, a ‘map’ of Shinjuku as key station and gathering-place, a run of notable Tokyo locations – from the National bunraku theatre to a Kawasaki sludge recycling centre. Other Odakyu travel involves the Hakone open air art gallery, Narita as both airport and temple complex, Yokohama as history and Chinatown. Essential reading for first-time, and second-time visitors, and even regular commuters.
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Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas
Sangjoon Lee
Amsterdam University Press

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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, Vol. 1 and 2
Joep Leerssen
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This monumental encyclopedia documents the presence and effects of cultural consciousness-raising in the early decades of European nationalism. The volume tracks how intellectuals, historians, novelists, poets, painters, folklorists, and composers, in an intensely collaborative transnational network, articulated the national identities and aspirations that would go on to determine European history and politics with effects that are still felt today.
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National Thought in Europe
A Cultural History
Joep Leerssen
Amsterdam University Press, 2007

Ranging widely across countries and centuries, National Thought in Europe critically analyzes the growth of nationalism from its beginnings in medieval ethnic prejudice to the romantic era’s belief in a national soul. A fertile pan-European exchange of ideas, often rooted in literature, led to a notion of a nation’s cultural individuality that transformed the map of Europe. By looking deeply at the cultural contexts of nationalism, Joep Leerssen not only helps readers understand the continent’s past, but he also provides a surprising perspective on contemporary European identity politics.

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National Thought in Europe
A Cultural History - 3rd Revised Edition
Joep Leerssen
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
A topical history of nationalism provides also a surprising perspective on Europe's contemporary identity politics
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History and Philosophy of the Humanities
An Introduction
Michiel Leezenberg
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The humanities include disciplines as diverse as literary theory, linguistics, history, film studies, theology, and philosophy. Do these various fields of study have anything in common, which distinguishes them from e.g. physics or sociology? The tripartite division between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities may seem self-evident, but it has arisen only in the course of the 19th century, and has been contested ever since.History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction presents a reasoned overview of the conceptual and historical backgrounds of the humanities. In four sections, it discusses:- The most influential views on scientific knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn;- The birth of the modern humanities;- The various methodological schools and conceptual issues in the humanities;- Some themes that set the agenda for current debates in the humanities: critiques of modernity; gender, sexuality and identity; and post-colonialism.Thus, it provides students in the various disciplines of the humanities with a comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of their field, its relation with other disciplines, and the state of the art in the humanities at large. Intended readership: advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
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History and Philosophy of the Humanities
An Introduction
Michiel Leezenberg
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The humanities include disciplines as diverse as literary theory, linguistics, history, film studies, theology, and philosophy. Do these various fields of study have anything in common that distinguishes them from, say, physics or sociology? The tripartite division between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities may seem self-evident, but it only arose during the course of the 19th century and is still contested today.History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction presents a reasoned overview of the conceptual and historical backgrounds of the humanities. In four sections, it discusses:- the most influential views on scientific knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn;- the birth of the modern humanities and its relation to the natural and social sciences;- the various methodological schools and conceptual issues in the humanities;- several themes that set the agenda for current debates in the humanities: critiques of modernity; gender, sexuality and identity; and postcolonialism.Thus, it provides students in the humanities with a comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of their own discipline, its relation to other disciplines, and the state of the art of the humanities at large.
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Special Effects on the Screen
Faking the View from Méliès to Motion Capture
Martin Lefebvre
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Since the very first days of cinema, audiences have marveled at the special effects imagery presented on movie screens. While long relegated to the margins of film studies, special effects have recently become the object of a burgeoning field of scholarship. With the emergence of a digital cinema, and the development of computerized visual effects, film theorists and historians have been reconsidering the traditional accounts of cinematic representation, recognising the important role of special effects. Understood as a constituent part of the cinema, special effects are a major technical but also aesthetic component of filmmaking and an important part of the experience for the audience. In this volume, new directions are charted for the exploration of this indispensable aspect of the cinematic experience. Each of the essays in this collection offers new insight into the theoretical and historical study of special effects. The contributors address the many aspects of special effects, from a variety of perspectives, considering them as a conceptual problem, recounting the history of specific special effects techniques, and analysing notable effects films.
