The Suharto (1966-98) government of Indonesia and the Mahathir (1981-2003) government of Malaysia both launched Islamisation programmes, upgrading and creating religious institutions. The author argues that, while generally ulamas, or religious teachers, had to support state ideologies, they sometimes succeeded in ŸcapturingŒ the state by influencing policies in their favour. The author builds his argument on strong fieldwork data, especially interviews, and he engages in critical discussion of comparative politics paradigms and the concept of capture.

This important and first-of-its-kind collection addresses the emerging challenges in the field of media art preservation and exhibition, providing an outline for the training of professionals in this field. Since the emergence of time-based media such as film, video and digital technology, artists have used them to experiment with their potential. The resulting artworks, with their basis in rapidly developing technologies that cross over into other domains such as broadcasting and social media, have challenged the traditional infrastructures for the collection, preservation and exhibition of art. Addressing these challenges, the authors provide a historical and theoretical survey of the field, and introduce students to the challenges and difficulties of preserving and exhibiting media art through a series of first-hand case studies. Situated at the threshold between archival practices and film and media theory, it also makes a strong contribution to the growing literature on archive theory and archival practices.

Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they move from the margins to the centre of contemporary media practice.Recent years have seen a marked scholarly interest in spatial dimensions and conceptions of moving image culture, with some theorists claiming that a 'spatial turn' has taken place in media studies and screen practices alike. Yet this is the first book-length study dedicated to on-screen spatiality as such.Spanning mainstream cinema, experimental film, video art, mobile screens, and stadium entertainment, the volume includes contributions from such acclaimed authors as Giuliana Bruno and Tom Gunning as well as a younger generation of scholars.

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.

The roles of popes, saints, and crusaders were inextricably intertwined in the Middle Ages: papal administration was fundamental in the making and promulgating of new saints and in financing crusades, while crusaders used saints as propaganda to back up the authority of popes, and even occasionally ended up being sanctified themselves. Yet, current scholarship rarely treats these three components of medieval faith together. This book remedies that by bringing together scholars to consider the links among the three and the ways that understanding them can help us build a more complete picture of the working of the church and Christianity in the Middle Ages.

The phenomenon of martyrdom is more than 2000 years old but, as contemporary events show, still very much alive. This book examines the canonisation, contestation and afterlives of martyrdom and connects these with cross-cultural acts and practices of remembrance. Martyrdom appeals to the imagination of many because it is a highly ambiguous spectacle with thrilling deadly consequences. Imagination is thus a vital catalyst for martyrdom, for martyrs become martyrs only because others remember and honour them as such. This memorialisation occurs through rituals and documents that incorporate and re-interpret traditions deriving from canonical texts. The canonisation of martyrdom generally occurs in one of two ways: First, through ritual commemoration by communities of inside readers, listeners, viewers and participants, who create and recycle texts, re-interpreting them until the martyrs ultimately receive a canonical status, or second, through commemoration as a means of contestation by competing communities who perceive these same people as traitors or terrorists. By adopting an interdisciplinary orientation and a cross-cultural approach, this book goes beyond both the insider admiration of martyrs and the partisan rejection of martyrdoms and concisely synthesises key interpretive questions and themes that broach the canonised, unstable and contested representations of martyrdom as well as their analytical connections, divergences and afterlives in the present.

This book takes as its object of investigation an array of traumatic heritage sites and spaces of memory, including museums, former detention camps, and sites of commemoration, in Europe, Argentina, and Colombia, to investigate how various traumatic pasts can be preserved and transmitted through space, and which kind of actions might be taken both to improve knowledge of the past and to serve as an opening to a discussion of current social issues.

For virtually all of our lives, we are surrounded by music. From lullabies to radio to the praises sung in houses of worship, we encounter music at home and in the street, during work and in our leisure time, and not infrequently at birth and death. But what is music, and what does it mean to humans? How do we process it, and how do we create it?Musician Leo Samama discusses these and many other questions while shaping a vibrant picture of music's importance in human lives both past and present. What is remarkable is that music is recognised almost universally as a type of language that we can use to wordlessly communicate. We can hardly shut ourselves off from music, and considering its primal role in our lives, it comes as no surprise that few would ever want to. Able to transverse borders and appeal to the most disparate of individuals, music is both a tool and a gift, and as Samama shows, a unifying thread running throughout the cultural history of mankind.

The province of Baetica, in present-day Spain, was one of the most important areas in the Roman Empire in terms of politics, economics, and culture. And in the late medieval period, it was the centre of a rich and powerful state, the Umayyad Caliphate. But the historical sources on the intervening years are limited, and we lack an accurate understanding of the evolution of the region. In recent years, however, archaeological research has begun to fill the gaps, and this book-built on more than a decade of fieldwork-provides an unprecedented overview of urban and rural development in the period.

The policies relating to language pursued by European monarchies and states have been widely studied, but far less attention has been given to their linguistic and cultural policies in territories outside their own borders. This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to filling that gap, distinguishing and analysing several different types of linguistic and foreign cultural policies. Such policies, the contributors show, tended not to be proclaimed officially, but they nonetheless had lasting effects on both language and culture in Europe and beyond.

While Turkey in recent years has experienced an exhaustive accession process to join the EU -a long desired aim-, at the same time it has been increasing its involvement across the Middle East, leading to a debate over whether it is altering its focus from West to East. This book reveals that a shift in focus can be seen through analysis of the Turkish political elites' definitions of "self" and "other" that were established as part of the EU accession process. Melek Saral uses these definitions to help us better understand the shift that Turkey is currently undergoing.

This volume assembles texts dedicated to the linguistic and educational aspects of missionary and colonial enterprises, taking into account all continents and with an extended diachronic perspective (15th–20th centuries). Strictly speaking, this “linguistics” is contemporary to the colonial era, so it is primarily the work of missionaries of Catholic orders and Protestant societies. It can also belong to a retrospective outlook, following decolonization. In the first category, one mostly finds transcription, translation, and grammatization practices (typically, the production of dictionaries and grammar books). In the second category, one finds in addition descriptions of language use, of situations of diglossia, and of contact between languages. Within this framework, the volume focuses on educational and linguistic policies, language teaching and learning, and the didactics that were associated with them.

