Art and Material Culture in the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds : Studies in Honour of Erica Cruikshank Dodd /
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"Dedicated to Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Art and Material Culture in the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds offers new perspectives on the Christian and Muslim communities of the east Mediterranean from medieval to contemporary times. The contributors examine how people from diverse religious backgrounds adapted to their changing political landscapes and show that artistic patronage, consumption, and practices are interwoven with constructed narratives. The essays consider material and textual evidence for painted media, architecture, and the creative process in Byzantium, Crusader-era polities, the Ottoman empire, and the modern Middle East, thus demonstrating the importance of the past in understanding the present"--
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004457140
9789004457133
Religious categories and the construction of the indigenous /
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This volume significantly advances the academic debate surrounding the taxonomy and the categorisation of 'indigenous religion'. Developing approaches from leading scholars in the field, this edited volume provides the space for established and rising voices to discuss the highly problematic topic of how indigenous 'religion' can be defined and conceptualised. Constructing the Indigenous highlights the central issues in the debate between those supporting and refining current academic frameworks and those who would argue that present thinking remains too dependant on misunderstandings that arise from definitions of religion that are too inflexible, and from problems caused by the World Religion paradigm. This book will prove essential reading for those that wish to engage with contemporary discussions regarding the definitions of religion and their relations to the indigenous category.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004328983 :
2214-3270 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Contextual biblical hermeneutics as multicentric dialogue : towards a Singaporean reading of Daniel /
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In this book, Stephen Lim offers a contextual way of reading biblical texts that reconceptualises context as an epistemic space caught between the modern/colonial world system and local networks of knowledge production. In this light, he proposes a multicentric dialogical approach that takes into account the privilege of specialist readers in relation to nonspecialist readers. At the same time, he rethinks what dialogue with the Other means in a particular context, which then decides the conversation partners brought in from the margins. This is applied to his context in Singapore through a reading of Daniel where perspectives from western biblical scholarship, Asian traditions and Singaporean cultural products are brought together to dialogue on issues of transformative praxis and identity formation.
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Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--King's College London, 2017, titled Asian Biblical hermeneutics as multicentric dialogue : towards a Singaporean way of reading. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004399259 :
0928-0731 ;
The performative structure : ritualizing the pyramid of Pepy I /
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In The Performative Structure: Ritualizing the Pyramid of Pepy I , Nils Billing investigates the ancient Egyptian pyramid complex as a performative structure, ritualized through the operative faculty inherent in monumental architecture, text, and image. The main body of research is given over to an analysis of the Pyramid Texts found in the pyramid of king Pepy I of the Sixth Dynasty (ca 2300 BCE). It is demonstrated that the texts were distributed on distinct space-bound thematic and ritual levels in order to perpetuate a cultic activity from which the lord of the tomb could be transformed by moving through the different chambers and corridors towards the exit. Just as the decoration program of the mortuary temple once delineated the ritual and ideological structure of the royal mortuary cult, the corpus of texts distributed in the pyramid provided a monumentalized performative structure that effectuated the perennial rebirth for its owner.
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"This is a lightly revised version of a doctoral thesis in the History of Religions, defended in the spring term of 2013 at the Faculty of Theology, Uppsala University." :
1 online resource. :
9789004372375 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Faith in the familiar : religion, spirituality, and place in the south of the Netherlands /
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Faith in the Familiar is an ethnography of religious change in the Netherlands, a country that has moved from strongly pillarized to strongly secularist in the space of fifty years. This book shows how people look back on this, but also how Catholic rituals continue to play a role in the reproduction of place. Furthermore, it shows how forms of spiritualism and new age have become part of a pluralistic local religious landscape, and are used to create new ways of relating to religious authority and to reshape personal relationships. Situating itself within general theories of religious change in Western Europe, it offers a contribution to this discussion from an angle that is often neglected, focusing on locality, rather than on globalization; on what happens to 'old' religion, rather than on new religious trends, on popular forms of 'spirituality' rather than on middle class and highbrow spirituality.