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Tolerance, Intolerance, and Recognition in Early Christianity and Early Judaism
Outi Lehtipuu
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This collection of essays investigates signs of toleration, recognition, respect and other positive forms of interaction between and within religious groups of late antiquity. At the same time, it acknowledges that examples of tolerance are significantly fewer in ancient sources than examples of intolerance and are often limited to insiders, while outsiders often met with contempt, or even outright violence. The essays take both perspectives seriously by analysing the complexity pertaining to these encounters. Religious concerns, ethnicity, gender and other social factors central to identity formation were often intertwined and they yielded different ways of drawing the limits of tolerance and intolerance. This book enhances our understanding of the formative centuries of Jewish and Christian religious traditions. It also brings the results of historical inquiry into dialogue with present-day questions of religious tolerance.
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Illusions of Democracy
Malaysian Politics and People
GB Gerakbudaya Enterprise Sdn Bhd Lemière
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Illusions of Democracy: Malaysian Politics and People offers an up-to-date and broad analysis of the contemporary state of Malaysian politics and society. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, it offers a look at Malaysian politics not only through the lens of political science but also anthropology, cultural studies, international relations, political economy and legal studies touching on both overlooked topics in Malaysian political life as well as the emerging trends which will shape Malaysia’s future. Covering silat martial arts, Malaysia’s constitutional identity, emergency legislation, the South China Sea dilemma, ISIS discourse, zakat payment, the fallout from the 1MDB scandal and Malaysia’s green movement, Illusions of Democracy charts the complex and multi-faceted nature of political life in a semi-authoritarian state, breaking down the illusions which keep it functioning, to uncover the mechanisms which really underlie the paradoxical longevity of Malaysia’s political, economic and social system.
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Landscape and Land Use in First Millennium BC Southeast Italy
Planting the Seeds of Change
Daphne Lentjes
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This book offers a comprehensive overview of landscape and land use in southeast Italy in the first millennium BCE. Using the most up-to-date techniques, it combines archaeobotanical and archaeozoological data with information from excavations, field surveys, and ancient written texts to place the relationship between people and landscapes in a broad geographical and chronological framework. It also confronts questions of food habits, the scale and organisation of agricultural production, the influx of Greek and Roman colonists, and the effects of globalisation on local and regional land use.
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Shopping Spaces and the Urban Landscape in Early Modern Amsterdam, 1550-1850
Clé Lesger
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
In this study, the appearance and location of shops in Amsterdam during the early modern period is linked to major changes in the urban economy, the size and socio-spatial distribution of its population, and the structure of the urban grid. Not only is there ample attention for the spatial distribution of shops across the urban landscape, but for the first time it is also accurately charted what the exterior and interior of Amsterdam shops looked like and how they changed in the course of the centuries. Partly as a result of this, it has proved possible to give an impression of the ways in which retailers and customers interacted.
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Looking for Loopholes
Processes of Incorporation of Illegal Immigrants in the Netherlands
Joanne van der Leun
Amsterdam University Press, 2003
Looking for Loopholes is a detailed account of how illegal immigrants manage to integrate into Dutch society. Drawing on long-term research in the four largest cities in the Netherlands, van der Leun discusses illegal immigration's relationships with illegal employment and criminal involvement, as well as aspects of education, housing, health care and police surveillance. Throughout, she combines the perspectives of immigrants with that of those who implement policies to discourage them, revealing growing tensions between restrictive rules and day-to-day reality.
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Digital Passages
Migrant Youth 2.0: Diaspora, Gender and Youth Cultural Intersections
Koen Leurs
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Increasingly, young people live online, with the vast majority of their social and cultural interactions conducted through means other than face-to-face conversation. How does this transition impact the ways in which young migrants understand, negotiate, and perform identity? That's the question taken up by Digital Passages: Migrant Youth 2.0, a ground-breaking analysis of the ways that youth culture online interacts with issues of diaspora, gender, and belonging. Drawing on surveys, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, Koen Leurs builds an interdisciplinary portrait of online youth culture and the spaces it opens up for migrant youth to negotiate power relations and to promote intercultural understanding.