In this volume, prominent anthropologists, public health physicians, and psychiatrists respond sympathetically but critically to the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH), which seeks to export psychiatry throughout the world. They question some of its fundamental assumptions: the idea that "mental disorders" can clearly be identified; that they are primarily of biological origin; that the world is currently facing an "epidemic" of them; that the most appropriate treatments for them normally involve psycho-pharmaceutical drugs; and that local or indigenous therapies are of little interest or importance for treating them. Instead, the contributors argue that labeling mental suffering as "illness" or "disorder" is often highly problematic; that the countries of South and Southeast Asia have abundant, though non- psychiatric, resources for dealing with it; that its causes are often social and biographical; and that many non-pharmacological therapies are effective for dealing with it. In short, they advocate a thoroughgoing mental health pluralism.

For the nations on its borders, the rapid rise of China represents an opportunity-but it also brings worry, especially in areas that have long been disputed territories of contact and exchange. This book gathers contributors from a range of disciplines to look at how people in those areas are actively engaging in making relationships across the border, and how those interactions are shaping life in the region-and in the process helping to reconfigure the cultural and political landscape of post-Cold War Asia.

Made up of both material and symbolic elements, the urban space is always dynamic and transitional; it brings together or separates the past and the present, the public and the private, the center and the periphery. The present volume focuses on the interaction between the social processes and spatial forms that shape the identity of Italian cities. Using both canonical and less well-known texts along with cultural artifacts, the essays in the volume deprovincialize the Italian city, interpreting the material and symbolic practices that have made it into a unique entity whose enduring influence extends far outside Italy.

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.

This book is one of the first to examine medieval Spanish canonical works for their portrayals of disability in relationship to theological teachings, legal precepts, and medical knowledge. Connie L. Scarborough shows that physical impairments were seen differently through each lens. Theology at times taught that the disabled were "marked by God," their sins rendered on their bodies; at other times, they were viewed as important objects of Christian charity. The disabled often suffered legal restrictions, allowing them to be viewed with other distinctive groups, such as the ill or the poor. And from a medical point of view, a miraculous cure could be seen as evidence of divine intervention. This book explores all these perspectives through medieval Spain's miracle narratives, hagiographies, didactic tales, and epic poetry.

This book draws on a wide range of methods-including approaches from literary studies, cultural studies, and urban sociology-to analyse the transformation of Shanghai through rapid growth and widespread urban renewal. Lena Scheen explores the literary imaginings of the city, its past, present, and future, in order to understand the effects of that urban transformation on both the psychological state of Shanghai's citizens and their perception of the spaces they inhabit.

Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe explores the Office of the Dead as a site of interaction between text, image, and experience in the culture of commemoration that thrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead was a familiar liturgical ritual, and its perceived importance and utility are evident in its regular inclusion in devotional compilations, which crossed the boundaries between lay and religious readers. The Office was present in all medieval deaths: as a focus for private contemplation, a site of public performance, a reassuring ritual, and a voice for the bereaved. Examining the images at the Office of the Dead and related written, visual, and material evidence, this book explores the relationship of these images to the text in which they are embedded and to the broader experiences of and aspirations for death.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) devoted ample time to the study of ancient chronology, resulting in the posthumously published The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728). Here, Newton attempted to show how the antiquity of Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and other Mediterranean nations could be reinterpreted to fit the timespan allowed for by Scripture. Yet as the hundreds of books from his library and the thousands of manuscript pages devoted to the topic show, the Chronology was long in the making. This volume provides the first full analysis of the genesis and evolution of Newton’s studies of ancient history and demonstrates how these emerged from that other major project of his, the interpretation of the apocalyptic prophecies in Scripture. A careful study of Newton’s reading, note-taking, writing, and -ordering practices provides the key to unravelling and reconstructing the chronology of Newton’s chronological studies, bringing to light writings hitherto hidden in the archives.

Today we can hardly imagine life in Europe without roads and the automobiles that move people and goods around. In fact, the vast majority of movement in Europe takes place on the road. Travelers use the car to explore parts of the continent on their holidays, and goods travel large distances to reach consumers. Indeed, the twentieth century has deservedly been characteried as the century of the car. The situation looked very different around 1900. People crossing national borders by car encountered multiple hurdles on their way. Technically, they imported their vehicle into a neighboring country and had to pay astronomic import duties. Often they needed to pass a driving test in each country they visited. Early on, automobile and touring clubs sought to make life easier for traveling motorists. International negotiations tackled the problems arising from differing regulations. The resulting volume describes everything from the standardied traffic signs that saved human lives on the road to the Europabus taking tourists from Stockholm to Rome in the 1950s. Driving Europe offers a highly original portrait of a Europe built on roads in the course of the twentieth century.

Centered on moral critiques of wealth and the unequal distribution of risks and rewards in the lengthy voyages required by the East Indies trade, this book examines the debates surrounding England’s earliest global trading ventures. Arguments over the staggering loss of lives and national resources and struggles over control of the new trade in luxuries reveal the forging of rationales justifying the new capitalist inequalities. Yet Company servants traveling abroad to conduct the risky trade resisted this newly coalescing social formation through strategic disobedience to their masters’ will, controlling information and promoting ignorance when it served their financial and sexual purposes. Conflicting Claims to East India Company Wealth, 1600–1650 interrogates the forces that shaped England’s earliest forays into capitalist imperialism by tracing the battles over corporate control of men’s finances, marriages, and bare survival at the dawn of its global trade.

In recent decades, what could be considered a gamification of the world has occurred, as the ties between games and activism, games and war, and games and the city grow ever stronger. In this book, Anne-Marie Schleiner explores a concept she calls 'ludic mutation', a transformative process in which the player, who is expected to engage in the preprogramed interactions of the game and accept its imposed subjective constraints, seizes back some of the power otherwise lost to the game itself. Crucially, this power grab is also relevant beyond the game because players then see the external world as material to be reconfigured, an approach with important ramifications for everything from social activism to contemporary warfare.

Transnational Play makes a case for approaching gameplay as a global industry and set of practices that also includes diverse participation from players and developers located within the global South, in nations outside of the First World. Such participation includes gameplay in cafes, games for regional and global causes like environmentalism, piracy and cheats, localization, urban playful art in Latin America, and the development of culturally unique mobile games. This book offers a reorientation of perspective on global play, while still acknowledging geographically distributed socioeconomic, racial, gender, and other inequities. Over the course of the inquiry, which includes a chapter dedicated to the cartography of the mobile augmented reality game Pokémon Go, the author develops a theoretical line of argument critically informed by gender studies and intersectionality, post-colonialism, geopolitics, and game studies. This book looks at who develops, localizes, and consumes games, problematizing play as a diverse and contested transnational domain.