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1 online resource (ix, 186 pages) :
9789004214934 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Religions and education in antiquity : studies in honour of Michel Desjardins /
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Religions and Education in Antiquity gathers ten essays on teaching and learning in the contexts of ancient Western religions, including Judaism, early Christianity and Gnostic Christian traditions. Beginning with an overview of religious education in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds, editor Alex Damm and the contributors together demonstrate the mutual influence of religion and education on each other; the relevance of educational traditions in addressing (for instance) historical or exegetical issues; and the thoroughgoing importance of education to religious life across time and space in antiquity. Highly useful to scholars of religion, theology, classics and education, this volume affords a state of the art study on pedagogy and learning in ancient religious contexts.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004384613 :
0169-8834 ;
Fabrications of the Greek past : religion, tradition, and modern identities /
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Taking seriously critiques of historiography produced in recent decades, Vaia Touna advocates for an alternative approach to the way the past is studied. From Euripides' tragedy Hippolytus , to the notion of voluntary associations in the Greco-Roman world, to the authenticity of traditional villages in Greece, Fabrications of the Greek Past argues that meanings (and thus identities) do not transcend time and space, and neither do they hide deep in the core of material artifacts, awaiting to be discovered by the careful interpreter. Instead, this book demonstrates that meanings are always relative to their present-day context; they are historical products created by social actors through their ever-contemporary acts of identification. ---- "By disturbing the notion of an easily knowable Greek past, Touna makes an invaluable contribution to critical scholarship regarding ancient cultures and to contemporary theory about ideological uses of history." - Naomi Goldenberg, University of Ottawa "From an insider to Greek tradition, expert in its modern appropriations and translations, Fabrications is an important stimulus to metatheory and self-reflexivity in the study of religion, ancient and contemporary." - Gerhard van den Heever, University of South Africa "Vaia Touna expertly dissects modern discourses on the past, arguing that our contemporary interests don't just color our accounts of the past, they constitute them. A fantastic book." - Brent Nongbri, author of Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004348615 :
2214-3270 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Dimitrie Cantemir, salvation of the sage and ruin of the sinful world /
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This is a thoroughly revised and expanded version of the first edition of the Arabic version of Dimitrie Cantemir's The Divan or the Sage's Dispute with the World (Ṣalāḥ al-ḥakīm wa-fasād al-ʿālam al-ḏamīm) (Iaşi, 1698), his first printed book, the earliest ethical treatise in Romanian literature and a testimony to his wide knowledge, reading, and proficiency in foreign languages. Completed in 1705 by Athanasius III Dabbās, Patriarch of the Antiochian Church (1684-1694, 1720-1724), the Arabic text is accompanied by the first translation into a modern language, English. Book III contains Cantemir's version of the Latin work Stimuli virtutum, fraena peccatorum (Amsterdam, 1682) by the Unitarian Andzrej Wiszowaty (Andreas Wissovatius) of Raków (Poland), a chief representative of the Polish Brethren. Thus, in the space of twenty-three years Central-European Protestant ideas reached the Arab Christians of Ottoman Syria, by way of Greek and Arabic.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004311022 :
2213-0039 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Wissensvermittlung im Gespräch : eine Studie zu klassisch-arabischen Dialogen /
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Wissensvermittlung im Gespräch ist die erste Monographie über die Verwendung der Dialogform in der arabischen Literatur. Regula Forster untersucht dazu ein umfangreiches Korpus klassisch-arabischer Dialoge ganz unterschiedlichen Inhalts (Religion, Jurisprudenz, Alchemie, Geschichte et cetera) aus der Zeit zwischen dem 8. und der Mitte des 11. Jahrhunderts. Sie zeigt auf, dass arabische Dialoge nicht einfach als dialogisierte Abhandlungen zu verstehen sind. Vielmehr erschaffen Dialoge eigene literarische Universen, indem sie Figuren in Zeit und Raum agieren lassen und spezifische Formen der Argumentation und Textstrukturierung verwenden. Durch die spezifische literarische Form des wissensvermittelnden Dialogs wird auch der Inhalt der Texte gelenkt. This is the first book-length study about the usage of the form of literary dialogue in Arabic literature. Regula Forster studies an extensive corpus of Classical Arabic didactic dialogues on very different subjects (religion, jurisprudence, alchemy, history, et cetera) from the 8th to the mid-11th centuries. She shows that Arabic dialogues are by no means dialogised treatises. Rather, they create a literary universe of their own. In this universe, figures are shown to be acting and speaking in time and space. Therefore, the dialogues use specific forms of argumentation and structuring. Through the use of the literary form of dialogue the content of these texts is shaped and the knowledge presented channelled.