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Doing Digital Migration Studies
Theories and Practices of the Everyday
Koen Leurs
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Doing Digital Migration present a comprehensive entry point to the variety of theoretical debates, methodological interventions, political discussions and ethical debates around migrant forms of belonging as articulated through digital practices. Digital technologies impact upon everyday migrant lives, while vice versa migrants play a key role in technological developments – be it when negotiating the communicative affordances of platforms and devices, as consumers of particular commercial services such as sending remittances, as platform gig workers or test cases for new advanced surveillance technologies. With its international scope, this anthology invites scholars to pluralize understandings of ‘the migrant’ and ‘the digital’. The anthology is organized in five different sections: Creative Practices; Digital Diasporas and Placemaking; Affect and Belonging; Visuality and digital media and Datafication, Infrastructuring, and Securitization. These sections are dedicated to emerging key topics and debates in digital migration studies, and sections are each introduced by international experts.
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Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy
Baschenis, Bettera and the Painting of Cultural Identity
Ornat Lev-er
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
*Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy* centers on the still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge. Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations, these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists. The unique contribution of this groundbreaking study is that it identifies for the first time these intellectually rich concepts that arise from these fascinating still-life paintings, a genre considered as "low". Engaging with literary blockbusters and banned books, theatrical artifice and music, and staging a war among the arts, Baschenis and Bettera capture the latest social intrigues, political rivalries, intellectual challenges, and scientific innovations of their time. In doing so, they structure an unstable economy of social, aesthetic, and political values that questions the notion of absolute truth, while probing the distinctions between life and artifice, meaningless marks and meaningful signs.
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Jacob van Ruisdael’s Ecological Landscapes
Catherine Levesque
Amsterdam University Press

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Jolted Images
Unbound Analytic
Pavle Levi
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Jolted Images brings together a large cast of mainstream and avant-garde cineastes, artists, photographers, comics creators, poets, and more, to reflect on a wide range of phenomena from the realms of cinema and visual culture in the Yugoslav region, broader Europe, and North America. Far from a staid monograph, the book takes a cue from filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, who once wrote that there are times when it is necessary "to jolt art, no matter what the outcome"; to that end, the book infuses its analysis with playful, creative transfiguration of the material at hand.
 
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Jews in the Netherlands
A Short History
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Most people know little more than fragments of Dutch Jewish history: the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam; Jewish socialism; the devastating years of the Second World War. So where is the storyline? What happened to the Jews in the Netherlands from the moment they first settled there permanently? This book answers that question. It presents the central points of 700 years of Jewish history in the Netherlands briefly and succinctly. One hundred elements of the story have been chosen that taken as a whole create a balanced and representative picture. Each relates to a central event, place, person or object that helps to illuminate one important aspect of the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, and each is linked to a striking, iconic image. They are grouped by century around unifying themes that make them part of an ongoing story.
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The Necklace of the Pleiades
24 Essays on Persian Literature, Culture and Religion
Franklin Lewis
Amsterdam University Press, 2010
The Necklace of the Pleiades is a volume on Persian literature, culture and religion by Persian scholars from around the world. This book reflects the state of the field of Persian literary studies and will be of substantial interest not only to scholars of Iranian culture, history and religions, but of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, as well. The topics of the 24 essays range from the Persian Alexander romance, to Ferdowsi’s Shahnama and other epics, the poetics and imagery of the ghazal and the qasida, Mughal court poetry, Sufism, Ismaili history, Baha’i literature, Iranian linguistics, the modern writer Sadeq Hedayat, and the reception of Salman Rushdie’s novel in Persian translation.
