Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) from biblical to early rabbinic sources and demonstrates how it oriented people to the affective, physical, and spatial dimensions of prayer. Rejecting a binary that would treat such language as either mental/subjective (and thus metaphorically) or sol…[Read more]

This thought experiment considers whether Siamese (Conjoined) are allowed to marry according to Halacha. It considers various aspects of the Biblical bans on incest and offers a very contemporary discussion about the meaning of personhood. This paper uses medical journals, works on medical history, and various responsa to find a precedent and…[Read more]

Les usages de la reproduction sonore parmi les musulmans mauriciens illustrent les liens entre religion publique et médiation religieuse. Les usages de la reproduction sonore parmi les musulmans mauriciens illustrent les liens entre religion publique et médiation religieuse. Ces deux dimensions de la religion s’appuient sur des objets mat…[Read more]

Orientation towards a point of political and historical allegiance outside the boundaries of the nation-state is often taken to be a defining quality of diasporas, and this aligns with the ubiquitous tendency of Islamic practice to engage with sources of long- distance, or indeed global, religious authority. In this article, I shall investigate…[Read more]

This module will deal with the study of a few texts written in Medieval and Early Modern Europe related to Witchcraft, Heresy and Inquisition. The main purpose of this course is to consider how some patterns and stereotypes in the European cultural history of the past use to appear also in our current times. The outline below gives the general…[Read more]

This essay attempts a reconceptualized relationship between Jesus the Jewish man and Christ the Christian messiah, with the twin purposes of mitigating the anti-Semitism of the Synoptic Gospels and reclaiming Jesus for Jews. I critique the quest for the historical Jesus, assess the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and situate Jesus in Christianity,…[Read more]

Preview of Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (SBL Press, 2019) https://secure.aidcvt.com/sbl/ProdDetails.asp?ID=064211C&PG=1&Type=BL&PCS=SBL

From SBL Press:
In her book, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature, Meredith J. C. Warren identifies and defines a new genre in ancient texts that she terms…[Read more]

María Montes, musicologist expert in Medieval Music, interviewed me on April 6th, 2019 on my experience designing and teaching a course on Medieval Iberian Literature and History using the HBO Show “Game of Thrones” as a thematic axis.

María Montes, musicologist expert in Medieval Music, interviewed me on April 6th, 2019 on my experience designing and teaching a course on Medieval Iberian Literature and History using the HBO Show “Game of Thrones” as a thematic axis.

This articel identifies the German cookbook in the manuscript Solothurn, Zentralbibliothek, Cod. S 490 as a copy of a ‘Küchenmeisterei’-print (from 1487 or later).

The early Church regarded dreams as potential messages from God, private revelations that appear as visions while the soul is undistracted by bodily sensations. Sleep, with its accompanying dreams, was also believed to be the temporary state of the disembodied soul as it awaits the resurrection of its body at the Last Judgment. Not only did…[Read more]

Early medieval literate culture, dominated by Christian monks and clerics, was focused on interpreting biblical texts and correlating them with a theological system devised in patristic times and late antiquity. Central to biblical exegesis was the fourfold method that distinguished the literal (or historical) sense of Old Testament narratives…[Read more]

Ernst Haeckel and Emil du Bois-Reymond were the most prominent champions of Darwin in Germany. This essay compares their contributions to popularizing the theory of evolution, drawing special attention to the neglected figure of du Bois-Reymond as a spokesman for a world devoid of natural purpose. It suggests that the historiography of the German…[Read more]

Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim (early Palestinian Jewish sages) of the Mishnah and Tosefta (redacted ca. early 3rd century CE) set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction, zoology and species crossings. The human here…[Read more]

This article makes several claims. It argues that the genre of “pilgrim’s literature” is present in rabbinic sources, and identifies rabbinic pilgrimage itineraries. Secondly, it shows that aside from the expected melancholic post-Temple itinerary, there exist itineraries for Babylon and for biblical conquest that do a very dif…[Read more]

This article studies the relationship between love and violence in Celestina. It departs from Octavio Paz’s essay La llama doble, in particular, the difference be- tween eroticism and love, and the acknowledgement of a dark and destructive side within sexual desire. It concludes that desire is the main driving force of the plot in Celestina and t…[Read more]

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.