ALBERT

Description: Within the scope of the Greek-Latin Alexander romance, the Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis by Julius Valerius (early fourth century CE) stand out due to their high literary and stylistic standards. The eleven contributions in this edited volume primarily focus on issues of narrative technique, linguistic design, and intertextuality, thereby illustrating the unique features and rank of this often-neglected work in literary history.

Description: While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them.

Description: Society begins at the local level. This interdisciplinary volume analyzes different kinds of local self-organization against the backdrop of the rather limited states of Antiquity and the Global South of the present. By collaborating across different periods of time the contributors get a better grasp of the mechanisms by which local governance succeeds, and advance the theoretical debate on state and society.

Description: This edited volume examines the forms and functions of the interaction between hand writing and print culture in the period ca. 1500 to 1800. Handwritten interventions into printed books interrupt the text fixed in print by commenting on it, correcting it, or expanding it. They point to changing contexts of use, the flexibilization of supposedly static concepts of authorship, and the dynamics of correction processes.

Description: The handbook illustrates the present state of knowledge on the region of Albania in the Southern Caucasus and its inhabitants with a focus on its late antique and medieval history, its language and its written heritage, its religion and its architecture, commonly authored by a group of international experts. Particular attention is directed to the relationship of the Caucasian Albanians with neighbouring peoples and its development over time.

Description: Historiography and literature are verbal representations of actions and events that either have happened or could happen in the human lifeworld. As such, they possess an uncanny ‘family resemblance’ that has impelled theorists since Antiquity to define the limits of the two ‘sister arts.’ Historiographical texts, from one point of view, are liable to veer towards fiction.

Description: The book sheds new light on a much debated issue in the field of ancient history: the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire and its relationship with Judaism in the 2nd century. The contributions collected in this volume illustrate from a multidisciplinary perspective (including archaeology, cultural, religious, and political history) how Christianity found a peculiar way of integrating into the transforming empire under Emperor Hadrian. In this way, Christianity gained an increasing place within Roman society, which ultimately opened the door to its affirmation in subsequent centuries.

Description: The buzzwords “Information Society” and “Age of Access” suggest that information is now universally accessible without any form of hindrance. Indeed, the German constitution calls for all citizens to have open access to information. Yet in reality, there are multifarious hurdles to information access – whether physical, economic, intellectual, linguistic, political, or technical. Thus, while new methods and practices for making information accessible arise on a daily basis, we are nevertheless confronted by limitations to information access in various domains. This new book series assembles academics and professionals in various fields in order to illuminate the various dimensions of information's inaccessability. While the series discusses principles and techniques for transcending the hurdles to information access, it also addresses necessary boundaries to accessability.

Description: This book describes the state of the art of digital philology with a focus on ancient Greek and Latin. It addresses problems such as accessibility of information about Greek and Latin sources, data entry, collection and analysis of Classical texts and describes the fundamental role of libraries in building digital catalogs and developing machine-readable citation systems.

Description: How does terrorism affect our picture of the history of terrorism then, if the victims are moved centre stage? If the focus is put on their suffering? The contributions to this edition of the European History Yearbook will examine such questions in a broad range of historical case studies and methods, including visual history.

Description: During the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, the geographical space of Europe was Christian and Christianity was “European.” The essays present the major theological discourses and decisions of that epoch that helped shape Church and society – from political regents to Church catechesis.

Description: Andronikos Kallistos, a leading personality among the Greeks who participated in Italian Humanism, was a scholar, teacher and copyist of manuscripts. This book investigates Kallistos’ scholarly and scribal activity by adopting a synergistic approach to historical, philological, codicological and paleographic data, in order to shed light on his role at the time of the transfer of Greek cultural heritage to Italy and, hence, throughout Europe.

Description: This publication seeks to endeavour the relationship between material artefacts and reading practices in ancient and medieval cultures.While the acts of reception of written artefacts in former times are irretrievably lost, some of the involved artefacts are preserved and might comprise hints to the ancient reading practices. In form of case studies, the contributions to this volume examine various forms of written artefacts as to their implications on modes of reading. Analyzing different Qumran scrolls, codices, Tefillin, Mezuzot, magical texts, tablets, bricks, and statues as well as meta-textual and iconographic aspects, the articles inquire the possibilities of how to correlate material aspects to assumed modes of reception and practices of reading. The contributions stem from Egyptology, Papyrology, Qumran Studies, Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, Ancient Christianity, and Islamic Studies.In total, this volume contributes to the research on practices of reception in times past and demonstrates the potential hidden in text-bearing artefacts.

Description: The book concerns female dress in Roman life and literature. The main focus is on female Roman dress as it may have been worn in daily life in Rome and in a social environment influenced by Roman culture in the time from the beginnings of the Republic until the end of the 2nd century AD.

Description: Ernst Papanek (1900-1973) was an Austrian-born Viennese reform pedagogue who realized already in the 1930s that unaccompanied, traumatized young refugees were self-directed. He organized "Kindertransporte" for about 1,600 refugees between 1938 and 1940.

Description: This book will consider how the outcomes of “doing history digitally” include different kind of sources and data, as well as new ways of researching historical questions, and innovative forms of presenting history. All contributions focus on aspects related to the history of National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust.

Description: Right wing populism has become an apparent and expanding phenomenon of the present. Nationalist claims to protect the state against waves of immigration are en vogue. Populists claim to secure national interests and to defend cultural values. The cultural Other is used to establish or to strengthen a narrative of fear. The proposed edited volume will examine the interrelationship of nationalism and populism during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Description: The book examines models of relationships between Constantinopolitan holy man and secular and ecclesiastical authorities in the capital of Byzantium. The study explores the ideal underlying the lives of the four Constantinopolitan holy men (Hypatios, Alexander Akoimetos, Daniel the Stylite, Marcellus Akoimetos), which was a reflection of contemporary reality as well as a vision of an ideal state.

Description: Questions concerning mobility and migration as well as subsistence strategies of past societies have always been of major importance in archaeological research. The West Eurasian steppes in the Eneolithic, the Early Bronze and the Iron Age were largely inhabited by cultural communities believed to show an elevated level of spatial mobility, often linked to their subsistence economy. In this volume, questions concerning the mobility and potential migration as well as the diet and economy of the West Eurasian steppes communities during the 4th, the 3rd and the 1st Millennia BC are approached by applying isotope analysis, specifically 87Sr/86Sr, δ18O, δ15N and δ13C analyses. Adapting a combination of different isotopic systems to a study area of vast spatial and chronological dimension allowed a wide variety of questions to be answered and establishes the beginning of a database of biogeochemical data for the West Eurasian steppes. Besides the characterisation of mobility and subsistence patterns of the archaeological communities under discussion, attempts to identify possible Early Bronze Age migrations from the steppes to the steppe-like plains in parts of Eastern Europe were made, alongside an evaluation of the applicability of isotope analysis to this context.