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Sino-American Relations
A New Cold War
Xiaobing Li
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Sino-American Relations brings together high-quality research articles in order to examine one aspect of the political mechanism of modern China, from empire to the PRC: political initiatives to root out corruption. Proceeding chronologically, the eleven chapters explore modern political history through a particular focus on the anti-corruption campaigns of early modern and modern China. Our interdisciplinary analysis draws on methodologies from several distinct fields, including political science, civil law, and mass media. Such an analysis reveals the unique characteristics of China’s urbanization, which have transformed not only the country, but also the CCP – from a rural-based totalitarian party to a city-centered authoritarian party, and from a party of the people to a party of powerful interest groups by 2002–2016.
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Framing Premodern Desires
Sexual Ideas, Attitudes, and Practices in Europe
Satu Lidman
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The way that we have perceived, described, and understood sexual desire has changed dramatically over time and across cultures. This collection brings together a group of experts from a variety of disciplines to explore the history of sexual desires and the transformation of sexual ideas, attitudes, and practices in premodern Europe. Among the topics considered are the visibility of sexual offenses and the construction of passions; the geographical range extends to Great Britain, with extended attention also to France as well as Northern and Eastern Europe. The result is a groundbreaking volume that adds significantly to our understanding of premodern European history, history of sexualities, gender studies, religious history, and many other fields.
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Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema
The Outside of Film
Sulgi Lie
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory. Rather than focusing on the role that certain films, or the cinema as an institution, might play in political consciousness, the book asks a different question: how can the subject of politics in film be thought? This problem is presented in a systematic-theoretical rather than historical manner. The main aim of this book is a retrospective rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of "suture," whose political core is progressively revealed. In a second step, this rereading of "suture"-theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity, films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious.
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Child Labour
Burning questions
Georges Kristoffel Lieten
Amsterdam University Press, 2005
It is often said that children have always been working. With the onset of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, however, children became to be exploited under miserable circumstances in factories. That was the beginning of the movement against child labour. A worldwide awareness campaign has brought international organizations and governments to the position that child labour should urgently be replaced by child education. The objectives seem simple and laudable but the issues involved are very complex. What actually is child labour, and what is childhood? How many child labourers are there in the world? Is child labour restricted to developing countries or is it frequently used in order to stigmatize the non-Western world? Is regulation of labour conditions the solution or should governments and civil society one opt for a radical ban? Is there a role for corporate social responsibility? These questions have been addressed in the professorial address on Child Labour Studies. It is argued that much more research is needed and that particular care should be taken to learn from children on how they view the world and what they think of work, labour and education.
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The Maintenance Crew for the Human Machinery
Ligteringen
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
The book, written as a doctoral thesis, examines the development of the personnel function in labour organisations. Starting from a history of personnel management in the Netherlands during the second half of the 20th century, it analyses the structural transformation in the societal-economic environment from which originate far-reaching changes in employee relations.
The transformation from the post-war model of guided capitalism towards its neo-liberal variety has serious consequences for intra-organisational power relations which result in a one-sided articulation of interests. This erodes the moral fabric of the labour organisation as a social institution. In this context special attention is paid to the wide-spread erosion of corporate ethics in the 21st century.
The intensification of the labour process - a consistent phenomenon in industrial capitalism ­ has got a new impulse, due to the lack of countervailing power within an eroding system of labour relations as well as to superior production techniques and technologies.
These tendencies have a deteriorating effect on the substance of the personnel discipline, ending up in a loss of function.
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Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism
Critique of Art
Thijs Lijster
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This book brings together two of the most important figures of twentieth-century criticism, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to consider a topic that was central to their thinking: the place of and reason for art in society and culture. Thijs Lijster takes us through points of agreement and disagreement between the two on such key topics as the relationship between art and historical experience, between avant-garde art and mass culture, and between the intellectual and the public. He also addresses the continuing relevance of Benjamin and Adorno to ongoing debates in contemporary aesthetics, such as the end of art, the historical meaning of art, and the role of the critic.
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Paris-Amsterdam Underground
Essays on Cultural Resistance, Subversion, and Diversion
Christoph Lindner
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
The postwar histories of Paris and Amsterdam have been significantly defined by the notion of the “underground” as both a material and metaphorical space. Examining the underground traffic between the two cities, this book interrogates the countercultural histories of Paris and Amsterdam in the mid to late-twentieth century. Shuttling between Paris and Amsterdam, as well as between postwar avant-gardism and twenty-first century global urbanism, this interdisciplinary book seeks to create a mirroring effect over the notion of the underground as a driving force in the making of the contemporary European city.