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1 online resource (xi, 532 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 480-509), repertorium of texts, and indexes. :
9789004326729 :
0929-2403 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Ottoman mobilization of manpower in the First World War : between voluntarism and resistance /
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The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War offers a multi-faceted story of how the Ottoman Empire tried to cope with the challenges of permanent mobilization under total war conditions which reshaped state-society relations. By focusing mainly on Anatolia and the Muslim population, Mehmet Beşikçi argues that the conditions of mobilization pushed the Ottoman state to become more centralized, authoritarian and nationalist, but the increasing dependence on people paradoxically also enlarged their space of action vis-à-vis state authority. The book demonstrates that people's responses to the state's needs constituted a wide spectrum ranging from voluntary support to open resistance such as desertion. In turn, the state responded by revising its mobilization policies and reformulating new mechanisms of control at the local level.
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1 online resource (viii, 346 pages) : mappages. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004235298 :
1380-6076 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Iconography of Family Members in Egypt's Elite Tombs of the Old Kingdom /
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In The Iconography of Family Members in Egypt's Elite Tombs of the Old Kingdom, , Jing Wen offers a comprehensive survey of how ancient Egyptians portrayed their family members in the reliefs of an elite tomb. Through the analysis of the depiction of family members, this book investigates familial relations, the funerary cult of the dead, ancestor worship, and relevant texts. It provides a new hypothesis and perspective that would update our understanding of the Egyptian funerary practice and familial ideology. The scenes of family members are not a record of family history but language games of the tomb owner that convey specific meaning to those who enter the chapel despite time and space.
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1 online resource :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004528628
9789004528635
Brill's companion to Propertius /
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The present volume provides a comprehensive guide to one of the most difficult authors of classical antiquity. All the major aspects of Propertius' work, its themes, the poetical technique, its sources and models, as well as the history of Propertian scholarship and the vexed problems of textual criticism, are dealt with in contributions by Joan Booth, James Butrica, Francis Cairns, Elaine Fantham, Paolo Fedeli, Adrian Hollis, Peter Knox, Robert Maltby, Tobias Reinhardt and Richard Tarrant; due space is also given to the reception of the author from antiquity and the renaissance (Simona Gavinelli) up to the modern age (Bernhard Zimmermann). At the centre stands an interpretation of the four transmitted books by Gesine Manuwaldt, Hans-Peter Syndikus, John Kevin Newman and Hans-Christian Günther.
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1 online resource (ix, 476 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047404835 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Staying Roman : conquest and identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 /
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"In 416, when preaching a sermon on the psalms in late Roman Carthage, Augustine was able to ask his audience, 'Who now knows which nations in the Roman empire were what, when all have become Romans, and all are called Romans?'1 Yet already by the time Augustine addressed his Carthaginian audience the continued unity of the Roman Mediterranean was being called into question. The defeat and death of the Roman emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378 had set the stage for a new phase of conflict between the empire and its non-Roman neighbours ; and over the course of the fifth century Roman power collapsed in the West, where it was succeeded by a number of sub-Roman kingdoms. Questions that had seemed trivial to Augustine were suddenly and painfully alive : what did it mean to be 'Roman' in the changed circumstances of the fifth and later centuries? And (from a twenty-first-century perspective) what became of the idea of Romanness in the West once Roman power collapsed?"--
"What did it mean to be Roman once the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West? Staying Roman examines Roman identities in the region of modern Tunisia and Algeria between the fifth-century Vandal conquest and the seventh-century Islamic invasions. Using historical, archaeological and epigraphic evidence, this study argues that the fracturing of the empire's political unity also led to a fracturing of Roman identity along political, cultural and religious lines, as individuals who continued to feel 'Roman' but who were no longer living under imperial rule sought to redefine what it was that connected them to their fellow Romans elsewhere. The resulting definitions of Romanness could overlap, but were not always mutually reinforcing. Significantly, in late antiquity Romanness had a practical value, and could be used in remarkably flexible ways to foster a sense of similarity or difference over space, time and ethnicity, in a wide variety of circumstances"--
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Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 2004, entitled: Staying Roman : Vandals, Moors, and Byzantines in late antique North Africa, 400-700. :
xviii, 438 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm. :
Includes bibliographical references (pages 379-419) and index. :
9780521196970
Literature and the encounter with immanence /
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In Literature and the Encounter with Immanence Brynnar Swenson collects nine original essays that approach the relationship between literature and immanence through methodologies grounded in the philosophy of Spinoza. One of Spinoza's most provocative claims is a simple declaration of ignorance: "We do not know what a body can do." A literary theory based on immanence privileges the ontological status of the text and the material act of reading. Rather than ask what a text means, the essays here ask what a text can do. Each essay documents a distinct literary and philosophical encounter with immanence and, as a result, opens up a space to read literature as one would read philosophy and vice versa .
