This article explores how certain dramatists in early modern England and in Spain, specifically Ben Jonson and Miguel de Cervantes (with much more emphasis on the former), pursued authority over texts by claiming as their own a new realm which had not been available – or, more accurately, as prominently available – to playwrights before: the sta…[Read more]

Als „kleine Biblia“ (Luther) hat der Psalter eine herausragende Rolle in Judentum und Christentum. Auch im Koran ist die Wertschätzung Davids hoch und die Psalmen klingen im Hintergrund mancher Sure an. Welches Potential können die Psalmen im Trialog der abrahamitischen Religionen entfalten? Was bedeutet es, wenn im Beten der Psalmen der eine…[Read more]

Young Michelangelo Buonarroti’s experience was deeply marked by his cult of Antiquity, reverberated in the creation of artworks such as the Sleeping Cupid and the Bacchus and shared with Raffaele Riario and Jacopo Galli, his patrons during his first stay in Rome (1496-1501).
The cardinal-camerlengo Raffaele Riario was an important promoter of t…[Read more]

The peculiar iconography of the winged horse surmounted by several puttos, as appears in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili sixth woodcut, turns out to be unprecedented and enigmatic at a glance and it’s the result of the depth and complexity of the author’s concepts.
Considering the iconographic details of the sculptural group as well as the text sca…[Read more]

Overlooking Lago di Orta in the foothills of the Northern Italian Alps, the Renaissance-era Sacro Monte di Orta (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is spectacle and hagiography, theme park and treatise. Sacro Monte di Orta is a sacred mountain complex that extolls the life of St. Francis of Assisi through fresco, statuary, and built environment.…[Read more]

Going to the theater was one of the most distinctive-as well as conspicuous-cultural activities to take place regularly in early modern european cities. Precisely because so many people from all walks of life partook of this highly visible pastime, public theaters became spaces wherein social and cultural boundaries between spectators were easily…[Read more]

This article explores the change in dynamics between matter and style in Shakespeare’s way of depicting distress on the early modern stage. During his early years as a dramatist, Shakespeare wrote plays filled with violence and death, but language did not lose its composure at the sight of blood and destruction; it kept on marching to the beat o…[Read more]

One of the major differences between the otherwise very similar commercial theatrical cultures of early modern Spain and England was that, whereas in England female roles were performed by young, cross-dressed boys, in Spain female performers were prominent in their industry. indeed, actresses in Spain played an active role in the creative process…[Read more]

The factors behind the rise of Islamism in Turkey remain the subject of intense scholarly debate. There are remarkable relationships between the rise of Islamism and preceding changes in population dynamics in Turkey. Rapid urbanization and large-scale migration of Kurds and other ethnic minorities from the east of the county to major cities in…[Read more]

This study argues that there is a tradition, arising from a ‘Jewish milieu’, based around the exegesis of select biblical passages, indicating that the messiah bears the Divine Name. This tradition appears to predate the Christian movement, and is referenced also in rabbinic literature. In the first section we highlight a tradition regarding the…[Read more]

Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity begins at the inception of the Catholic Church and deals with the election of the present Pope, and thus is contemporary yet rooted in history. Histories of religious traditions need not be unwieldy. They could be pointers to all the important references to literature on the subject. This book is a…[Read more]

Mary Stuart’s Bouncing Head
Execution scenes reveal the links between the spectacular and the punitive (Michel Foucault), but they are difficult to stage, even more so when the topic is the decapitation of Mary Stuart, whose execution divided Catholics and Protestants, forcing playwrights to adopt several mediation strategies. Taking plays by J…[Read more]

In this contribution, I take up Michael Nijhawan’s focus on the embodied aspects of memory and time he elaborates so insightfully in “The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations”, specifically his invocation of, via Veena Das’s work, of Bergson’s distinction between translational and rotational time. Drawing on examples from my ow…[Read more]

Jean de la Taille’s “Saül le furieux” (1562) has been described as “the most dramatic play produced by the French Renaissance,” and the author’s preface to the play in the printed edition of 1572, “De l’Art de la Tragedie,” as “certainly the best theoretical essay on the theatre written in France before the classical period.” These estimates by…[Read more]

It took Pedro Costa four feature films to get to “Horse Money” (“Cavalo Dinheiro”, 2014). In Down to Earth (Casa de Lava, 1994), a Portuguese nurse accompanies an immigrant worker in coma from Lisbon to his homeland, the Cape Verdean island of Fogo. “Bones” (“Ossos”, 1997), In “Vanda’s Room” (“No Quarto da Vanda”, 2000), and “Colossal Youth” (“Ju…[Read more]

According to Gurdjieff, man is not born with an immortal soul. The man perishes with the death of the physical body. Gurdjieff also taught that through certain efforts man has the possibility of acquiring an immortal soul that can survive the death of the physical body. This paper examines Gurdjieff’s ideas on death and immortality and serves as a…[Read more]

This article explores the way assumptions about gender prevalent in twenty-first century readers impact our understanding of Sarai. It interrogates the way a mere glimpse allows us to instantaneously assign a person gender, something trans theorist Julia Serano calls gendering. Through this article, we see how the third-party accounts of Sarai in…[Read more]

Efficient activism in the classroom and beyond is contingent upon the ability to identify and understand ideological principles, to express opposition to injustice, to challenge and de-centre authority and privilege, and to redistribute power to those without. Moreover, it requires collective and collaborative action. This article is a case study…[Read more]

What is the relationship between the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament, where does Jesus fit in, and why do these questions even matter? In the context of the biblical studies classroom for Christian ministerial training, being able to answer these questions is an essential part of effective and responsible biblical interpretation…[Read more]

Together we seek to model the redemptive, liberatory, activist, feminist approach to collaborative working to which both authors are committed as teachers, students, rabbis and activists. In our rabbinic chain of tradition (more particularly through other female rabbis) we explore, through the lenses of student and teacher, the 5-year rabbinic…[Read more]