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front cover of Aesthetics of Gentrification
Aesthetics of Gentrification
Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City
Christoph Lindner
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary-gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city.

In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.
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Same-sex Sexuality in Later Medieval English Culture
Tom Linkinen
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
This volume investigates the state of same-sex relations in later medieval England, drawing on a remarkably rich array of primary sources from the period that include legal documents, artworks, theological treatises, and poetry. Tom Linkinen uses those sources to build a framework of medieval condemnations of same-sex intimacy and desire and then shows how same-sex sexuality reflected“and was inflected by“gender hierarchies, approaches to crime, and the conspicuous silence on the matter in the legal systems of the period.
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Special Effects and German Silent Film
Techno-Romantic Cinema
Katharina Loew
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a "techno-romantic" paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.
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The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya
Tangled Strands of Modernity
Kah Seng Loh
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Using a wealth of material including interviews, official documents, and student writings, the authors recount the rise of newly independent states in postwar Malaya and Singapore through the engagements of a left-wing group of university student activists. The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya brings to life various contemporary movements, including democratic, Marxist, socialist, ethnicity-based groups which seek to influence postcolonial Malaya, as well as their fluid relationships with one another, at a time when allies became enemies, and vice versa. An original and vital study, this volume delves into the complex mental worlds and historical milieu of political and student activism.
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Two Centuries of English Language Teaching and Learning in Spain
1769-1970
Alberto Lombardero Caparrós
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
This book provides an exhaustive historical account of how the English language was taught and learnt in Spain over two centuries. Since its origins back in 1769 with the publication of San Joaquín de Pedro's 'Gramática inglesa' until 1970, a key year in European and World affairs. A period of time ample enough to accurately gauge the impact of this social phenomenon against the backdrop of social and political unrest which looms over the whole period but also with scientific breakthroughs that shaped our modern world. The history of ELT runs parallel to those events adopting diffferent mainstrem trends ranging from the Traditional or Latin-like approach to foreign language teaching to the so-called Grammar-Translation Method and the Direct or Oral Method. However, special attention is also given to 'minor' trends such as Ecclecticism which constantly overlaps the mainstream trends. This book is the first to take a close look at how the English language was taught and learnt in Spain for a two-century period when the French language was the Spaniard's first choice when it came to learning a foreign language.
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Europe - On Air
Interwar Projects for Radio Broadcasting
Suzanne Lommers
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
During the interwar years, broadcast radio became a popular way for Europeans to consume local, national, and international news. The medium not only began to shape European policy and politics, but also laid the foundation for European unification and global interconnectedness. In Europe On Air, Suzanne Lommers has documented the rich and often underexposed history of broadcast radio through the lens of international European relations. She specifically explores the roles of Radio Moscow, Radio Luxembourg, Vatican Radio, and the International Broadcasting Union as institutions that played an important role in national identities and establishing standards for broadcasting. The radio also offered new opportunities to politicians, who seized upon a vibrant and more direct way to communicate with their constituents.
            Essential reading for scholars of technology and European history, Europe–On Air reveals broadcast radio to be a technology that revolutionized international relations during the brief respite between the chaos of war in Europe.

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Horizontal Learning in the High Middle Ages
Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer in Religious Communities
Micol Long
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The history of medieval learning has traditionally been studied as a vertical transmission of knowledge from a master to one or several disciples. *Horizontal Learning in the High Middle Ages: Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer in Religious Communities* centres on the ways in which cohabiting peers learned and taught one another in a dialectical process - how they acquired knowledge and skills, but also how they developed concepts, beliefs, and adapted their behaviour to suit the group: everything that could mold a person into an efficient member of the community. This process of 'horizontal learning' emerges as an important aspect of the medieval learning experience.Progressing beyond the view that high medieval religious communities were closed, homogeneous, and fairly stable social groups, the essays in this volume understand communities as the product of a continuous process of education and integration of new members. The authors explore how group members learned from one another, and what this teaches us about learning within the context of a high medieval community.