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1 online resource (ix, 192 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004311930 :
0929-8436 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Religions and trade : religious formation, transformation, and cross-cultural exchange between East and West /
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In Religions and Trade a number of international scholars investigate the ways in which eastern and western religions were formed and transformed from the perspective of "trade." Trade changes religions. Religions expand through the help of trade infrastructures, and religions extend and enrich the trade relations with cultural and religious "commodities" which they contribute to the "market place" of human culture and religion. This leads to the inclusion, demarcation and densification as well as the amalgamation of religious traditions. In an attempt to find new pathways into the world of religious dynamics, this collection of essays focuses on four elements or "commodities" of religious interchange: topologies of religious space, religious symbol systems, religious knowledge, and religious-ethical ways of life.
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Includes index. :
1 online resource. :
9789004255302
Ritual dynamics in Jewish and Christian contexts : between Bible and liturgy /
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Ritual Dynamics in Jewish and Christian Contexts investigates questions that arise in modern ritual studies concerning Jewish and Christian religious communities: How did their religious rituals develop? Where did different ritual communities and their ritual texts interact? How did religious communities and their authoritative texts respond to change, and how did change influence religious rituals? The volume is a product of the interdisciplinary and international research efforts taken by the Research Centre "Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present" at the Universität Erfurt (Germany) and unites the voices of important senior and emerging scholars in the field. It focuses on antiquity and the medieval period but also considers examples from the early modern and modern period in Europe
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004405950
All the glory of Adam : liturgical anthropology in the Dead Sea scrolls /
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All the Glory of Adam examines Dead Sea Scroll texts which pertain to the Qumran community's understanding of (a) a transcendent, angelomorphic or divine humanity and (b) the role of cultic space and time, and the experience of worship, in the formation of such a humanity. The book contains twelve chapters. The first three are devoted to material which either antedates or provides important cognate material to the peculiarly sectarian material studied in the remaining chapters (esp. the Book of Noah and Sirach). Chapters 4-6 examine texts devoted to a divine humanity (4Q381, Hodayoth , 1Q/4QInstruction et cetera), the divine or angelic Moses (4Q374 andamp; 4Q377) and the heavenly human priesthood (1QSb, 4Q511, 4Q418 81, 4Q545, 4Q541, 4Q468b et cetera). The seventh chapter discusses the mystical and theophanic significance of the high priest's breastpiece at Qumran. Chapters 8-11 are a revisionist reading of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice as a liturgy for a divine humanity and chapter 13 proposes a new interpretation of 1QM 10-17 in the same vein. Apart from all DSS scholars the book will be useful for anyone working on biblical anthropology, messianism and Christology, and temple or cultic theology.
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1 online resource (xii, 546 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 481-497) and indexes. :
9789004350403 :
0169-9962 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Minority religions under Irish law : Islam in national and international context /
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Minority Religions under Irish Law focuses the spotlight specifically on the legal protections afforded in Ireland to minority religions, generally, and to the Muslim community, in particular. Although predominantly focused on the Irish context, the book also boasts contributions from leading international academics, considering questions of broader global importance such as how to create an inclusive environment for minority religions and how to regulate religious tribunals best. Reflecting on issues as diverse as the right to education, marriage recognition, Islamic finance and employment equality, Minority Religions under Irish Law provides a comprehensive and fresh look at the legal space occupied by many rapidly growing minority religions in Ireland, with a special focus on the Muslim community.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004398252
The Shape of Stories : Narrative Structures in Cuneiform Literature /
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How were narratives composed in the ancient Near East? What patterns and principles, constraints and considerations guided the shaping of cuneiform stories? The study of narrative structures has emerged as a promising approach to the textual heritage of the cuneiform world. Engaging with practically any ancient text - whether literary, historical, or religious - requires some understanding of the narrative forms that shaped their content. This volume gives researchers the tools to better understand those form, illustrating each approach to narrative analysis with a case study from the cultures of the ancient Near East: Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite. .
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1 online resource (368 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004537149
9789004539761