In Unani Medicine in the Making, Kira Schmidt Stiedenroth examines the contemporary institutions and practices of Graeco-Islamic healing in India. Drawing on interviews with practitioners, clinical observations, and Urdu sources, the book focuses on Unani's multiplicity, scrutinizing apparent tensions between the understanding of Unani as a system of medicine and its multiple enactments as Islamic medicine, medical science, or alternative medicine. Ethnographic details provide vivid descriptions of the current practices of Unani in India and invite readers to rethink the idea that humoral medicine is incommensurable with modern science. Ultimately, the book also discusses the relationship of Unani with Muslim communities, examining the growing practice of Prophetic Medicine in Urban India and the increasing representation of Unani as Islamic Medicine.

2013 saw the launch of the largest, most influential investment initiative in recent memory: China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This globe-spanning strategy has reshaped local economies and regionals networks, and it has become a contested subject for scholars and practitioners alike. How should we make sense of the complex interactions that the BRI has enabled? Understanding these processes requires truly global perspectives alongside careful attention to the role that local actors play in giving shape to individual BRI projects. The contributions in this volume provide both 'big picture' assessments of China's role in regional and global interactions and detailed case studies that home in on the role agency plays in BRI dynamics. Written by leading area studies scholars with diverse disciplinary expertise, this book reveals how Chinese efforts to recalibrate the world are taken up, challenged, revamped, and reworked in diverse contexts around the world.

This volume investigates educational inequalities among children of Turkish immigrants in Austria, France, and Sweden. One of the largest immigrant groups in these countries, Turks nonetheless face discrimination and limited opportunities, and this study shows how those problems play out in education. One of its key findings is that systems that provide more favorable institutional arrangements lead to greater economic mobility in the second generation.

This study describes and analyses a wide array of initiatives leading to the hunt, by Dutch whalemen, of whales and seals in Arctic waters, the temperate zones of the South Pacific and the waters of the Dutch East Indies during the major part of the nineteenth century (1815-1885) an era neglected so far.

Site-specific installations are created for specific locations and are usually intended as temporary artworks. The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums: Staging Contemporary Art shows that these artworks consist of more than a singular manifestation and that their lifespan is often extended. In this book, Tatja Scholte offers an in-depth account of the artistic production of the last forty years. With a wealth of case studies the author illuminates the diversity of site-specific art in both form and content, as well as in the conservation strategies applied. A conceptual framework is provided for scholars and museum professionals to better understand how site-specific installations gain new meanings during successive stages of their biographies and may become agents for change in professional routines.

Since its opening in 1882, the Gotthard Railway with its 15-kilometer long tunnel under the Gotthard Mountains, provides a crucial international link through the Swiss Alps, between North-Western Europe and Italy. In contrast to many other railway lines, its symbolic meaning has never sunk into oblivion. In Swiss society today, references to the Gotthard myth are multifaceted and omnipresent. Not only do they evoke images of a technological railway project, they also allude to Swiss history, alpine nature and national identity. Reading this book assists in understanding the old and contemporary discussions about the future of the Gotthard Railway, the regions in which it lies and the Swiss national identity.Curiosity-driven, this research combines viewpoints from the history of technology, cultural studies and cultural geography to grasp the intensity of the Gotthard as a national Swiss image. Whereas the relationship between the Gotthard Mountains and the Swiss national identity has received ample scholarly attention, the role of the Gotthard Railway remains largely unexplored. To illustrate to what extent historical actors co-constructed the railway and Swiss identity, the empirical chapters start with an analysis of an engineering discussion about tunneling methods. Hereafter, the book examines the reactions in Switzerland to the inauguration of the railway line. Subsequently, it describes the appreciation of the railway line portrayed in travel guides of the belle époque. The last chapter captures the glory days of the Gotthard myth, before and during the Second World War, with a focus on the novels and plays, in which the Gotthard Tunnel construction occurs. This historical overview offers insight into the multiple roles that technology plays in the construction of a sense of national identity as well as illustrating how identity has an effect on the appropriation of a technological railway project.

Since times immemorial China regarded its culture, philosophy and statecraft as superior to all other nations, hence the saying Hua Yi Zhi Bian ( 華夷之辨)- China and the barbarians are different. In the so-called ‘Age of Humiliation’ (1839-1949), Western and Japanese imperialists reduced the old empire to a semi-colony. China has now regained its economic and military strength, but what drives its domestic and foreign policy? President Xi Jinping has declared that ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ is at hand, but China can better be described as a country in search of a new identity. The philosopher Tu Weiming sees China as a battlefield of Socialism, Liberalism and Confucianism. The outcome of this struggle will have profound repercussions. Continuation of the present policy will only lead to increased tensions with its neighbours, because the Communist Party claims that only she can restore China’s rightful position under heaven. Beijing’s land reclamation in the South China Sea and the ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative are foremost driven by a yearning to restore the days of China’s imperial grandeur. If China choses the ‘third way’ of blending the Confucian meritocratic tradition with a western style representative government, a clash with its neighbours and the United States can be avoided. China and the barbarians offers a fascinating insight into the thinking of China’s philosophers and powerbrokers of the past and present. Interviews with eight prominent Chinese intellectuals add an authentic ring to this book.

How and why do people become involved in European homegrown jihadism? This book addresses this question through an in-depth study of the Dutch Hofstadgroup, infamous for containing the murderer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was killed in November 2004 in Amsterdam, and for plotting numerous other terrorist attacks. The Hofstadgroup offers a window into the broader phenomenon of homegrown jihadism that arose in Europe in 2004 and is still with us today. Utilizing interviews with former Hofstadgroup participants and the extensive police files on the group, Becoming a European Homegrown Jihadist overcomes the scarcity of high-quality data that has hampered the study of terrorism for decades. The book advances a multicausal and multilevel understanding of involvement in European homegrown jihadism that is critical of the currently prevalent 'radicalization'-based explanatory frameworks. It stresses that the factors that initiate involvement are separate from those that sustain it, which in turn are again likely to differ from those that bring some individuals to actual acts of terrorism. This is a key resource for scholars of terrorism and all those interested in understanding the pathways that can lead to involvement in European homegrown jihadism.