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Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North
Senses, Media and Power
Carola Lorea
Amsterdam University Press

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Development on Loan
Microcredit and Marginalisation in Rural China
Nicholas Loubere
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Key to China's plans to promote rural development is the de-marginalisation of the countryside through the incorporation of rural areas into the urban-based market-oriented financial system. For this reason, Chinese development planners have turned to microcredit -- i.e. the provision of small-scale loans to 'financially excluded' rural households -- as a means of increasing 'financial consciousness' and facilitating rural de-marginalisation. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in rural China, this book examines the formulation, implementation and outcomes of government-run microcredit programmes in China, illuminating the diverse roles that microcredit plays in local processes of socioeconomic development and the livelihoods of local actors. It details how microcredit facilitates de-marginalisation for some, while simultaneously exacerbating the marginalisation of others; and exposes the ways in which microcredit and other top-down development strategies reflect and reinforce the contradictions and paradoxes implicit in rural China's contemporary development landscape.
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Paths of Integration
Migrants in Western Europe (1880-2004)
Leo Lucassen
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
In the 1990s, as concern grew in the United States about the integration of large numbers of immigrants, scholars searching for historical parallels looked to the last great period of immigration, ffrom 1880 to 1914. That example, however, is generally viewed as inapplicable to the current immigration debates in Europe.

Paths of Integration turns this conventional wisdom on its head, arguing that the history of European migration more closely parallels the U.S. experience than most realize, due to the largely ignored, but extensive, intra-European migration of the same period. By placing the European and U.S. examples side by side, the contributors to this volume offer long-term insights on a question that will be of great importance in the coming decades.

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The Heritage Turn in China
The Reinvention, Dissemination and Consumption of Heritage
Carol Ludwig
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This edited volume focuses on heritage discourse and practice in China today as it has evolved from the 'heritage turn' that can be dated to the 1990s. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches to regionally and topically diverse case studies, the contributors to this volume show how particular versions of the past are selected, (re)invented, disseminated and consumed for contemporary purposes. These studies explore how the Chinese state utilises heritage not only for tourism, entertainment, educational and commercial purposes, but also as part of broader political strategies on both the national and international stage. Together, they argue that the Chinese state employs modes of heritage governance to construct new modernities while strengthening collective national identity in support of both its political legitimacy and its claim to status as an international superpower. The authors also consider ways in which state management of heritage is contested by some stakeholders whose embrace of heritage has a different purpose and meaning.
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Unpopular Culture
Martin Luthe
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This volume introduces a new concept that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture. From the works of David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway to fanfiction and The Simpsons, from natural disasters to 9/11 and beyond, the essays find the unpopular across media and genres, analysing the politics and aesthetics of a side to culture that has been overlooked by previous theories and methods in cultural studies.
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Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions
Emily Lyle
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions explores the traditions of two fascinating and contiguous cultures in north-western Europe. History regularly brought these two peoples into contact, most prominently with the Viking invasion of Ireland. In the famous Second Battle of Moytura, gods such as Lug, Balor, and the Dagda participated in the conflict that distinguished this invasion. Pseudohistory, which consists of both secular and ecclesiastical fictions, arose in this nexus of peoples and myth and spilled over into other contexts such as chronological annals. Scandinavian gods such as Odin, Balder, Thor, and Loki feature in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the history of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus. This volume explores such written works alongside archaeological evidence from earlier periods through fresh approaches that challenge entrenched views.
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front cover of Elementary and Grammar Education in Late Medieval France
Elementary and Grammar Education in Late Medieval France
Lyon, 1285-1530
Sarah Lynch
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a marked increase in the availability of elementary and grammar education in Europe. In France, that rise took the form of a unique blend of trends also seen elsewhere in Europe, ranging from Church-dominated schools to independent schools and communal groups of teachers. Lyon, long a crossroad of ideas from north and south, was home to a particularly interesting blend of approaches, and in this book Sarah Lynch offers a close analysis of the educational landscape of the city, showing how schools and teachers were organised and how they interacted with each other and with ecclesiastical and municipal authorities.
