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This collection of essays contributes to the growing field of ‘encounter studies’ within the domain of cultural history. The strength of this work is the multi- and interdisciplinary approach, with papers on a broad range of historical times, places, and subjects. While each essay makes a valuable and original contribution to its relevant field(s), the collection as a whole is an attempt to probe more general questions and issues concerning the productive outcomes of cultural encounters throughout the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. The collection is divided into three sections organised thematically and chronologically. The first, ‘Encounters with the Past,’ focuses on the r...
This volume brings together the leading experts in the history of European Oriental Studies. Their essays present a comprehensive history of the teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe, covering a wide geographical area from southern to northern Europe and discussing the many ways and purposes for which the Arabic language was taught and studied by scholars, theologians, merchants, diplomats and prisoners. The contributions shed light on different methods and contents of language teaching in a variety of academic, scholarly and missionary contexts in the Protestant and the Roman Catholic world. But they also look beyond the institutional history of Arabic studies and consider the importance of alternative ways in which the study of Arabic was persued. Contributors are Asaph Ben Tov, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Sonja Brentjes, Mordechai Feingold, Mercedes García-Arenal, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Aurélien Girard, Alastair Hamilton, Jan Loop, Nuria Martínez de Castilla Muñoz, Simon Mills, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Bernd Roling, Arnoud Vrolijk. This title, in its entirety, is available online in Open Access.
In the terms of Durkheimian sociology, conversion is a fait social. Although they are rarely treated as a cultural phenomenon, conversions can obviously be examined for the norms, values and presuppositions of the cultures in which they take place. Thus conversion can help us to shed light on a particular culture. At the same time, the term evokes a dramatic appeal that suggests a kind of suddenness, although in most cases conversion implies a more gradual process of establishing and defining a new - religious - identity. From 21-24 May, 2003, the University of Groningen hosted an international conference on 'Cultures of Conversion'. The contributions have been edited in two volumes, which p...
This book studies medieval theories of angelology insofar as they made groundbreaking contributions to medieval philosophy. It centers on the period from Bonaventure to Ockham while also discussing some original positions by earlier thinkers.
Physico-theology celebrated the observation of nature as a way toward the recognition of God as Creator and to demonstrate the compatibility of the biblical record with the new science. It was a crucial, albeit often underestimated element in the intellectual as well as socio-cultural establishment of the new science in western and central Europe beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. The importance of physico-theology in enhancing the acceptance of the new science among a broad educated public cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, this insight has not yet received much attention in the history of early modern science, chiefly because the history of physico-theology tends to highlight ...
Deities, demons, and angels became important protagonists in the magic of the Late Antique world, and were also the main reasons for the condemnation of magic in the Christian era. Supplicatory incantations, rituals of coercion, enticing suffumigations, magical prayers and mystical songs drew spiritual powers to the humain domain. Next to the magician's desire to regulate fate and fortune, it was the communion with the spirit world that gave magic the potential to purify and even deify its practitioners. The sense of elation and the awareness of a metaphysical order caused magic to merge with philosophy (notably Neoplatonism). The heritage of Late Antique theurgy would be passed on to the Ar...
This volume explores the various strategies by which appropriate pasts were construed in scholarship, literature, art, and architecture in order to create “national”, regional, or local identities in late medieval and early modern Europe. Because authority was based on lineage, political and territorial claims were underpinned by historical arguments, either true or otherwise. Literature, scholarship, art, and architecture were pivotal media that were used to give evidence of the impressive old lineage of states, regions, or families. These claims were related not only to classical antiquity but also to other periods that were regarded as antiquities, such as the Middle Ages, especially ...
The question of constructing tradition, concepts of origin, and memory as well as techniques and practices of knowledge transmission, are central for cultures in general. In esotericism, however, such questions and techniques play an outstanding role and are widely reflected upon, in its literature. Esoteric paradigms not only understand themselves in elaborated mytho-poetical narratives as bearers of “older”, “hidden”, “higher” knowledge. They also claim their knowledge to be of a particular origin. And they claim this knowledge has been transmitted by particular (esoteric) means, media and groups. Consequently, esotericism not only involves the construction of its own tradition; it can even be understood as a specific form of tradition and transmission. The various studies of the present voume, which contains the papers of a conference held in Tübingen in July 2007, provide an overview of the most important concepts and ways of constructing tradition in esotericism.
Since 1971, the International Congress for Neo-Latin Studies has been organised every three years in various cities in Europe and North America. In August 2012, Münster in Germany was the venue of the fifteenth Neo-Latin conference, held by the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies. The proceedings of the Münster conference have been collected in this volume under the motto „ Litterae neolatinae, sedes et quasi domicilia rerum religiosarum et politicarum – Religion and Politics in Neo-Latin Literature”. Forty-five individual and five plenary papers spanning the period from the Renaissance to the present offer a variety of themes covering a range of genres such as history, literature, philology, art history, and religion. The contributions will be of relevance not only for scholarly readers, but also for an interested non-professional audience.
The early modern period was rife with attempts to re-imagine the world and the human place within it. This volume looks at natural philosophers, playwrights, historians, and other figures in the period 1500-1700 as a means of accessing the plethora of world models that circulated in Europe during this era.