What do scholars do when they talk about virtues (impartiality, accuracy) or vices (dogmatism, prejudice)? Against the common view that such high-minded talk is largely irrelevant to actual scholarly practice, this volume proposes to treat it as a practice in its own right. Drawing on case studies from the nineteent...

This book brings together contributions from leading figures in legal studies on analogy and related forms of reasoning in the law. Analogical reasoning-which relies on the concept of two different things being in some way like each other-is hugely important not just in the practice of law, but it is nonetheless str...

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography. Scholarship has productively combined analysis of medieval literary texts with modern queer theory – yet, too often, questions of gender are explored almost excl...

Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques or temples. Lars de Wildt interviews developers and players of games such as Assassin’s Creed to find out how and why the Pop Theology of Videogames is so appealing to modern audiences. Based...

Until currently there have been no specific publications, particularly in English, on women in traditional Islamic educational institutions in Indonesia, known as pesantren, which played a significant role in shaping the gender issues in the Indonesian Muslim community. This informative and insightful book contribut...

With the birth of the cult of the saints, their relics became valuables whose possession would guarantee prestige, protection, and spiritual benefits to a town, church, or monastery. For this reasonーat first with the aim of preserving the bodies of newly-executed martyrs from destruction and later of increasing the...

The lifetime of Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was marked by dramatic transformations in Europe. Cityscapes, aesthetic codes, social orders, political cultures, international travel and means of warfare developed beyond recognition; entire catalogues of hopes and fears were torn asunder and replaced by new ones during n...

This book addresses the shifting status of the humanities through a national case study spanning two centuries. The societal function of the humanities is considered from the flexible perspective of knowledge politics in order to historicize notions of impact and intellectual organization that tend to be taken for g...

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the north-eastern borderlands of Bangladesh, this book focuses on the everyday struggles of indigenous farmers threatened with losing their land due to such state programmes as the realignment of the national border, ecotourism, social forestry and the establishment o...

Views on climate change are often either pessimistic or optimistic. In this book Jan Jorrit Hasselaar discovers and explores a third way, one of hope. A debate within economics on risk and uncertainty brings him to theological questions and the concept of hope in the work of the late Jonathan Sacksーand to a renewed...

How did gender shape the expanding Jesuit enterprise in the early modern world? What did it take to become a missionary man? And how did missionary masculinity align itself with the European colonial project? This book highlights the central importance of male affective ties and masculine mimesis in the formation of...

Our current understanding of our world is nearly 350 years old. It stems from the ideas of Descartes and Newton and has brought us many great things, including modern science and increases in wealth, health and everyday living standards. Furthermore, it is so ingrained in our daily lives that we have forgotten it is...

Subjectivity is a central concept in film theory, philosophy and cultural studies. It was also a key term in the reception of the Nouvelle Vague film movement in France and Italy from the start of 1945. This timely volume explores the ways in which the concept of subjectivity has made its way into film theory, histo...

In Multispecies Dialogues Eva Meijer develops a new understanding of the concept ‘dialogue’, which includes embodied, material and spatial interaction. Meijer does not do this alone: each chapter of the book is devoted to a dialogue, or set of dialogues – with street dog Olli, a community of former lab mice, amphibi...

The history of medieval learning has traditionally been studied as a vertical transmission of knowledge from a master to one or several disciples. Horizontal Learning in the High Middle Ages: Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer in Religious Communities centres on the ways in which cohabiting peers learned and taught one...

Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their soci...