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Floral Culture and the Tudor and Stuart Courts
Susannah Lyon-Whaley
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
At court, flowers coloured, scented, adorned, sustained, nourished, and enthralled. These interdisciplinary essays engage with flowers as real, artificial, and represented objects across the Tudor and Stuart courts in gardens, literature, painting, interior furnishing, garments, and as jewels, medicine, and food. Situating this burgeoning floral culture within a European floral revolution of science, natural history, global trade, and colonial expansion, they reveal the court’s distinctive floral identity and history. If the rose operated as a particularly English lingua franca of royal power across two dynasties, this volume sheds light on an array of wild and garden flowers to offer an immersive picture of how the Tudor and Stuart courts lived and functioned, styled and displayed themselves through flowers. It contributes to a revival of interest in the early modern green world and provides a focused view of a court and court culture that used and revelled in blooms.
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front cover of Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens
Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens
J. Vanessa Lyon
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens’s paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist’s best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens’s lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.
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Finance and the World Economy in Weimar Cinema
Owen Lyons
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
After the First World War, the effects of financial crisis could be felt in all corners of the newly formed Weimar Republic. The newly interconnected world economy was barely understood and yet it was increasingly made visible in the films of the time. The complexities of this system were reflected on screen to both the everyday spectator as well as a new class of financial workers who looked to popular depictions of speculation and crisis to make sense of their own place on the shifting ground of modern life. Finance and the World Economy in Weimar Cinema turns to the many underexamined depictions of finance capital that appear in the films of 1920s Germany. The representation of finance capital in these films is essential to our understanding of the culture of the Weimar Republic – particularly in the relation between finance and ideas of gender, nation and modernity. As visual records, these films reveal the stock exchange as a key space of modernity and coincide with the abstraction of finance as a vast labour of representation in its own right. In so doing, they introduce core visual tropes that have become essential to our understanding of finance and capitalism throughout the twentieth century.
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Real Life Cryptology
Ciphers and Secrets in Early Modern Hungary
Benedek Láng
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
A large number of enciphered documents survived from early modern Hungary. This area was a particularly fertile territory where cryptographic methods proliferated, because a large portion of the population was living in the frontier zone, and participated (or was forced to participate) in the network of the information flow. A quantitative analysis of sixteenth-century to seventeenth-century Hungarian ciphers (300 cipher keys and 1,600 partly or entirely enciphered letters) reveals that besides the dominance of diplomatic use of cryptography, there were many examples of ŸprivateŒ applications too. This book reconstructs the main reasons and goals why historical actors chose to use ciphers in a diplomatic letter, a military order, a diary or a private letter, what they decided to encrypt, and how they perceived the dangers threatening their messages.
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David Gorlæus (1591-1612)
An Enigmatic Figure in the History of Philosophy and Science
Christoph Lüthy
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
When David Gorlæus, a prospective theology student, passed away tragically at twenty-one years old, he left behind two highly innovative manuscripts, which were published posthumously in 1620 and 1651, respectively. As his identity was unknown, seventeenth-century readers understood him both as an anti-Aristotelian thinker and a precursor of Descartes. In contrast, by the twentieth century, historians depicted him as an atomist, natural scientist, and even a chemist. David Gorlæus (1591–1612) seeks to pull together what is known of this enigmatic figure. Combining multiple historical sources, Christoph Lüthy provides a narrative of Gorlæus’s life that casts light on his exceptional body of work and places it firmly at the intersection between philosophy, the nascent natural sciences, and theology.  
“Christoph Lüthy is the first to tell the complete story of David Gorlæus and to reconstruct his image on the basis of all remaining sources. Showing in a convincing way that Gorlæus is one of the key figures in the renewal of atomistic philosophy in the seventeenth century and a major influence on many philosophers that are much better known, he leaves us with the melancholy picture of someone who died too young to become one of the heroes of the scientific revolution.”—Theo Verbeek, Utrecht University
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