Description: In the recent cultural heritage boom, community-based and national identity projects are intertwined with interest in cultural tourism and sites of the memory of enslavement. Questions of historical guilt and present responsibility have become a source of social conflict, particularly in multicultural societies with an enslaving past. This became apparent in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, when statues of enslavers and colonizers were toppled, controversial debates about streets and places named after them re-ignited, and the European Union apologized for slavery after the racist murder of George Floyd. Related debates focus on museums, on artworks acquired unjustly in societies under colonial rule, the question of whether and how museums should narrate the hidden past of enslavement and colonialism, including their own colonial origins with respect to narratives about presumed European supremacy, and the need to establish new monuments for the enslaved, their resistance, and abolitionists of African descent. In this volume, we address this dissonant cultural heritage in Europe, with a strong focus on the tangible remains of enslavement in the Atlantic space in the continent. This may concern, for instance, the residences of royal, noble, and bourgeois enslavers; charitable and cultural institutions, universities, banks, and insurance companies, financed by the traders and owners of enslaved Africans; merchants who dealt in sugar, coffee, and cotton; and the owners of factories who profited from exports to the African and Caribbean markets related to Atlantic slavery. ; In the recent cultural heritage boom, community-based and national identity projects are intertwined with interest in cultural tourism and sites of the memory of enslavement. Questions of historical guilt and present responsibility have become a source of social conflict, particularly in multicultural societies with an enslaving past. This became apparent in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, when statues of enslavers and colonizers were toppled, controversial debates about streets and places named after them re-ignited, and the European Union apologized for slavery after the racist murder of George Floyd. Related debates focus on museums, on artworks acquired unjustly in societies under colonial rule, the question of whether and how museums should narrate the hidden past of enslavement and colonialism, including their own colonial origins with respect to narratives about presumed European supremacy, and the need to establish new monuments for the enslaved, their resistance, and abolitionists of African descent. In this volume, we address this dissonant cultural heritage in Europe, with a strong focus on the tangible remains of enslavement in the Atlantic space in the continent. This may concern, for instance, the residences of royal, noble, and bourgeois enslavers; charitable and cultural institutions, universities, banks, and insurance companies, financed by the traders and owners of enslaved Africans; merchants who dealt in sugar, coffee, and cotton; and the owners of factories who profited from exports to the African and Caribbean markets related to Atlantic slavery.

Description: In the Middle Ages, rolls were ubiquitous as a writing support. While scholars have long examined the texts and images on rolls, they have rarely taken the manuscripts themselves into account. This volume readdresses this imbalance by focusing on the materiality and various usages of rolls in late medieval England and France. Researchers from England, France, Germany and Singapore demonstrate in 11 contributions how this approach can increase our understanding of the rolls and their contents, as well as the contexts in which they were produced and used.

Description: This book discusses the 3rd–11th century developments that led to the formation of the three Scandinavian kingdoms in the Viking Age. Wide-ranging studies of communication routes, regional identities, judicial territories, and royal sites and graves trace a complex trajectory of rulership in these pagan Germanic societies. In the final section, new light is shed on the pinnacle and demise of the Norwegian kingdom in the 13th–14th centuries.

Description: Guglielmo Sirleto has generally been acknowledged as a crucial contributor to defending the papacy’s claims over St Peter’s primacy, including the apostle’s legendary arrival to Rome before his martyrdom. Sirleto established himself as a pivotal prelate, who assisted Pope Paul IV in rearranging the ceremonial apparatus for the solemn celebrations of the Cathedra Petri (St Peter’s Throne). Scholars, however, were unable to properly examine his De praestantia basilicae Vaticanae, because the manuscripts of this discourse were never completely identified. The edition of this treatise will therefore primarily provide a reconstruction of Sirleto’s working methods in readjusting the ceremonial solemnities prescribed for the feast day of the Cathedra Petri according to Curial Ceremony. The second discourse concerns, on the other hand, a description of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill, which Sirleto composed for the Cardinal Bishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo. In contrast to the edition of the first discourse in this volume, the Trattato sopra la chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore is presented according to the correspondence between Borromeo and Sirleto. ; Guglielmo Sirleto has generally been acknowledged as a crucial contributor to defending the papacy’s claims over St Peter’s primacy, including the apostle’s legendary arrival to Rome before his martyrdom. Sirleto established himself as a pivotal prelate, who assisted Pope Paul IV in rearranging the ceremonial apparatus for the solemn celebrations of the Cathedra Petri (St Peter’s Throne). Scholars, however, were unable to properly examine his De praestantia basilicae Vaticanae, because the manuscripts of this discourse were never completely identified. The edition of this treatise will therefore primarily provide a reconstruction of Sirleto’s working methods in readjusting the ceremonial solemnities prescribed for the feast day of the Cathedra Petri according to Curial Ceremony. The second discourse concerns, on the other hand, a description of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill, which Sirleto composed for the Cardinal Bishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo. In contrast to the edition of the first discourse in this volume, the Trattato sopra la chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore is presented according to the correspondence between Borromeo and Sirleto.

Description: Michael Stolberg offers the first comprehensive presentation of medical training and day-to-day medical practice during the Renaissance. Drawing on previously unknown manuscript sources, he describes the prevailing notions of illness in the era, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, the doctor–patient relationship, and home and lay medicine.

Description: Cicero's self-portrait as master of Roman prose, philosopher, and statesman has often attracted interest from intellectuals over the times. This volume concentrates on the multiple ways by which different ages created their 'Ciceros'. An international group of scholars elaborates on the portrait of Cicero, contributing greatly to our understanding of the influence of the republican orator and politician on Western culture throughout the centuries.

Description: This work is largely a social history of Tertullian, a Christian from Carthage (c.160� CE), and his ancient African context, which is viewed through a postcolonial lens.Theories from the discipline of social/cultural anthropology, e.g. kinship, class and ethnicity, are applied to selections of Tertullian`s writings.Some of the issues addressed include identity politics, Roman/African relations, martyrdom and the so-called Montanist heresy.

Description: This volume addresses controversies connected to the testing of the capacities and potentials of mediums. Today we commonly　associate the term medium with the technical communication between transmitters and receivers. Yet this term likewise applies to　those who cooperate with agencies that exceed the presumed domain of the material world. Insofar as one presumes a division　between distinctly opposed categories of religion and the secular, technical media tend to be associated with the secular and human　(trance) mediums tend to be associated with religion after 1900. This volume concerns the ways in which the term　medium still marks an overlapping of – and thus problematizes – the aforementioned division between religion and the secular, the　personal and the technological.The term medium carries with it a seed of doubt that is itself inseparable from investment in the medium's power: insofar as they　communicate with an other realm, mediums offer the hope and promise of new possibilities and improved efficiency, and thus of a　better life yet they have simultaneously been under suspicion of altering (or even inventing) the messages they communicate. It is due　to this combination of promise and suspicion that mediumism has tended to evoke scientific, religious, and moral controversies. Thus,　we can speak of a mediumistic trial – that is, a process in which a medium is put to the test concerning its potentials and　trustworthiness. Around 1800, experts were asked if a modern secular institution would be capable of inspiring, domesticating or　excluding trance mediumship. This question has stayed with us ever since, and the answers have remained inconclusive. That is why　the past and present of mediumship may be asked to elucidate each other.