In the wake of the recent far-reaching changes in the use and accessibility of technology in our society, the average person is far more engaged with digital culture than ever before. They are not merely subject to technological advances but actively use, create, and mold them in everyday routines—connecting with loved ones and strangers through the Internet and smart phones, navigating digital worlds for work and recreation, extracting information from vast networks, and even creating and customizing interfaces to best suit their needs. In this timely work, Mirko Tobias Schäfer delves deep into the realities of user participation, the forms it takes, and the popular discourse around new media. Drawing on extensive research into hacking culture, fan communities, and Web 2.0 applications, Schäfer offers a critical approach to the hype around user participation and exposes the blurred boundaries between industry-driven culture and the domain of the user.

As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practices. This book critically reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what such information can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualisation, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation.

This is the first book to focus on coins as material artefacts and agents of meaning in the arts of the early modern period. The precious metals, double-sided form, and emblematic character of coins had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. Coins embodied Europe’s impressive power and the labour, increasingly located in colonised regions, of extracting gold and silver. Their efficacy depended on faith in their inherent value and the authority perceived to be imprinted into them, guaranteed through the institution of the Mint. Yet they could speak eloquently of illusion, debasement and counterfeiting. A substantial introduction precedes paired essays by interdisciplinary scholars organised around five themes: power and authority in the Mint; currency and the anxieties of global trade; coins and persons; coins in and out of circulation; credit and risk. A thought-provoking Afterword focused on an American contemporary artist demonstrates the continuing expressive and symbolic power of numismatic forms.

Agreement Restrictions in Persian is the first comprehensive attempt to tackle the issue of verbal agreement in Persian from a cross-linguistic point of view. Persian is a field of research within theoretical linguistics that is yet to be sufficiently explored. This book adopts the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995-2004) which is at the forefront of recent theories of formal syntax and applies it to the Persian language. Although it is commonly believed that in Persian the verb agrees with the subject, several constructions seem to constrain this obligatory rule. Adopting the framework of Distributed Morphology, the author argues that agreement is in fact obtained with the plural inanimate subjects but a morphological rule may block the result. Unlike the previous analyses which consider the experiencer as the subject of the psychological constructions, the author argues that the psychological state is the subject of the sentence. The findings of this book not only contribute to better understanding of Persian syntax, but also have important implications for grammar theory.

In Art and Politics, Segal explores the collision of politics and art in seven enticing essays. The book explores the position of art and artists under a number of different political regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, traveling around the world to consider how art and politics have interacted and influenced each other in different conditions. Joes Segal takes you on a journey to the Third Reich, where Emil Nolde supported the regime while being called degenerate; shows us Diego Rivera creating Marxist murals in Mexico and the United States for anti-Marxist governments and clients; ties Jackson Pollock's drip paintings in their Cold War context to both the FBI and the CIA; and considers the countless images of Mao Zedong in China as unlikely witnesses of radical political change.

This volume argues that the mapping of stories, movement and change should not be understood as an innovation of contemporary cartography, but rather as an important aspect of human cartography with a longer history than might be assumed. The authors in this collection reflect upon the main characteristics and evolutions of story and motion mapping, from the figurative news and history maps that were mass-produced in early modern Europe, through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century flow maps that appeared in various atlases, up to the digital and interactive motion and personalised maps that are created today. Rather than presenting a clear and homogeneous history from the past up until the present, this book offers a toolbox for understanding and interpreting the complex interplays and links between narrative, motion and maps.

On 9 May 1950, France launched a revolutionary plan for supranational cooperation in Western Europe. The Netherlands was taken completely by surprise. In the decades that followed, European integration moved forward at an unprecedented pace, taking the Netherlands with it. Geography and the post-war world seemed to leave the country no other choice. European integration forced - and is still forcing - the Netherlands on a far-reaching 'journey to the continent'.For the Netherlands, European integration represents a difficult journey to a new old world that often seems far off. How has that journey progressed so far? Why did the Netherlands join the common European market and currency from the very beginning? Was this course inevitable? And where has it brought the country?Using new, international source material, The Netherlands and European Integration digs deeply into the history of the Netherlands in Europe - a subject that is today more topical than ever.

This multidisciplinary collective volume advances the scholarly discussion on the origins of Islam. It simultaneously focuses on three domains: texts, social contexts, and ideological developments relevant for the study of Islam’s beginnings -- taking the latter expression in its broadest possible sense. The intersections of these domains need to be examined afresh in order to obtain a clear picture of the concurrent phenomena that collectively enabled both the gradual emergence of a new religious identity and the progressive delimitation of its initially fuzzy boundaries.

Vienna, with its stunning architecture and unforgettable streetscape, has long provided a backdrop for filmmakers. Visions of Vienna offers a close look at how directors such as Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Ophüls made use of the city, and how the nostalgic glorification of the Habsburg era can be seen as directly tied to crucial issues of modernity. Films set in Vienna, Alexandra Seibel shows, persistently articulate the experience of displacement due to emigration, changing gender relations and anti-feminism, class distinction, and anti-Semitism, themes that run counter to the ongoing mystification of Vienna as the incarnation of "waltz dreams" and schmaltz.

Before being declared heretical in 1713, Jansenism was a Catholic movement focused on such central issues as original sin and predestination. In this engaging book, David Selby explores how the Jansenist tradition shaped Alexis de Tocqueville’s life and works and argues that once that connection is understood, we can apply Tocqueville’s political thought in new and surprising ways. Moving from the historical sociology of Jansenism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France to contemporary debates over the human right to education, the role of religion in democracy, and the nature of political freedom, Selby brings Tocqueville out of the past and makes him relevant to the present, revealing that there is still much to learn from this great theorist of democracy.

Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata offers an extended analysis of the architecture and urban planning of Kolkata from the earliest days of colonialism through independence and on into the twenty-first century, all set in the larger context of Indian cities’ architecture and urban planning. What Siddhartha Sen shows is the transformation of a colonial city into a Marxist one — and ongoing attempts to further transform Kolkata into a global city. Richly illustrated, the book carefully situates architecture, design, and urban planning within Kolkata’s political economy and social milieu.

Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages aims to tell the full story of early English shipboard performers, who have been historically absent from conversations about English navigation, maritime culture, and economic expansion. Often described reductively in voyaging accounts as having one function, in fact maritime performers served many communicative tasks. Their lives were not only complex, but often contradictory. Though not high-ranking officers, neither were they lower-ranking mariners or sailors. They were influenced by a range of competing cultural practices, having spent time playing on both land and sea, and their roles required them to mediate parties using music, dance, and theatre as powerful forms of nonverbal communication. Their performances transcended and breached boundaries of language, rank, race, religion, and nationality, thereby upsetting conventional practices, improving shipboard and international relations, and ensuring the success of their voyages.

The Game of the Goose is one of the oldest printed board games, dating back 400 years. It has spawned thousands of derivatives: simple race games, played with dice, on themes that mirror much of human activity. Its legacy can be traced in games of education, advertising and polemic, as well as in those of amusement and gambling - and games on new themes are still being developed. This book, by the leading international collector of the genre, is devoted to showing why the Game of the Goose is special and why it can lay claim to being the most influential of any printed game in the cultural history of Europe. Detailed study of the games reveals their historical provenance and - reversing the process - gives unusual insights into the cultures which produced them. They therefore provide rich sources for the cultural historian. This book is beautifully illustrated with more than 90 illustrations, many in color, which are integrated throughout the text.

The book identifies to what extent it is possible to speak of a democratization of knowledge in Renaissance Italy. It establishes the boundaries of the present investigation within the Aristotelian tradition, and outlines democratization as a process capable of assigning power to people. It deals with how the democratization of knowledge historically is invested equally in ideas from religion and philosophy, involving the same democratizers, moved by similar intentions, employing identical techniques of vulgarization and targeting equivalent communities of recipients.

Processing Compound Verbs in Persian is the first monograph investigating how Persian compound verbs are processed in the mental lexicon, through which it can be inferred how they are stored, organized, and accessed. The study examines Persian compound verbs in light of psycholinguistic theories on poly-morphemic word processing as well as linguistic theories of complex predicates.

Mahasu is the joint name of four gods whose influence is widespread throughout the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Like other deities in the Western Himalayas, they are regarded as royal gods who rule over territories and people. This book traces changes in faith and practices surrounding the Mahasu brothers, and shows how the locals understand these changes by emphasizing the dominant role of humans in the decisions of the gods. The locals are also constantly testing the authenticity of the human mediumship. Thus, the book presents the claim that the gap between local conceptions of divinity and the perceptions of anthropologists regarding gods may be narrower than we think. The Biography of a God: Mahasu in the Himalayas is based on ethnographic research, resulting in an important contribution to the study of Indian village deities, Himalayan Hinduism, lived Hinduism, and the anthropology of religion.

The Celestine monks of France represent one of the least studied monastic reform movements of the late Middle Ages, and yet also one of the most culturally impactful. Their order - an austere Italian Benedictine reform of the late thirteenth century, which came be known after the papal name of their founder, Celestine V (St Peter of Murrone) - arrived in France in 1300. After a period of marginal growth, they flourished in the region from the mid-fourteenth century, founding thirteen new houses over the next hundred years, taking their total to seventeen by 1450. Not only did the French Celestines expand, they gained a distinctive character that separated them from their Italian brothers. More urban, better connected with both aristocratic and bourgeois society, and yet still rigorous and reformist, they characterised themselves as the 'Observant' wing of their order, having gained self-government for their provincial congregation in 1380 following the arrival of the Great Western Schism (1378-1417). But, as Robert L.J. Shaw argues, their importance runs beyond monastic reform: the late medieval French Celestines are a mirror of the political, intellectual, and Christian reform culture of their age. Within a France torn by war and a Church divided by schism, the French Celestines represented hope for renewal, influencing royal presentation, lay religion, and some of the leading French intellectuals of the period, including Jean Gerson.

By focusing on the politics of disability as a pillar of Czechoslovak identity, The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist Czechoslovakia: Segregating in the Name of the Nation reflects upon the vicissitudes of nation building over the twentieth century that led to extreme forms of institutional violence against minorities, mainly the Roma, such as forced sterilization. The authors trace the intersectionality of ethnicity and disability, which proliferated across diverse realms of public life, positioning the continuities and ruptures of interrogating propaganda and racial science during the interwar and post-war periods as establishing and reinforcing the border between a healthy Czech majority and a disabled Roma minority. The book critically revises this border that remains observable but unapproachable until it operates as a part of constructing the authenticity of a nation.

Chinese culture, to readers of English, is somewhat veiled in mystery. Fundamentals of Chinese Culture (in pinyin, Zhongguo wenhua yaoyi), a classic of great insight and profundity by noted Chinese thinker, educator and social reformist Liang Shuming, takes readers on an intellectual journey into the five-thousand-year-old culture of China, the world's oldest continuous civilization. With a set of "Chinese-style" cultural theories, the book well serves as a platform for Westerners' better understanding of the distinctive worldview of the Chinese people, who value family life, group-centered life and social stability, and for further mutual understanding and greater mutual consolidation among humanities scholars in different contexts, dismantling common misconceptions about China and bridging the gap between Chinese culture and Western culture. As a translation of Liang Shuming's original text, this book pulls back the curtain to reveal to Westerners a highly complex and nuanced picture of a fascinating people.

This volume brings the studies of institutions, labour, and material cultures to bear on the history of science and technology by tracing the workings of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu) in the Qing court and empire. An enormous apparatus that employed 22,000 men and women at its heyday, the Department operated a "machine" with myriad moving parts. The first part of the book portrays the people who kept it running, from technical experts to menial servants, and scrutinises the paper trails they left behind. Part two uncovers the working principles of the machine by following the production chains of some of its most splendid products: gilded statues, jade, porcelain, and textiles. Part three tackles the most complex task of all, managing living organisms in nature, including lotus plants grown in imperial ponds in Beijing, fresh medicines sourced from disparate regions, and tribute elephants from Southeast Asia.

Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects presents institutions, individuals and networks who have ensured experimental films and Expanded Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s are not consigned to oblivion. Through a comparison of recent international case studies from festivals, museums, and gallery spaces, the book analyzes their new contexts, and describes the affective reception of those events. The study asks: what is the relationship between an aesthetic experience and memory at the point where film archives, cinema, and exhibition practices intersect? What can we learn from re-screenings, re-enactments, and found footage works, that are using archival material? How does the affective experience of the images, sounds and music resonate today? Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects proposes a theoretical framework from the perspective of the performative practice of programming, curating, and reconstructing, bringing in insights from original interviews with cultural agents together with an interdisciplinary academic discourse.

This book illustrates the results of ethnographical research designed to shed light on the notion of civil society in a context characterized by the transformation of power relations. Such transformation is given by shifting resources, renewed local and international opportunities, and a general reframing of goals and objectives. The academic literature has usually relied on a substantialist understanding of the notion of civil society – referring to the latter as something that exists a priori or does something. This volume relies, instead, on a relational approach – where civil society becomes the name we give to a host of complex interactions in which local associations are involved in a time of reconfiguration of power relations. Building on this approach, this volume analyses the relational dynamics affecting Tunisian associations after the fall of the authoritarian regime in 2011 and their implications for the changing political order. Findings show two main interrelated trends: the nationwide professionalization of local associations and the localized networking strategies of various socio-political categories crossing the associational sector. The book shows how their members understand the standardization of local associations as a strategy to have guaranteed access to the public sphere and, therefore, to influence the changing political order.

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability explores a geopolitically situated set of cultures negotiating unique relationships to colonial history. Singaporean, Malaysian, and Indonesian identities are discussed through a variety of commercial films, art cinema, and experimental work. The book discovers instances of postcoloniality that manifest stylistically through Singapore’s preoccupations with space, the importance of sound to Malay culture, and the Indonesian investment in genre.

Released on the 500-year anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, this volume seeks to adapt and apply More's fecund imagination to the contemporary leisure landscape. The contributors to this volume theorize and analyze a variety of 'tourist utopias' - a nascent socio-spatial form crucial to a post-industrial global economy. From Disney World to Dubai, 'Middle Earth' to Marina Bay, Macau to Abu Dhabi, these sites share common characteristics that include their respective status as 'spaces of exception'; entrepreneurial governance regimes that rely on cooperation among state and non-state actors; transient, multinational populations; immaterial and affective forms of labor and consumption; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to such leisure activities as shopping, gambling, and spectacle. These locales are not only popular destinations for migrant workers and mobile tourists from around the globe, but also serve as cultural laboratories for testing new formats and protocols of an emergent post-Fordist form-of-life.

Social movements throughout the world have been central to history, politics, society, and culture. Observing Protest froma Place examines the impact of one such campaign, the global justice movement, as seen from the southern hemisphere. Drawing upon a collective survey from the 2011 World Social Forum in Dakar, the essays explore a number of vital issues, including the methodological problems of studying international activist gatherings and how scholars can overcome those challenges. Bydemonstrating the importance of the global justice movement and the role of nongovernmental organizations for participantsin the southern hemisphere, this volume is an important addition to the literature on community action.

Research on social movements has historically focused on the traditional weapons of the working class, especially labor strikes and street demonstrations-but everyday actions, such as eating or singing, which can also be turned into a means of protest, have yet to be fully explored. Originally published as La grève de la faim by Johanna Siméant and La musique en colère by Christophe Traïni, Bodies in Protest is an interdisciplinary and comparative history of these modes of action that reveals how hunger strikes and music ranging from gospel songs to rock anthems can efficiently convey political messages and mobilize the masses. Common to both approaches, the chapters show, is a direct appeal to the emotions and a reliance on the physical, concrete language of the human body.

Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. New spaces that included vistas along house interiors and uninterrupted library reading rooms offered open expanses for shaping sequences of social behaviour, scientists observed how the Earth rotated around the sun, and philosophers attributed emotions to neural vibrations in the human brain. Early Modern Spaces in Motion examines this increased emphasis on motion with eight essays encompassing a geographical span of Portugal to German-speaking lands and a disciplinary range from architectural history to English. It consequently merges longstanding strands of analysis considering people in motion and buildings in motion to explore the cultural historical attitudes underpinning the varied impacts of motion in early modern Europe.

The ever increasing ability of medical technology to reshape the human body in fundamental ways - from organ and tissue transplants to reconstructive surgery and prosthetics - is something now largely taken for granted. But for a philosopher, such interventions raise fundamental and fascinating questions about our sense of individual identity and its relationship to the physical body. Drawing on and engaging with philosophers from across the centuries, Jenny Slatman here develops a novel argument: that our own body always entails a strange dimension, a strangeness that enables us to incorporate radical physical changes.

Rembrandt’s extraordinary paintings of female nudes—Andromeda,Susanna, Diana and her Nymphs, Danaë, Bathsheba—as well as his etchings of nude women, have fascinated many generations of art lovers and art historians. But they also elicited vehement criticism when first shown, described as against-the-grain, anticlassical—even ugly and unpleasant. However, Rembrandt chose conventional subjects, kept close to time-honored pictorial schemes, and was well aware of the high prestige accorded to the depiction of the naked female body. Why, then, do these works deviate so radically from the depictions of nude women by other artists? To answer this question Eric Jan Sluijter, in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, examines Rembrandt’s paintings and etchings against the background of established pictorial traditions in the Netherlands and Italy. Exploring Rembrandt’s intense dialogue with the works of predecessors and peers, Sluijter demonstrates that, more than any other artist, Rembrandt set out to incite the greatest possible empathy in the viewer, an approach that had far-reaching consequences for the moral and erotic implications of the subjects Rembrandt chose to depict.

            In this richly illustrated study, Sluijter presents an innovative approach to Rembrandt’s views on the art of painting, his attitude towards antiquity and Italian art of the Renaissance, his sustained rivalry with the works of other artists, his handling of the moral and erotic issues inherent in subjects with female nudes, and the nature of his artistic choices.  

*The Lasting Significance of Etty Hillesum’s Writings* contains the proceedings of the third international Etty Hillesum Conference, held in Middelburg in September 2018. It brings together the work of 33 experts from all over the world to shed new light on life, works, inspiration and vision of the Dutch Jewish writer Etty Hillesum (1914-1943), one of the victims of the Nazi regime. Hillesum’s diaries and letters illustrate her heroic struggle to come to terms with her personal life in the context of the Holocaust. This volume revives Hillesum research with a comprehensive rereading of her texts but also by introducing new sources about her life. With the current rise of interest in peace studies, Judaism, the Holocaust, inter-religious dialogue, gender studies and mysticism, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars in a range of disciplines.

The diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum (1914—1943) have a special place among the Jewish-Dutch testimonies of the Shoah, somuch so that Etty Hillesum studies has become its own field. This book offers the most important contributions from the pastfifteen years of international research into Hillesum’s work and life, studying her ethical, philosophical, spiritual, and literary existential search.

As Cardinal Hugo and as pope, Gregory was one of the dominant figures in the history of the papacy of the High Middle Ages. Coming to prominence under Pope Innocent III, Hugo played an important political role, particularly as legate on various occasions, as well as being a major promoter of the new religious orders. As pope, his battle with Emperor Frederick II is one of medieval history’s most absorbing conflicts. But he also acted as peacemaker, promoter of the Crusades, instigator of mission for the sake of conversion, refomer of the Curia, patron of arts and liturgy, and as a passionate advocate of Church reform. His decretal collection, the Liber Extra, was the most influential of the Middle Ages. A full examination of Gregory’s pontificate is very long overdue. The current volume brings together a team of international scholars, each of them expert in dealing with a particular aspect of the pontificate, and provides what will be a collection of studies of lasting scholarly value on a central figure of the medieval papacy.

This book brings together the insights of theories of management and marketing to give an original view of the organizational dynamics of globalizing Asian New Religious Movements (NRMs) and established religions. Seventeen authors in this collection have recast their data on individual Asian religions and social movements to focus on the way these organizations are managed in an overseas or globalcontext, by examining the structure, organizational culture, management style, leadership principles and marketing strategies of the religious movements they had hitherto studied from the perspective of the sociology of religion, or religious studies. The book examines strategies for global proselytization and outcomes in a variety of local ethnographic contexts, thus contributing to the scholarly work on the ‘glocalization’ of religions.

The societies in the Himalayan borderlands have undergone wide-ranging transformations, as the territorial reconfiguration of modern nation-states since the mid-twentieth century and the presently increasing trans-Himalayan movements of people, goods and capital, reshape the livelihoods of communities, pulling them into global trends of modernisation and regional discourses of national belonging.This book explores the changes to native senses of place, the conception of border - simultaneously as limitations and opportunities - and what the authors call "affective boundaries," "livelihood reconstruction," and "trans-Himalayan modernities." It addresses changing social, political, and environmental conditions that acknowledge growing external connectivity even as it emphasises the importance of place.

This book explores the historical and contemporary processes that have made and remade Mongolia as it is today: the construction of ethnic and national cultures, the transformations of political economy and a ‘nomadic’ pastoralism, and the revitalization of a religious and cosmological heritage that has led to new forms of post-socialist politics. Widely published as an expert in the field, David Sneath offers a fresh perspective into a region often seen as mysterious to the West.

An elaborately crafted and decorated tomahawk from somewhere along the north American east coast: how did it end up in the royal collections in Stockholm in the late seventeenth century? What does it say about the Swedish kingdom’s colonial ambitions and desires? What questions does it raise from its present place in a display cabinet in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm? This book is about the tomahawk and other objects like it, acquired in colonial contact zones and displayed by Swedish elites in the seventeenth century. Its first part situates the objects in two distinct but related spaces: the expanding space of the colonial world, and the exclusive space of the Kunstkammer. The second part traces the objects’ physical and epistemological transfer from the Kunstkammer to the modern museum system. In the final part, colonial objects are considered at the centre of a heated debate over the present state of museums, and their possible futures.

Just as higher education (HE) in Europe had its beginnings in religious training for the priesthood, HE in feudal Japan, too, provided instruction for a religious life. But while the evolution to secular instruction was gradual in Europe, in Japan it came with a big bang: the "opening" of the country and consequent Westernization and all that that involved in the mid-19th century. This first volume in the new Japan Documents Handbook series tells the story in 25 chapters of how Japan’s HE system has become what it is now, ending with a very tentative glimpse into the rest of the 21st century. A variety of themes are covered by scholars: chapters that concentrate on governance look at the distinction between "national," "public," and "private" institutions; others consider important topics such as internationalization, student recruitment, and faculty mobility. More innovative topics include "Women of Color Leading in Japanese Higher Education." All provide copious references to other authorities, but rather than just toe the conventional line they include opinions and proposals that may be contentious or even revolutionary. The editor provides an overview of the subject and its treatment in an Introduction.

*Breaking Laws: Violence and Civil Disobedience in Protest* questions the complex relationship between social movements and violence through two contrasted lenses; first through the short-lived radical left wing post ’68 revolutionary violence, and secondly in the present diffusion of civil disobedience actions, often at the border between non-violence and violence. This book shows how and why violence occurs or does not, and what different meanings it can take. The short-lived extreme left revolutionary groups that grew out of May ’68 and the opposition to the Vietnam War (such as the German Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army) are without any doubt on the violent side. More ambiguous are the burgeoning contemporary forms of "civil" disobedience, breaking the law with the aim of changing it. In theory, these efforts are associated with non-violence and self-restraint. In practice, the line is more difficult to trace, as much depends on how political players define and frame non-violence and political legitimacy.

It would have been hard to miss the pivotal role debt has played for contentious politics in the last decades. The North Atlantic Financial Crisis, Global Recession and European Debt Crisis - as well as the recent waves of protest that followed them - have catapulted debt politics into the limelight of public debates. Profiting from years of fieldwork and an extensive amount of empirical data, Christoph Sorg traces recent contestations of debt from North Africa to Europe and the US. In doing so, he identifies the emergence of new transnational movement networks against the injustice of current debt politics, which struggle for more social and democratic ways of organizing debt within and between societies.

Social media platforms have been pivotal in redefining the conduct of contemporary society. Amid the proliferation of a range of new and ubiquitous online platforms, YouTube, a video-based platform, remains a key driver in the democratisation of creative, playful, vernacular, intimate, as well as political expressions. As a critical node of contemporary communication and digital cultures, its steady uptake and appropriation in a social media-savvy nation such as the Philippines requires a critical examination of its role in the continued reconstruction of identities, communities, and broader social institutions. This book closely analyses the diverse content and practices of amateur Filipino YouTubers, exposing and problematising the dynamics of brokering the contested aspirational logics of beauty and selfhood, interracial relationships, world-class labour, and progressive governance in a digital sphere. Ultimately, Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube offers a fresh, compelling, and nuanced account of YouTube as an important site for the mediation of culture, economy, and politics in Philippine postcolonial modernity amid rapid economic globalisation and digitalisation.

