On September 30, 1567, members of the Protestant majority of Nîmes, led by many members of the présidial court, overthrew the Catholic town council. They arrested many leading Catholics, both laity and priests, who they felt perverted the word and will of God, and massacred an estimated one hundred of them; about one-third of the dead can be s…[Read more]

Review Essay on work (2004 to 2014) on French religious history, 1500-1650. The article discusses books including “Une concorde urbaine: Senlis au temps des réformes (vers 1520-vers 1580)” by Thierry Amalou, “Martyrs & Murderers: The Guise Family & the Making of Europe” by Stuart Carroll, and “Calvin” by Bruce Gordon, focusing on the relationship…[Read more]

In “Ending the French Wars of Religion,” Allan A. Tulchin considers why these sixteenth-century sectarian wars—eight of them—recurred over half a century and why they finally ended when they did. The existing literature emphasizes that the French state proved too weak to enforce order, and that each side believed itself favored by God, making…[Read more]

Analysis of medieval and Renaissance era French non-nuclear household systems. Shows that such arrangements were common, and occasionally consisted of same-sex unrelated male couples.

EMoDir Research Group Report 2007-2017

Article on ancient biographical or autobiographical stories regarding journeys in pursuit of wisdom.

This is the complete second, fully revised edition of the book with links to inscriptions on the AGRW website. (First edition was published by Fortress in 2003).

Book that explores processes of identification within various small group situations in the Greco-Roman world.

Article on parental language within small groups in the Greco-Roman world with special attention to fathers or mothers of the synagogue.

Article exploring and challenging the notion of the decline of the city as a preliminary to the study of rivalries among associations.

‘Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift’, ‘Ambrasser Heldenbuch’, ‘Rostocker Liederbuch’, ‘Hausbuch des Michael de Leone’, ‘Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch’, ‘Alsfelder Dirigierrolle’, ‘Bamberger mathematisches Manuskript’ …, there are many established names for medieval German manuscripts. Their proper names consist of nominal phrases and the heads…[Read more]

An interpretation of the rock art appearing in The Shaft at Lascaux and a discussion of Aurignacian Rites of Passage

An interpretation of the Red Mammoth Panel in Chauvet linking Chauvet to Lascaux in a single ritual landscape

In this chapter I discuss how contests about religious language have revolved around a contrast between, on the one hand, a preference for literalism, with its emphasis on reference and denotation; and on the other hand, a valuation of the poetic functions of language and its material properties. Turning to the issue of electronically mediated…[Read more]

This article introduces a new perspective, the history of vision, into the study of rabbinic literature. Specifically it examines how rabbinic visual regimes dealt with those objects and images that it designated as idols. It argues that rabbis took seeing seriously and that they developed a set of strategies to shape the viewing of problematic…[Read more]

This article treats the cultural meaning of rabbinic toilet rules from their Tannaitic instantiation through to later developments in Palestine and Mesopotamia. It argues that these rules draw their corporeal and mental bearings from the Jerusalem temple, in inverse and opposite directions to prayer deportment. It shows how the juxtaposition of…[Read more]

A brief report on an MA course on Tolkien taught at Leiden University

This essay considers the category of “Jewish law” in Jewish studies while inviting scholarly and historiographic assessment of the ways that Judaism’s link to law has come to appear as obvious. Considering that our present concepts of law are invariably linked to a geographically and temporally parochial “mythology of modern law,” the essay sounds…[Read more]

Bibliography of research on bishops in Anglo-Saxon England and Ottonian-Salian Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as well as comprehensive and comparative studies of this period, as long as either of the aforementioned geographical entities is covered.