Description: Over the last two decades, social scientists, legal scholars, human rights activists, and historians, have sought common conceptual grounds in the study of enslavement, thus forging a new perspective that comprises historical and contemporary forms of slavery. This has also intensified awareness of enslavement as a global phenomenon. In this volume, the authors give tentative answers to the question on what global enslavement means.

Description: This study uncovers the traditions behind the formative Classic Shàngshū (Venerated Documents). It reveals a genre of “Shū” (Documents) practice that was used creatively by contrasting conceptual communities for socio-philosophical ends. Working from Warring States-manuscript texts, it shows how different communities rewrote old cultural capital, becoming political actors by expanding their scope of action through literary thought production.

Description: The nucleus of society is situated at the local level: in the village, the neighborhood, the city district. This is where a community first develops collective rules that are intended to ensure its continued existence. The contributors look at such configurations in geographical areas and time periods that lie outside of the modern Western world with its particular development of society and statehood: in Antiquity and in the Global South of the present. Here states tend to be weak, with obvious challenges and opportunities for local communities. How does governance in this context work? Scholars from various disciplines (Classics, Theology, Political Science, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Human Geography, Sinology) analyze different kinds of local arrangements in case studies, and they do so with a comparative approach. The sixteen papers examine the scope and spatial contingency of forms of self-governance its legitimization and the collective identity of the groups behind them the relations to different levels of state governance as well as to other local groups. Overall, this volume makes an interdisciplinary contribution to a better understanding of fundamental elements of local governance and statehood.

Description: This book offers an Asia-centred story of bondage and coerced labour. Spanning the western Indian Ocean to Japan, and the 16th to the 19th century, it follows coercion from the regulation of sales to post-abolition labour contracts. In doing so, it highlights long lines, similarities, contrasts and interregional contacts of this history, and places Asia firmly within the discussion of slavery and coercion on a global scale.

Description: Health and development require one another: there can be no development without a critical mass of people who are sufficiently healthy, and people cannot be healthy without societal developments. 11 case studies from 9 countries on 3 continents since the late 19th century show how different actors have struggled to reconcile the nature of health and development policies, and the subordination of these policies to a range of political objectives.

Description: The volume includes the proceedings of the 2nd Roma Sinica project conference held in Seoul in September 2019 and aims to compare some features of the ancient political thought in the Western classical tradition and in the Eastern ancient thought. The contributors, coming from Korea, Europe, USA, China, Japan, propose new patterns of interpretation of the mutual interactions and proximities between these two cultural worlds and offer also a perspective of continuity between contemporary and ancient political thought. Therefore, this book is a reference place in the context of the comparative research between Roman (and early Greek thought) and Eastern thought. Researchers interested in Cicero, Seneca, Plato, post-Platonic and post Aristotelic philosophical schools, history, ancient Roman and Chinese languages could find interesting materials in this work.

Description: The contributions to this volume inquire into many important issues of Plutarchean scholarship: the conditions under which Plutarch`s writings were split into two distinct corpora, his methods of work and the various authorial techniques employed, the interplay between Lives and Moralia, Plutarch and politics, Plutarch and philosophy, literary aspects of Plutarch`s œuvre, Plutarch on women, Plutarch in his epistemological and socio-historical context. The contributors offer in-sights that throw new light on Plutarch`s personality and illustrate the unity of his varied literary production.

Description: In the Middle Ages, writing was not confined to manuscripts, but inscribed in the broader material world, in textiles and tombs, on weapons or human skin. This volume presents the first comparative overview of text-bearing artefacts in medieval German, Old Norse, British, French, Italian and Iberian literature and offers a fresh perspective on the medieval world that takes seriously the vibrancy of matter as a vital aspect of textual culture.

Description: The volume re-centres Africa and African history in memory studies, with each chapter drawing parallels to comparable cases in Africa and the world. An underlying assumption is that what can be learned from the politics of historical memory in Africa will have relevance for contemporary politics globally and for understanding how memories can be mobilised for political ends.

Description: In the second volume a wide range of economic actors – from kings and armies to cities and producers – are discussed within different imperial settings as well as the tools which enabled and constrained economic outcomes. A central focus are nodes of consumption that are visible in the archaeological and textual records of royal capitals, cities, religious centers, and armies that were stationed in imperial frontier zones.

Description: Most people regard the arts as free. This publication demonstrates that Asian art and architecture are created in contexts of extreme dependence. They depend on the climate, resources, social and religious traditions and patrons. Despite these asymmetrical dependencies, artists have found freedoms for self-expression. This creative dialogue is explored in 13 chapters on material culture from India, Nepal, Tibet, the Silk Routes and China.

Description: The 1st part of the volume engages with the theme of inclusion and exclusion in the history of ideas from different perspectives. The 2nd part of the volume discusses debates on natural law, human nature and political economy in early-modern Europe. Its contributions explore the sorts of political and moral visions that were relevant in post-Hobbesian moral philosophy and the development of economic thought.

Description: This volume focuses on the role played by historiography in the selection, processing and transmission of knowledge in Late Antiquity. In particular, the transmission of documents (civil and ecclesiastical, authentic and apocryphal) is studied, the impact of differences in genre, as well as how historical, anthropological, ethnographic, astronomical, and medical notions are reshaped in new cultural traditions.

Description: The notion of apocalypse is an age-old concept which has gained renewed interest in popular and scholarly discourse. The book highlights the versatile explications of apocalypse today, demonstrating that apocalyptic transformations – the various encounters with anthropogenic climate change, nuclear violence, polarized politics, colonial assault, and capitalist extractivism – navigate a range of interdisciplinary views on the present moment. Moving from old worlds to new worlds, from world-ending experiences to apocalyptic imaginaries and, finally, from authoritarianism to activism and advocacy, the contributions begin to map the emerging field of Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. Foregrounding the myriad ways in which collective imaginations of apocalypse underpin ethical, political, and, sometimes, individual experience, the authors provide key points of reference for understanding old and new predicaments that are transforming our many worlds. ; The notion of apocalypse is an age-old concept which has gained renewed interest in popular and scholarly discourse. The book highlights the versatile explications of apocalypse today, demonstrating that apocalyptic transformations – the various encounters with anthropogenic climate change, nuclear violence, polarized politics, colonial assault, and capitalist extractivism – navigate a range of interdisciplinary views on the present moment. Moving from old worlds to new worlds, from world-ending experiences to apocalyptic imaginaries and, finally, from authoritarianism to activism and advocacy, the contributions begin to map the emerging field of Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. Foregrounding the myriad ways in which collective imaginations of apocalypse underpin ethical, political, and, sometimes, individual experience, the authors provide key points of reference for understanding old and new predicaments that are transforming our many worlds.

