There is an universal consensus among scientists that human beings are first and last social animals. IT would stand to reason then that relationships – and social consciousness – would be pivotal. In this complex society human beings simply would not be able to function is they didn’t have some form of functional social consciousness. Hinduism h…[Read more]

Geertz, perhaps the most influential of the anthropologists, contends that symbolism and meaning are central to religion: “The view of man as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal, which has become increasingly popular both in the social sciences and in philosophy over the past several years, opens up a whole new approach not o…[Read more]

Uno de los muchos manuscritos de la Crónica de Enrique IV de Enríquez
del Castillo,1 en concreto el que hoy reposa en la Biblioteca de El Escorial
(X.II.15), se abre con unos curiosos versos seguramente redactados por el
anónimo amanuense autor de esta copia, fechada en la primera mitad del
siglo XVI.2 El poemita, que creo es inédito (algo lóg…[Read more]

The little known German card game “Höllfahren” or “Hölle” has a forgotten history that stretches back into the 16th century, when it was called “Untreue”, “untreuer Nachbar”, “in die Hölle (fahren)” and similar names. Several images and textual references indicate the game’s popularity in the 17th century. Unusual for a card game, Höllfahren emp…[Read more]

‘There is no truth, only perception of truth’, and that perception too changes with time. Lysistrata is one such text where this difference of perception prevails. Written by Aristophanes in 411 BCE, Lysistrata is one of the eleven Old Greek Comedy plays surviving out of forty-two. The play revolves around the Peleponnesian war, when women hav…[Read more]

No descubro nada nuevo comenzando estas líneas aludiendo al sobradamente conocido carácter de mecenas cultural y de impulsora de grandes obras artísticas de Isabel la Católica , cuyos resultados son fáciles de detectar a lo largo de todo su reinado (1474-1504). Concretando este comentario general en lo que ha sido el núcleo de mi tesis docto…[Read more]

This chapter presents the significance of both Spanish cancioneros and Portuguese cancioneiros for the scholarly examination of medieval Jewish history and literature on the Iberian Peninsula. Through a close integration of historiographical and literary analysis, all major cancioneros are examined and contextualized based on exemplary…[Read more]

This is a history of the Centre William Rappard, the first building designed to house an international organization in Geneva, and its art treasures. For nearly a century, these works of art and decorations offered by governments and institutions encouraged smooth diplomacy and fluent international negotiations in the fields of labour, trade and…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article… One of the most striking things about speculative literature of the twenty-first century has been its increasingly focussed interest in imagining impending disaster: from the escalating likelihood of biblical deluge on a planetary scale to looming ecocatastrophes of drought and…[Read more]

This article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains…[Read more]

Du sage Varnava la merveilleuse apparition de sa vision avec exemple pour tous, cette traduction-recréation roumaine en vers du Dialogus du poète baroque hongrois Nyéki Vörös Mátyas, effectuée en Transylvanie en 1670, peut être considérée comme la première œuvre du pope Ioan de Vintz. Sur le plan européen, sa Vision de Varnava représente l…[Read more]

“Every culture develops some kind of art as surely as it develops language. Some primitive cultures have no real mythology or religion, but all have some art – dance, song, design (sometimes only on tools or on the human body). Dance, above all, seems to be the oldest elaborated art….. Art is, indeed, the spearhead of human development, social…[Read more]

While the colonial and modern history of epidemics in South Asia is well researched, the earlier developments of this subject area have hardly been studied. The project Epidemics and Crisis Management in Pre-modern South Asia aims to fill part of this gap by exploring the intellectual history of epidemics and similar disasters in South Asia and…[Read more]

Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–1774), a Bolognese wax sculptor, overcame humble origins to become one of the most important anatomical artists of the eighteenth century. Working with her husband Giovanni Manzolini (c. 1700–1755), and continuing alone after his death, Morandi created remarkably lifelike and anatomically accurate wax models of the sen…[Read more]

“The company builds cars and destroys men” was the promotional tagline of one of the posters for “Blue Collar” (1978). Shot in Detroit and Kalamazoo, Michigan, the film stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto playing three Detroit auto workers in financial despair who break into and rob the offices of their own union. “Blue Collar”…[Read more]

The disputes within the Church of England over the Scheme to reunite Anglicans and Methodists generated a great deal of heat and only limited light. Despite their long friendship, Michael Ramsey and Eric Mascall ended up diametrically and publicly opposed in relation to an existential question facing the Church: Ramsey as archbishop of Canterbury,…[Read more]