In Esoteric Images: Decoding the Late Herat School of Painting Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the pictorial language which flourished in the city of Herat, modern Afghanistan, under the rule of the last Timurid ruler, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (r.1469-1506). This study focuses on one illustrated manuscript of a poem entitled Khamsa by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, kept in the British Library under code Or.6810. Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the paintings, reveals the syntax behind them and thus deciphers the message of the whole manuscript. The book combines scholarly efforts to interpret theological-political lessons embedded in one of the foremost Persian schools of art against the background of the court dynamic of an influential medieval power in its final years.
This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes. While all the plays employ similar dramatic devices for "putting skepticism on stage", the study explores how these dramas, however, give different "answers" to the challenges posed by skepticism in relation to their respective historico-cultural and "ideological" contexts.
In Esoteric Images: Decoding the Late Herat School of Painting Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the pictorial language which flourished in the city of Herat, modern Afghanistan, under the rule of the last Timurid ruler, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (r.1469-1506). This study focuses on one illustrated manuscript of a poem entitled Khamsa by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, kept in the British Library under code Or.6810. Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the paintings, reveals the syntax behind them and thus deciphers the message of the whole manuscript. The book combines scholarly efforts to interpret theological-political lessons embedded in one of the foremost Persian schools of art against the background of the court dynamic of an influential medieval power in its final years.
The special issue of Journal of Classical Sociology is an outcome of MBSF activities. Edited by Nitzan Rothem and Shlomo Fischer, this volume points to the significance of Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage for contemporary social thought and research. MBSF articles include: Orit Gazit on migration and van Gennep's theory of the limit, Ruthie Abeliovich on Les rites de passage's contribution to the field of Performance Studies, Moshe Blidstein on the theoretical problem of purity, and Nitzan Rothem on Turner's and van Gennep's frameworks vis-à-vis contemporary warfare. Also in this volume: Ilana Silber on gift theory, Nicole Hochner on rhythm and social kinesis and Harvey Goldberg on early 20th-century social thought.
The Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire examines the history of the Mongol Empire, the pre-imperial era of Mongolian history that preceded it, and the various Mongol successor states that continued to dominate Eurasia long after the breakdown of Mongol unity.
This second edition contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture of the Mongol Empire. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Mongol Empire.
For the first time, Volume 1 compiles all extant dramatic works by Sammy Gronemann published in German. They include the Purim play Haman’s Flight written for Martin Buber (1900), Gronemann’s first successful comedy The Wise Man and the Fool, written around 1940 in Tel Aviv, a work that, after Gronemann’s death, went on in Hebrew translation and with songs by Nathan Alterman to become one of the first successful musicals in the Israeli theater.
This volume presents the proceedings of the international conference “Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain”, held in 2012 as part of the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet). Implementing the concept of culture as a virtual network, it investigates Early modern European drama and its global dissemination. The 12 articles of the volume – all written by experts in the field teaching in the United Kingdom, the USA, Russia, Switzerland, India and Germany – focus on a selection of English and Spanish dramas from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Analysing and comparing motifs, formal parameters as well as plot structures, they discuss the commonalities and differences of Early modern drama in England and Spain.
Oxford University Press
Moshe Blidstein Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions Charts the development of a multifaceted discourse of purity in early Christianity, drawing on, rejecting, and reworking previous traditions Provides analysis of many dimensions of ancient Christian purity, including dietary restrictions, death pollution, ancient psychology and demonology, sexuality, and church rituals Focuses on the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, and the writings of Paul, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen
This book (by Palgrave Macmillan UK ) explores the experiences of people who struggled with fertility problems in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. Motherhood was central to early modern women’s identity and was even seen as their path to salvation. To a lesser extent, fatherhood played an important role in constructing proper masculinity. When childbearing failed this was seen not only as a medical problem but as a personal emotional crisis. Infertility in Early Modern England highlights the experiences of early modern infertile couples: their desire for children, the social stigmas they faced, and the ways that social structures and religious beliefs gave meaning to infertility. It also describes the methods of treating fertility problems, from home-remedies to water cures. Offering a multi-faceted view, the book demonstrates the centrality of religion to every aspect of early modern infertility, from understanding to treatment. It also highlights the ways in which infertility unsettled the social order by placing into question the gendered categories of femininity and masculinity.
The distinction that Praxagoras of Cos (4th-3rd c. BC) made between arteries and veins and his views on pulsation and pneuma are two significant turning points in the history of ideas and medicine. In this book Orly Lewis presents the fragmentary evidence for this topic and offers a fresh analysis of Praxagoras’ views on the soul and the functions of the heart and pneuma. In so doing, she highlights the empirical basis of Praxagoras’ views and his engagement with earlier medical debates and with Aristotle’s physiology. The study consists of an edition and translation of the relevant fragments (some absent from the standard 1958 edition) followed by a commentary and a synthetic analysis of Praxagoras’ views and their place in the history of medicine and ideas.