Description: The Donation of Constantine is the largest and most powerful forgery in world history. Disputed until modern times, this document was the fuel of religious war, used by both the reformation, as well as the counter-reformation. Johannes Fried not only reinterprets the origin of this forgery (i.e. he ascribes it to the Franks` opposition of Emperor Louis the Pious), but retells, as well, the history of its misinterpretation since the High Middle Ages.

Description: On 6 April 1922, Einstein met Bergson to debate the nature of time: is the time the physicist calculates the same time the philosopher reflects on? Einstein claimed that only scientific time is real, while Bergson argued that scientific time always presupposes a living and perceiving subject. On that day, nearly 100 years ago, conflict was inevitable. Is it still inevitable today? How many kinds of time are there?

Description: During the Imperial Rome Age and late antiquity, Euripides was considered a tragic dramatist par excellence, and, alongside Homer, was the most frequently cited poet. This book examines the reception of complete and partially transmitted Euripidean tragedies into the Greek language vis-à-vis key authors and literary genres of the Imperial Rome Age and late antiquity, situating them in the cultural and literary-historical context of the times.

Description: This book explores the intermediality of image and text in Graeco-Roman sculpture. By studying a wide range of material, from grand sculpture to humble reliefs, scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds explore thematic aspects including the interplay of image and epigram, viewing and ‘reading’ sculpture in space, the issue of (re-)naming statues,and image and inscription seen from the perspective of social status or gender.

Description: Slavery takes many forms. This was also true in Roman antiquity, even though modern scholarship on Roman slavery paints the picture of a very homogenous institution. This volume intends to correct that perception. In it, renowned legal historians analyse juristic writings to showcase the social differences among slaves reflected in these texts. In this way, the papers collected here convey an impression of the complexity of Roman slave law.

Description: In this volume, leading scholars examine the ideas of the last days of the world held in Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. They discuss the mutual influence of these ideas together with their intended and actual political effect at the time. They open up a significant source for political andintellectual history, because apocalyptic writings are always to be found among the powerful. Key Features: overview of the latest research findings, presented in the form of a handbook successful interdisciplinary dialogue particular focus on the political history and intellectual history of this epoch

Description: This volume adds to the plurality of global histories by locating the global through its articulation and manifestation within particular localities. It accomplishes this by bringing together interlinked case-studies that analyse various temporal and spatial dimensions of the global in the local and the interactions between the local and the global. The case-studies apply a spatial approach to analyse how global questions of space, movement, networks, borders, and territory are worked out at a local level. The material draws on the Nordic countries, Europe, the Atlantic world, Africa, and Australia and ranges from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It is further divided into sections that address topics such as the translocality of humans and goods, local articulations of identities and globalities, parliamentarism and anti-colonialism, the organization of knowledge and the construction of spaces of representation and memory.

Description: How can it be, that only as much happens as fits into the newspaper the next day? (K. Valentin). Information of the past has to be organised, arranged and selected. The process of selection must be seen as the fundamental moment of making History. This book shows selection as creative act. With the richness of early medieval material it can be demonstrated that creative selection was omnipresent and took place even in unexpected text genres.

Description: The notion of the “Silk Road” that the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen invented in the 19th century has lost attraction to scholars in light of large amounts of new evidence and new approaches. The handbook suggests new conceptual and methodological tools for researching ancient economic exchange in a global perspective with a strong focus on recent debates on the nature of pre-modern empires.The interdisciplinary team of Chinese, Indian and Graeco-Roman historians, archaeologists and anthropologists that has written this handbook compares different forms of economic development in agrarian and steppe regions in a period of accelerated empire formation during 300 BCE and 300 CE. It investigates inter-imperial zones and networks of exchange which were crucial for ancient Eurasian connections.Volume I provides a comparative history of the most important empires forming in Northern Africa, Europe and Asia between 300 BCE and 300 CE. It surveys a wide range of evidence that can be brought to bear on economic development in the these empires, and takes stock of the ways academic traditions have shaped different understandings of economic and imperial development as well as Silk-Road exchange in Russia, China, India and Western Graeco-Roman history.

Description: (History of Religion: Essays and Preliminary Studies) brings together the mutually constitutive aspects of the study of religion(s)—contextualized data, theory, and disciplinary positioning—and engages them from a critical historical perspective. The series publishes monographs and thematically focused edited volumes on specific topics and cases as well as comparative work across historical periods from the ancient world to the modern era.

Description: What role does digitality play in negotiating the question of how we want to live together in the future? How do processes of digitalisation affect the formation of opinion, the shaping of political parties, their communication with voters, the discursive formation of issues, the creation of majorities and their regulation? This volume offers a constructive perspective on the challenges of a society increasingly shaped by digitalisation. In addition to diagnoses of the current situation, the contributions also bring together concepts and speculative drafts for the future that are united by the concern for a more just society. Experts from academia, journalism and practice outline the central results of the second "Dießener Klausur Mensch|Maschine|Zukunft" (Dießen Retreat Man|Machine|Future), which creates a space for constructive drafts, interjections and provocations in today's discourse on digitalisation, which is often characterised by cultural criticism and pessimistic perspectives.

Description: This volume, bringing together work by scholars from Europe, East Asia, North America, and West Africa, investigates transnational religious spaces in a comparative manner by juxtaposing East Asian and African examples. It highlights flows of ideas, actors, and organizations out of, into, or within a given continental space. These flows are patterned mainly by colonialism or migration. The book also examines cases where the transnational space in question encompasses both East Asia and Africa, notably in the development of Japanese new religions in Africa. Most of the studies are located in the present a few go back to the late nineteenth century. The volume is rounded off by Thomas Tweed’s systematic reflections on categories for the study of transnationalism his chapter Flows and Dams critically weighs the metaphorical language we use to think, speak, and write about transnational religious spaces.

Description: Ravenna is the place which preserves the highest number of historical evidence among all centres featuring the late Roman Mediterranean. Its cultural heritage is vast and composite, ranging from papyri to inscriptions, from ivories to marbles. Starting from concrete typologies of hand-manufactured goods existing in the Ravennate milieu, the book aims to explore the multifaceted traditions of late antique and early Byzantine handicraft.

Description: In the World of the Second Sophistic, the Roman Empire's Greek elite turned education, paideia, and knowledge of the Classical age into a vital factor in their struggle for political power. This book presents, for the first time, studies from a broad range of disciplines on various fields of life and on different media, in which this ideology became manifest.

Description: In this collection leading international authorities analyse the structures and economic functions of non-agrarian centres between ca. 500 and 1000 A.D. – their trade, their surrounding settlements, and the agricultural and cultural milieux. The thirty-one papers presented at an international conference held in Bad Homburg focus on recent archaeological discoveries in Central Europe (Vol.1), as well as onthose from southeastern Europe to Asia Minor (Vol. 2).