Video games have entered the cultural mainstream and in terms of economic profits they now rival established entertainment industries such as film or television. As careers in video game development become more common, so do the stories about precarious working conditions and structural inequalities within the industry. Yet, scholars have largely overlooked video game production cultures in favor of studying games themselves and player audiences. In Game Production Studies, an international group of established and emerging researchers takes a closer look at the everyday realities of video game production, ranging from commercial industries to independent creators and cultural intermediaries. Across sixteen chapters, the authors deal with issues related to labour, game development, monetization and publishing, as well as local specificities. As the first edited collection dedicated solely to video game production, this volume provides a timely resource for anyone interested in how games are made and at what costs.

By the end of the fifth century, with the structural collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, Western Europe had fallen into the so-called Dark Ages. With the power of Rome removed, the Catholic Church stepped in to fill the void. Its political rise, alongside that of the Germanic kingdoms, led to dramatic changes in law, politics, power, and culture. Against the backdrop of that upheaval, the family became a vitally important area of focus for cultural struggles related to morality, law, and tradition. This book explores those battles in order to demonstrate, through the family, the intersections between Roman and Christian legal culture, thought, and political power.

n the 17th century, the Dutch Republic was the centre of the world trade in exotic drugs and spices. They were sought after both as medicines, and as luxury objects for the bourgeois class, giving rise to a medical and moral anxiety in the Republic. This ambivalent view on exotic drugs is the theme of the poetry of Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620-1695). Six, who himself ran the drug shop ‘The Gilded Unicorn’ in Amsterdam, addresses a number of exotic medicines in his poems, such as musk, incense, the miracle drug theriac, Egyptian mumia, and even the blood of Charles I of England. In Dangerous Drugs, these texts are studied for the first time. The study shows how Six, through a process of self-presentation as a sober and restrained merchant, but also as a penitent sinner, thirsting for God’s grace, links early modern drug abuse to different desires, such as lust, avarice, pride and curiosity. The book shows also how an early modern debate on exotic drugs contributed to an important shift in early modern natural science, from a drug lore based on mythical and fabulous concepts, to a botany based on observation and systematic examination.

This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on the silver screen, and on our TVs and laptops. This book places contemporary pop-culture media - such as blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West's social media feeds, and the outputs of online role-players in Second Life - in dialogue with a corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies, 'Holy Women of Liège'. In these texts, holy women see God, and see God often. Their experiences fundamentally orient their life, and offer the women new routes to knowledge, agency, and belonging. For the holy visionaries of Liège, as with us modern 'seers', visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces. Through theoretically informed close readings, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens reveals the interconnection of decidedly 'old' media - medieval textualities - and artefacts of our 'new media' ecology, which all serve as spaces in which altogether human concerns are brought before the contemporary culture's eyes.Read Alicia Spencer-Hall's keynote paper 'Hagiography, Media, and the Politics of Visibility' from the Gender and Medieval Studies conference in Oxford on her blog Medieval She Wrote.

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography. Scholarship has productively combined analysis of medieval literary texts with modern queer theory – yet, too often, questions of gender are explored almost exclusively through a prism of sexuality, rather than gender identity. This volume moves beyond such limitations, foregrounding the richness of hagiography as a genre integrally resistant to limiting binaristic categories, including rigid gender binaries. The collection showcases scholarship by emerging trans and genderqueer authors, as well as the work of established researchers. Working at the vanguard of historical trans studies, these scholars demonstrate the vital and vitally political nature of their work as medievalists. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography enables the re-creation of a lineage linking modern trans and genderqueer individuals to their medieval ancestors, providing models of queer identity where much scholarship has insisted there were none, and re-establishing the place of non-normative gender in history.

In Calvinists and Indians in the Northeastern Woodlands, Stephen T. Staggs analyzes the impact of the Dutch Reformation upon the cross-cultural relations between those living in and around New Netherland. Staggs shows that Native Americans and New Netherlanders hunted, smoked, ate, and drank together, shared their faith while traveling in a canoe, and slept in each other’s bedrooms. Such details emerge in documents written by New Netherlanders like Megapolensis. Author of the most accurate account of the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawks) by a Dutch Reformed minister, Megapolensis provides a window into the influence and limits of the Dutch Reformation upon the dynamic, multifaceted relationships that developed in the early modern Northeastern Woodlands. Megapolensis came of age when Dutch Reformed theologians looked to the Bible to incorporate Indians into a Reformed worldview. In so doing, they characterized Indians as “blind Gentiles” to whom the Dutch were being called, by God, to present the gospel through the preaching of the Bible and the Christian conduct of colonists, which necessitated social interaction. This characterization ultimately informed the instructions given to those heading to New Netherland, raised expectations among the clergy and lay chaplains who served in the colony, and prefigured the reciprocal, intimate relationships that developed between Indians and New Netherlanders during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Hunt for Nazis is the first comprehensive account of the post-1945 efforts to bring Nazi war criminals who had escaped to South America to justice. The author shows that the Nazi hunt -- which resulted in spectacular cases like the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann -- should not only be understood as part of the afterlife of the Third Reich, but that it also became an integral aspect of dealing with repression at the hands of authoritarian regimes in South America. Dissidents and human rights activists assumed that the escaped Nazi perpetrators and collaborators continued to be involved in violent crimes in the service of these new dictatorships.

This book examines the desire for, and intoxication with, destruction as it appears in cultural objects and representation, arguing that all cultural and aesthetic value is fundamentally predicated on its own fragility, as well as the living transience of those who make and encounter it. Beginning with a philosophy of expenditure after Georges Bataille, each chapter maps different operations of destruction in media and culture. These operations are expressed and located in representations of human extinction and explosive architecture, in the body and in sexuality, and in media and digital archives, which constitute a further destabilisation of the notion of destruction in the dynamic between aspirational immortality and material volatility embedded in the archival systems of digital cultures.