(Studies in Ancient Medicine 48; Brill: Leiden, 2017)
Mobility is one of the principle topics of humans, be it as nomads in former days, be it as frequent travellers for business or in leisure nowadays. Early in history, voyagers wrote their experiences down, but only very late travel stories become a respected desk in journalistic media. As special-interest-journalism it is and was highly coined by economic influence. The new book "Motor/Reise" - travel- and motor journalism - is part of the series "Journalismus Bibliothek", released by the renowned publisher Herbert von Halem Verlag, Cologne, Germany. The authors picture the history of travel- and mobility journalism from the ancient world until today. They consider new developments due to digital journalism - for instance travel blogs and mobile reporting -, ethical challenges, and the special role of photography in travel- and motorjournalism. Examples of best practice show freshmen and old-stagers how to engage in modern travel- and mobility journalism, and how to deal self-confidently with demands of makers, providers, and advertisers. Evelyn Runge and Hektor Haarkötter have intensivley worked as journalists themselves and clearly enrich their writing from these experiences.
(Herbert von Halem Verlag, Cologne ,Germany, 2016)
http://www.halem-verlag.de/motor-reise/
In the aftermath of World War II, virtually all European countries struggled with the dilemma of citizens who had collaborated with Nazi occupiers. Jewish communities in particular faced the difficult task of confronting collaborators among their own ranks—those who had served on Jewish councils, worked as ghetto police, or acted as informants. European Jews established their own tribunals—honor courts—for dealing with these crimes, while Israel held dozens of court cases against alleged collaborators under a law passed two years after its founding. In Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust, editors Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder bring together scholars of Jewish social, cultural, political, and legal history to examine this little-studied and fascinating postwar chapter of Jewish history.
The volume begins by presenting the rationale for punishing wartime collaborators and purging them from Jewish society. Contributors go on to examine specific honor court cases in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, and France. One essay also considers the absence of an honor court in Belgium. Additional chapters detail the process by which collaborators were accused and brought to trial, the treatment of women in honor courts, and the unique political and social place of honor courts in the nascent state of Israel. Taken as a whole, the essays in Jewish Honor Courts illustrate the great caution and integrity brought to the agonizing task of identifying and punishing collaborators, a process that helped survivors to reclaim their agency, reassert their dignity, and work through their traumatic experiences.
For many years, the honor courts have been viewed as a taboo subject, leaving their hundreds of cases unstudied. Jewish Honor Courts uncovers this forgotten chapter of Jewish history and shows it to be an integral part of postwar Jewish rebuilding. Scholars of Jewish, European, and Israeli history as well as readers interested in issues of legal and social justice will be grateful for this detailed volume.
Finalist of the 2015 National Jewish Book Awards
Maurice Ebileeni explores the thematic and stylistic problems in the major novels of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner through Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theories. Against the background of the cultural, scientific, and historic changes that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, describing the landscape of ruins bequeathed to humanists by the forefathers of the Counter-Enlightenment movement (Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Baudelaire), Ebileeni proposes that Conrad and Faulkner wrote against impossible odds, metaphorically standing at the edge of a chaotic abyss that initially would spill over into the challenges of literary production. Both authors discovered that underneath, behind, or within the intuitively comprehensible narrative layers there exists a nonsensical dimension, constantly threatening to dissolve any attempt at producing intelligible meaning.Ebileeni argues that in Conrad's and Faulkner's major novels, the quest for meaning in confronting the prospects of nonsense becomes a necessary symptom of human experience to both avoid and engage the entropy of modern life.(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)
Intersexed people are born with many sexual characteristics which differ from the typical male/female bodies. Usually intersexed people are concealed from the public discourse and living with secrecy. How do intersexed people experience their lives? How do they live in the Israeli society or in any society with intersexed bodies?
This book analyzes intersexed bodies' variations; it describes the bio-medical discourse on intersexuality and the medical treatment exists in Israel and in many countries. It also follows the constant conflict between the body and the social norms. While the human body undefinable, multi-characteristic and infinite being, the social norms and cultural values reproduce and sustain the ideology of two possible human bodies, and constrain natural variation of soma-sexual developments. This conflict establishes the MinGuf process (soma-normalization process), in which the medical system normalizing intersexed bodies to fit to one sex/one gender category.
The MinGuf process includes diagnosing intersex bodies, shaping it through cosmetic surgeries and hormonal replacement therapy and follows it through time. Secrecy exists and plays significant role in the MinGuf process and together with the shaping practices intersexed people supposed to be in normal male/female bodies and heterosexual identities. Are they? Is it possible to normalize intersex bodies? How do parents of intersex people in Israel deals with the MinGuf process? on these questions and many more this book tries to answer in order to expose the crucial price intersexed people pay in order to exist and live in society who worship (imaginable) norms.