Description: Gods dwell in human environments in multiple ways. They move into imaginary spaces and explore the cosmos. This book analyzes the mapping of gods through a specific lens: their naming. By proposing this new perspective, it sheds light on ritual practices and representations of gods in the whole Mediterranean, from Italy to Mesopotamia, from Greece to North Africa and Egypt. Names and spaces enable to better define, differentiate, and connect gods.

Description: The origins of the incest taboo have puzzled many of the most influential minds of the West, from Plutarch to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, David Hume, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Edward Westermarck, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book puts the discussion of incest on a new foundation. It is the first attempt to thoroughly examine the rich literature, from philosophical, theological, and legal treatises to psychological and biological-genetic studies, to a wide variety of popular cultural media over a long period of time. The book offers a detailed examination of discursive and figurative representations of incest during five selected periods, from 1600 to the present. The incest discussion for each period is complemented with a presentation of dominant kinship structures and changes, without arguing for causal relations. Part I deals with the legacy of ecclesiastical marriage prohibitions of the Middle Ages: Historians dealing with the Reformation have wondered about the political and social implications of theological debates about the incest rules, the Enlightenment opted for sociological considerations of the household and a new anthropology based on the passions, Baroque discourse focused upon sexual relations among kin by marriage , while Enlightenment and Romantic discussions worried the intimacy of siblings. The first section of Part II deals with the six decades around 1900, during which European and American cultures obsessed about the sexuality of women. Almost everyone concurred in the idea that mother made the family what it was; that she configured the household, kept the lines of kinship vibrant, and stood at the threshold as stern gatekeeper, and many thought that she managed these tasks through her sexuality and an eroticized relationship with sons. Another story line, taken up in the section "Intermezzo," this one about the physical and mental consequences of inbreeding, appeared after 1850. To what extent do close-kin marriages pose risks for progeny? At its center, lay the incest problematic, now restated: Is avoidance of kin genetically programmed? Do all cultures know about risks of consanguinity? As for the twenty-first century, evolutionary and genetic assumptions are challenged by a living world population containing roughly one billion offspring of cousin marriages. Part III deals with one of the perhaps most remarkable reconfigurations of Western kinship in the aftermath of World War I: The shift from an endogamous to an exogamous alliance system centered on the "nuclear family." An historical anomaly, this family form began to dissolve almost as soon as it came together and, in the process, shifted the focus of incest concerns to a new pairing: father and daughter. By the 1970s, when the father/daughter problematic swept all other considerations of incest aside, that relationship had come to be modeled, for the most part, around power and its abusive potential. As for "incest," its representations in the last three decades of the twentieth century no longer focused on biologically damaged progeny but rather on power abuses in the nuclear family: sexual "abuse." By the mid-1990s, Western culture at least partly redirected its gaze away from father and daughter towards siblings, especially towards brothers and sisters and the sexual boundaries and erotics of their relationships. Correspondingly, siblings became a "model organism" for psychotherapy, evolutionary biology, and the science of genetics. ; The origins of the incest taboo have puzzled many of the most influential minds of the West, from Plutarch to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, David Hume, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Edward Westermarck, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book puts the discussion of incest on a new foundation. It is the first attempt to thoroughly examine the rich literature, from philosophical, theological, and legal treatises to psychological and biological-genetic studies, to a wide variety of popular cultural media over a long period of time. The book offers a detailed examination of discursive and figurative representations of incest during five selected periods, from 1600 to the present. The incest discussion for each period is complemented with a presentation of dominant kinship structures and changes, without arguing for causal relations. Part I deals with the legacy of ecclesiastical marriage prohibitions of the Middle Ages: Historians dealing with the Reformation have wondered about the political and social implications of theological debates about the incest rules, the Enlightenment opted for sociological considerations of the household and a new anthropology based on the passions, Baroque discourse focused upon sexual relations among kin by marriage , while Enlightenment and Romantic discussions worried the intimacy of siblings. The first section of Part II deals with the six decades around 1900, during which European and American cultures obsessed about the sexuality of women. Almost everyone concurred in the idea that mother made the family what it was; that she configured the household, kept the lines of kinship vibrant, and stood at the threshold as stern gatekeeper, and many thought that she managed these tasks through her sexuality and an eroticized relationship with sons. Another story line, taken up in the section "Intermezzo," this one about the physical and mental consequences of inbreeding, appeared after 1850. To what extent do close-kin marriages pose risks for progeny? At its center, lay the incest problematic, now restated: Is avoidance of kin genetically programmed? Do all cultures know about risks of consanguinity? As for the twenty-first century, evolutionary and genetic assumptions are challenged by a living world population containing roughly one billion offspring of cousin marriages. Part III deals with one of the perhaps most remarkable reconfigurations of Western kinship in the aftermath of World War I: The shift from an endogamous to an exogamous alliance system centered on the "nuclear family." An historical anomaly, this family form began to dissolve almost as soon as it came together and, in the process, shifted the focus of incest concerns to a new pairing: father and daughter. By the 1970s, when the father/daughter problematic swept all other considerations of incest aside, that relationship had come to be modeled, for the most part, around power and its abusive potential. As for "incest," its representations in the last three decades of the twentieth century no longer focused on biologically damaged progeny but rather on power abuses in the nuclear family: sexual "abuse." By the mid-1990s, Western culture at least partly redirected its gaze away from father and daughter towards siblings, especially towards brothers and sisters and the sexual boundaries and erotics of their relationships. Correspondingly, siblings became a "model organism" for psychotherapy, evolutionary biology, and the science of genetics.

Description: Water is a global resource for modern societies - and water was a global resource for pre-modern societies. The many different water systems serving processes of urbanisation and urban life in ancient times and the Middle Ages have hardly been researched until now. The numerous contributions to this volume pose questions such as what the basic cultural significance of water was, the power of water, in the town and for the town, from different points of view. Symbolic, aesthetic, and cult aspects are taken up, as is the role of water in politics, society, and economy, in daily life, but also in processes of urban planning or in urban neighbourhoods. Not least, the dangers of polluted water or of flooding presented a challenge to urban society. The contributions in this volume draw attention to the complex, manifold relations between water and human beings. This collection presents the results of an international conference in Kiel in 2018. It is directed towards both scholars in ancient and mediaeval studies and all those interested in the diversity of water systems in urban space in ancient and mediaeval times.     

Description: The monograph realigns political culture and countermeasures against slave raids, which rose during the breakup of the Golden Horde. By physical defense of the open steppe border and embracing the New Israel symbolism (exodus from slavery in Egypt/among the Tatars), Muscovites found a defensive model to expand the empire. Recent debates on slaving are introduced to Russian and imperial history, while challenging entrenched perceptions of Muscovy.

Description: This miscellaneous volume collects contributions on nineteen projects dealing with Digital Epigraphy – they are diversified in geographic and chronological context, for script and language, and for typology of digital output. The objective is to point out the methodological issues which are specific to the application of information technologies to epigraphy, with a focus on data modelling and text annotation, lexicography and interoperability.

Description: This volume addresses Jewish, Christian and Muslim future visions on the end of the world, focusing on the respective allies and antagonists for each religious society. Spanning late Antiquity to the early modern period, the collected papers examine distinctive aspects represented by each religion`s approach as well as shared concepts.

Description: This book offers the first attempt at understanding interpersonal violence in ancient Athens. While the archaic desire for revenge persisted into the classical period, it was channeled by the civil discourse of the democracy. Forensic speeches, curse tablets, and comedy display a remarkable openness regarding the definition of violence. But in daily life, Athenians had to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They did so by enacting a discourse on violence in the performance of these genres, during which complex negotiations about the legitimacy of violence took place. Since discourse and reality were intertwined and the discourse was ritualized, actual violence might also have been partly ritualized. By still respecting the on-going desire to harm one's enemy, this partial ritualization of violence helped restrain violence and thus contributed to Athens' relative stability.

Description: Few pre-modern empires had an impact on their subjects comparable to that of the Roman Empire. Over time, being Roman could mean many different things, e.g. Latin speakers under barbarian rule, subjects of the Byzantine empire or Christians in post-Roman Syria. This volume explores the changes Roman identity underwent in most of the former provinces of the empire between c. 400 and c. 1000, offering the first comprehensive overview on this topic.

Description: In this book, experts discuss the use of ‘theatre’ and ‘metatheatre’ to describe ancient Greek dramatic activities. By examining how these two concepts are used in very different ways by scholars of various horizons, this collective volume aims both at widening what should be encompassed under the label ‘theatre’ when looking at the ancient Greek world and at better defining what could count as ‘metatheatre’ in ancient Greek dramatic production.

Description: This book provides a personal view of the European Bronze Age by one of its long-standing scholars. It takes the period as a series of “lives”: of people, objects, places and societies, as well as of the Bronze Age itself, and provides an overview of research on the period, covering the latest work as well as fundamental studies from the past. While not intended as a systematic overview, it places up-to-date scholarship before a wider public.

Description: In his last essay just weeks before his death at the age of 91, David S. Nivison says, "Breaking into a formal system - such as a chronology - must be like breaking into a code. If you are successful, success will show right off." Since the late 1970's Nivison has focused his scholarship on breaking the code of Three Dynasties (Xia, Shang, Zhou) chronology by establishing an innovative methodology based on mourning periods, astronomical phenomenon, and numerical manipulations derived from them. Nivison is most readily known in the field for revising (and then revising again) the date of the Zhou conquest of Shang, and for his theory that Western Zhou kings employed two calendars (His so-called "Two yuan" theory), the second being set in effect upon the death of the new king's predecessor and counted from the completion of post-mourning rites for him (i.e., a "second 'first' year"). Nivison's enabling discovery that the Bamboo Annal (BA) had a historical basis was initially designed to make Wang Guowei's analysis of lunar phase terms (the so-called "Four quarter" theory that separated each month into four quarters) work for Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. In order to do so he had to assume that some inscriptions used a second yuan counted from completion of mourning. The king's death was the most important event late in a reign, so this implied that a king's reign-of-record was normally counted from the second yuan, omitting initial mourning years. It follows that when the unexpressed mourning years are forgotten (or edited out) but the dates of the beginning and end of the dynasty are still known, the remaining reigns-of-record cluster toward the beginning and end, and a reign in the middle is enlarged. Problems, ideas, and solutions like the one described above are found throughout this new collection of important works on chronology, astronomy, and historiography.

Description: Religion plays a central role in nearly every aspect in people’s life of most pre-modern cultures. Especially the interconnection between religion and politics is a common fact but the details of this relation and interacting processes behind this are not substantially studied. Therefore, this volume does not aim to confirm the linkage of religion and politics in general but to investigate its functionalities in political processes. A focus is placed on the political role of religious personnel beyond their religious and cultic tasks and their influence in pre-modern societies from a cross-cultural perspective. Specialists from various disciplines present their research based on case studies. Thereby this interdisciplinary volume covers a wide geographical and chronological range from ancient Egypt in the Bronze Age until medieval England. These papers are organised according to core functions questioning the instrumentalisation of religious personnel. ; Religion plays a central role in nearly every aspect in people’s life of most pre-modern cultures. Especially the interconnection between religion and politics is a common fact but the details of this relation and interacting processes behind this are not substantially studied. Therefore, this volume does not aim to confirm the linkage of religion and politics in general but to investigate its functionalities in political processes. A focus is placed on the political role of religious personnel beyond their religious and cultic tasks and their influence in pre-modern societies from a cross-cultural perspective. Specialists from various disciplines present their research based on case studies. Thereby this interdisciplinary volume covers a wide geographical and chronological range from ancient Egypt in the Bronze Age until medieval England. These papers are organised according to core functions questioning the instrumentalisation of religious personnel.

Description: This volume brings together historical research on classical antiquity and early medieval Europe with the study of eastern Christianity. To this end, it examines concepts of good rulership, especially of good Christian rulership, to highlight commonalities but also areas of divergence. The wide-ranging specialized studies offer a balanced picture of the cultural diversity of the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean.

Description: The volume includes the proceedings of the 2nd Roma Sinica project conference held in Seoul in September 2019 and aims to compare some features of the ancient political thought in the Western classical tradition and in the Eastern ancient thought. The contributors, coming from Korea, Europe, USA, China, Japan, propose new patterns of interpretation of the mutual interactions and proximities between these two cultural worlds and offer also a perspective of continuity between contemporary and ancient political thought. Therefore, this book is a reference place in the context of the comparative research between Roman (and early Greek thought) and Eastern thought. Researchers interested in Cicero, Seneca, Plato, post-Platonic and post Aristotelic philosophical schools, history, ancient Roman and Chinese languages could find interesting materials in this work.

Description: This collection of articles is an important milestone in the history of the study of time conceptions in Greek and Roman Antiquity. It spans from Homer to Neoplatonism. Conceptions of time are considered from different points of view and sources. Reflections on time were both central and various throughout the history of ancient philosophy. Time was a topic, but also material for poets, historians and doctors.

Description: In the past 25 years or more, political observers have diagnosed a crisis of the sovereign nation state and the erosion of state sovereignty through supranational institutions and the global mobility of capital, goods, information and labour. This edition of the European History Yearbook seeks to use "cultural sovereignty" as a heuristic concept to provide new views on these developments since the beginning of the 20th century.

Description: This volume approaches the phenomenon of slavery and other types of strong asymmetrical dependencies from two methodologically and theoretically distinct perspectives: semantics and lexical fields. Detailed analyses promise to provide new insights into the worldview of pre-modern societies. The case studies range from Ancient China and Egypt over Greek and Maya societies to Early Modern Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Islamic and Roman law

Description: It is now recognized that emotions have a history. In this book, eleven scholars examine a variety of emotions in ancient China and classical Greece, in their historical and social context. A general introduction presents the major issues in the analysis of emotions across cultures and over time in a given tradition. Subsequent chapters consider how specific emotions evolve and change. For example, whereas for early Chinese thinkers, worry was a moral defect, it was later celebrated as a sign that one took responsibility for things. In ancient Greece, hope did not always focus on a positive outcome, and in this respect differed from what we call “hope.” Daring not to do, or “undaring,” was itself an emotional value in early China. While Aristotle regarded the inability to feel anger as servile, the Roman Stoic Seneca rejected anger entirely. Hatred and revenge were encouraged at one moment in China and repressed at another. Ancient Greek responses to tragedy do not map directly onto modern emotional registers, and yet are similar to classical Chinese and Indian descriptions. There are differences in the very way emotions are conceived. This book will speak to anyone interested in the many ways that human beings feel.

Description: Slavery Studies are one of the most consolidated fields in Brazilian historiography with various discussions on issues like slave agency, slavery and law, slavery and capitalism, slave families, demography of slavery, transatlantic slave trade, abolition etc. Taking into consideration these new trends of Brazilian slavery studies, this volume of collected articles allows leading scholars to present their research to a broader academic community.

Description: Since the very beginnings of the digital humanities, Papyrology has been in the vanguard of the application of information technologies to its own scientific purposes, for both theoretical and practical reasons (the strong awareness towards the problems of human memory and the material ways of preserving it; the need to work with a multifarious and overwhelming amount of different data). After more than thirty years of development, we have now at our disposal the most advanced tools to make papyrological studies more and more effective, and even to create a new conception of "papyrology" and a new model of "edition" of the ancient documents. At this turining point, it is important to build an epistemological framework including all the different expressions of Digital Papyrology, to trace a historical sketch setting the background of the contemporary tools, and to provide a clear overview of the current theoretical and technological trends, so that all the possibilities currently available can be exploited following uniform pathways. The volume represents an innovative attempt to deal with such topics, usually relegated into very quick and general treatments within journal articles or papyrological handbooks.

Description: The hands-on and experimental approach of DEMA offers the unique opportunity to ‘grasp’ media and communication technologies in their concrete materiality and tangibility and to (re)-sensitize historians and communication scholars for the material qualities and performative dimension of past media devices and practices.

Description: Material is the substance of the world of things. Literary sources suggest that materiality was part of aesthetic perception, loaded with meaning and bound to function even in antiquity. To date, this complex reading of material has not been adequately represented in archaeological research. The present volume addresses this oversight by examining the decorative use of material in Roman Italy between the Late Republic and Early Imperial period.

Description: This collection of essays by a team of international scholars offers a wide-ranging examination of the key concepts of 'space and time' in the work of the Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea (1st-2nd centuries CE). Combining philological and socio-cultural approaches, the essays demonstrate how space and time can shed new light on Plutarch's biographical, philosophical, religious and political thought.

Description: What is development, what has it been in the past, and what can historians learn from studying the history of development? How has the field of the history of development evolved over time, and where should it be going in the future?

Description: This collection of essays analyzes the construction of the "fall" of Rome from a range of perspectives native to different disciplines. Subjects addressed include comparable discourses dating from the earlier history of Rome, the perception of this historical moment by writers living at the time it occurred, and its reception in Byzantium and Western Europe during the Middle Ages.

Description: To integrate the regions of the early Islamic Empire from Central Asia to North Africa, transregional and regional elites of various backgrounds were essential. The papers analyze elite groups, their structures and networks, within selected regions across geographical, religious and social boundaries. While each region seems to be different, certain common patterns of governance and interaction made the largest empire of Late Antiquity work.

Description: The Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies offers in three volumes the first comprehensive discussion of economic development in the empires of the Afro-Eurasian world region to elucidate the conditions under which large quantities of goods and people moved across continents and between empires. Volume 3: Frontier-Zone Processes and Transimperial Exchange analyzes frontier zones as particular landscapes of encounter, economic development, and transimperial network formation. The chapters offer problematizing approaches to frontier zone processes as part of and in between empires, with the goal of better understanding how and why goods and resources moved across the Afro-Eurasian region. Key frontiers in mountains and steppes, along coasts, rivers, and deserts are investigated in depth, demonstrating how local landscapes, politics, and pathways explain network practices and participation in long-distance trade. The chapters seek to retrieve local knowledge ignored in popular Silk Road models and to show the potential of frontier-zone research for understanding the Afro-Eurasian region as a connected space. ; The Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies offers in three volumes the first comprehensive discussion of economic development in the empires of the Afro-Eurasian world region to elucidate the conditions under which large quantities of goods and people moved across continents and between empires. Volume 3: Frontier-Zone Processes and Transimperial Exchange analyzes frontier zones as particular landscapes of encounter, economic development, and transimperial network formation. The chapters offer problematizing approaches to frontier zone processes as part of and in between empires, with the goal of better understanding how and why goods and resources moved across the Afro-Eurasian region. Key frontiers in mountains and steppes, along coasts, rivers, and deserts are investigated in depth, demonstrating how local landscapes, politics, and pathways explain network practices and participation in long-distance trade. The chapters seek to retrieve local knowledge ignored in popular Silk Road models and to show the potential of frontier-zone research for understanding the Afro-Eurasian region as a connected space.

Description: Almost everyone has used a guidebook, when travelling, or in the armchair at home. But how was the guidebook born? In this book, scholars from various disciplines argue that the guidebook emerged in Rome in the late Middle Ages, to form a surprisingly consistent model for guidebooks up to our time. The descriptions of must-see monuments, recommended routes, and value-laden instructions have guided travellers to Rome through more than 1000 years.

Description: This book explores the relationships between ancient Roman and Confucian thought, paying particular attention to their relevance for the contemporary world. More than 10 scholars from all around the world offer thereby a reference work for the comparative research between Roman (and early Greek) and Eastern thought, setting new trends in the panorama of Classical and Comparative Studies.

Description: In this preface, a synopsis of the conference preceding this volume is followed by a concise description of the DramaNet project; after an outline of various ties between rhetoric and drama, including copious references for heuristic purposes and future research, each contributor’s previous work in this field is briefly referred to, complemented by an abstract of the essay in the present volume.

Description: This volume presents recent research on the relationship between the material format of text-bearing artefacts, the texts they carry, and their genre. The essays cover a vast period, from the counting stones of the late 4th millennium BCE to the time of the Great Hittite Kingdom in the 2nd millennium BCE. The breadth of substantive focus allows new insights of relevance to scholars in both Ancient Middle Eastern studies and the humanities.

Description: This book-length study is concerned with the various - vicarious and delegative - devices pertaining to rhetorical ventriloquism (sermocinatio, ethopoeia, prosopopoeia, etc.) - including their technical, conceptual, and applicative history in European and Western literatures, from Ancient to (Early) Modern times. It is published as an Online Supplement (.pdf) to (the article "Rhetorical Ventriloquism in Application", forming part of) the following DramaNet volume: History and Drama. The Pan-European Tradition. Eds. Joachim Küpper, Jan Mosch, Elena Penskaya. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019.

Description: Throughout Egypt’s long history, pottery sherds and flakes of limestone were commonly used for drawings and short-form texts in a number of languages. These objects are conventionally called ostraca, and thousands of them have been and continue to be discovered. This volume highlights some of the methodologies that have been developed for analyzing the archaeological contexts, material aspects, and textual peculiarities of ostraca.

Description: This volume explores the entangled history of Constantinople and Jerusalem in Late Antiquity. The two cities were powerful symbols of Empire and Church, interconnected and interdependent in multiple ways. Covering the transition between Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Middle Ages, distinguished international scholars investigate art, ceremony, religion, ideology, and imperial rule in these vibrant, inspiring and fascinating urban hubs.

Description: Sign-bearing artifacts are immanent elements of sacred spaces in many cultures. Often, one encounters a phenomenon there that might be described as deliberate “invisibility,” the conscious “concealment” of artefacts and writing. The volume examines this interplay of presence and invisibility using the example of sign-bearing artefacts in sacral spaces in various religions in the Near East and Europe.

Description: Western expansion in North America has mainly been described as either a linear sequence energized by nineteenth-century nation-building processes at a moving frontier, or as the practice of settler colonialism and its exploitation of resources and displacement of nonwhite peoples. This book suggests that shifting the focus from this binary pattern towards spatial imaginations and spatialization processes—a new theoretical framework developed at SFB 1199—provides novel insights into the placemaking dynamics of the American West. It brings to light a discursive diversity that often contradicts unidirectional interpretive patterns. It becomes clear that while some discourses solidified into spatial metanarratives like the character-shaping clash of civilizations at the frontier or manifest destiny, alternative spatial imaginations exist juxtaposed to or obfuscated by canonical interpretations. Making use of a variety of sources (including works of literature, poetry, newspapers, paintings, and speeches) to access spatialization processes on several sociocultural scales, the book presents a careful exploration of the parameters that inform(ed) the creation, affirmation, and subversion of spatial imagination of the American West throughout the nineteenth century from the perspective of American Studies.

Description: The volume aims at taking the materiality of past media devices seriously and explores the heuristic possibilities of an experimental study of these devices. It offers a sophisticated reflection on the epistemological and heuristic potential of hands-on media historical research.

Description: In the late 10th century, an anonymous author wrote the fictitious account of a religious dialogue between Archbishop Gregentios and the Jewish scribe Herban and included it in a life of Gregentios based on earlier sources, which indicate that he was a missionary in Yemen in pre-Islamic times. Albrecht Berger examines and translates these texts, and he presents a critical edition. Key Features first edition of a large proportion of the extant texts critical edition using all known manuscripts, including those which only recently have been discovered

Description: This is the first volume dedicated exclusively to the historiographical work by Seneca the Elder, after the recent discovery of a fragmentary roll from Herculaneum bearing traces of his Historiae. Contributions not only focus on the discovery of the papyrus roll, but also offer a broader view on early-imperial Roman historiography, to which the new perspectives opened by the rediscovery of Seneca the Elder’s Historiae greatly contribute.

Description: Forty years before the war of annihilation in eastern Europe and the Holocaust, German colonial troops in German South West Africa perpetrated the first genocide of the twentieth century. From Windhoek to Auschwitz? interrogates the relationship between colonialism and National Socialism, using genocide, the 'racial state', and systems of forced labour as points of departure for comparative observation. The book is an indispensable document in the intensive debate among German and international scholars about the postcolonial expansion of German history, and it offers a fresh look at the history of colonialism and also the 'Third Reich'.; Forty years before the war of annihilation in eastern Europe and the Holocaust, German colonial troops in German South West Africa perpetrated the first genocide of the twentieth century. From Windhoek to Auschwitz? interrogates the relationship between colonialism and National Socialism, using genocide, the 'racial state', and systems of forced labour as points of departure for comparative observation. The book is an indispensable document in the intensive debate among German and international scholars about the postcolonial expansion of German history, and it offers a fresh look at the history of colonialism and also the 'Third Reich'.

Description: The theme of the first issue of the yearbook HIC deals with "Participatory Knowledge". It will target the various ways knowledge is rooted in society through the participation of individuals and groups. Topics may include different kinds of knowledge harnessed within or through communities, modes of producing, circulating, and recording knowledge content.

Description: A cross-cultural, comparative view on the transition from a predominant ‘culture of handwriting’ to a predominant ‘culture of print’ in the late medieval and early modern periods is provided here, combining research on Christian and Jewish European book culture with findings on East Asian manuscript and print culture. This approach highlights interactions instead of retracing a linear process from the manuscript book to its printed successor.

Description: This edited volume explores the intermediality of image and text in Graeco-Roman sculpture. Through its choice of authors, disciplinary backgrounds are deliberately merged in order to bridge the traditional gap between archaeologists, epigraphists and philologists, who for a long time studied statues, material inscriptions and literary epigrams within the closely confined borders of their individual disciplines. Through its choice of objects, privileging works of which there are significant material remains, through its inclusion of all kinds of figural-cum-inscriptional designs, ranging from grand sculpture to reliefs and ‘decorative’ marble-objects, and through its methodological emphasis on ‘close viewing’ (and reading!) of individual objects, this volume focuses on the materiality of both sculpture and inscription. This perspective is enriched by two comparative chapters on inscribing Greek vases and Roman walls (graffiti). The intermediality of image and inscription is envisaged from various thematic angles, including the intricacies of combining image and epigram (both materially and in literary projection), the original production and reception of inscribed sculpture in its ‘long life’, the viewing and ‘reading’ of sculpture in a space of movement, the issue of (re-)naming statues, and the image and inscription in its social and gender-historical context.

Description: Gods dwell in human environments in multiple ways. They move into imaginary spaces and explore the cosmos. This book analyzes the mapping of gods through a specific lens: their naming. By proposing this new perspective, it sheds light on ritual practices and representations of gods in the whole Mediterranean, from Italy to Mesopotamia, from Greece to North Africa and Egypt. Names and spaces enable to better define, differentiate, and connect gods.

Description: The eleven contributions in the volume examine the terminology used to refer to enslaved people and people in other forms of strong asymmetrical dependency as well as narratives by means of which dependency has been either justified or challenged. The articles address a wide range of historical contexts – from medieval Scandinavia and the Fatimid Empire to the history of abolition in Martinique and human rights violations in contemporary society.