This dissertation considers how Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny from 1122 to 1156, implemented reform through a textual program. Peter’s abbacy witnessed a period of fundamental reconstruction, in which not only the practices of Cluniac monasticism, but also its mentality and institutional ethos underwent dramatic change. This period e…[Read more]

This is a preprint draft of the chapter appearing in the De Gruyter volume, Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age.

Drei digitale Kunstprojekte aus den Jahren 2015 und 2016 werden in diesem Text vorgestellt und verglichen, Game Over Facebook, WrongGrid und Curating Money. Ihnen ist gemeinsam, dass sie in Konfrontation zu ihrem jeweiligen technischen und ästhetischem Kontext stehen, beispielsweise zu den digitalen Plattformen, auf denen sie gespeichert sind,…[Read more]

Am 11.10.2014 erschien im Feuilleton der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung ein Artikel von Gina Thomas über die derzeitige Intensivierung der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit zum Kunstmarkt. Der Titel lautete: Wie der Kunsthandel die Wissenschaft erobert. Auf diese Bestimmung eines Verhältnisses und die gebrachten Beispiele soll hier reagiert werden.

In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how the Angolan refugees living in Zambia during the Angolan civil war used their divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. To many people, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of small articles drawn in…[Read more]

Sónia Silva is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Skidmore College. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia, as well as museum work in Europe and the USA, Silva’s research deals with materiality, material religion, the notion of the fetish, ritual and religion, divination, witchcraft, violence, and museums. Silva is the author of Alon…[Read more]

Clark Ashton Smith—unlike the more famous H.P. Lovecraft—engaged with the medieval as a setting for his fiction. Lovecraft admired classical Roman civilization and the eighteenth century, but had little time for medieval themes. As Brantley Bryant has related, Lovecraft wrote contemptuously that the Middle Ages was a period that “snivel[ed] along…[Read more]

Clark Ashton Smith—unlike the more famous H.P. Lovecraft—engaged with the medieval as a setting for his fiction. Lovecraft admired classical Roman civilization and the eighteenth century, but had little time for medieval themes. As Brantley Bryant has related, Lovecraft wrote contemptuously that the Middle Ages was a period that “snivel[ed] along…[Read more]

Throughout historic developments, the publicly ascertained and published price of an artwork repeatedly served as a reference point for art theoretical discussion. Particular importance was attached to the auction sale price, since this financial evaluation of art was of such a public nature. While there is a long history of these ideas about the…[Read more]

This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, each genre elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form. The West, South, and East Asian genres each cultivated a met…[Read more]

The city of Lucca was never limited to the urban area within the walls. Autumn and winter would be lived in the city palazzo, with life concentrating upon commercial activities enlivened by entertainments such as music and theatre. In spring and summer life was relocated en masse to the villa. This article outlines the essentials of Lucchese…[Read more]

The garden theatre can take many forms: it can erupt forth in an explosion of water and sound as in the teatro d’acqua; it can appear carved into a hedge as a teatro di verzura; or it can calmly wait to be filled with performers as in a teatro avanti il palazzo. The garden theatre was first a feature of the Baroque garden in Italy, before f…[Read more]

This article explores the interface of multiple legal systems in early modern Daghestan. By comparing colonial engagements with legal plurality with indigenous genres of Daghestani legal discourse, I aim to shed light on the plurality of legal systems that preceded as well as informed legal discourse under colonialism. The Daghestani turn to…[Read more]

This discussion of Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature (2014), a magisterial contribution to South Asian literature edited by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb, situates this work within broader trends within the discipline of comparative literature and cross-cultural poetics. I consider how this volume…[Read more]

This course covers autobiographical writings in Persian from premodern times to contemporary Iran. It reflects the emergence of autobiographical writing in the first days of Islam and an evolving sense of self, identity, and cultural cohesion, and then records transitions within the political/economic power structures in the geographical region.…[Read more]

Marco HEILES, Die Handschrift MS Broxbourne 84.3 der Bodleian Library, Manuskript, Oxford 2010.

Manuscript description of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Broxbourne 84.3, German manuscript, 15th century (a. 1469).

This dissertation proposes a social analysis of the Early Christian basilicas (4th-6th century) of Southern and Central Greece, predominantly those in the Late Roman province of Achaia. After an introduction which places the dissertation in the broader context of the study of Late Antique Greece, the second chapter argues that church construction…[Read more]

The subject of this paper is a fragment of a liturgical book that is a part of the manuscript fragment collection in the holdings of the Utrecht University Library Special Collections. The fragment was brought to light in the 1960s, after it was rebound into a manuscript belonging to the St. Paul’s Abbey, Utrecht, where it was inserted during t…[Read more]

‘Passio Iudeorum Pragensium’, a late fourteenth–century pogrom narrative from Bohemia, provides many unique insights into the medieval tradition of pogrom narratives. It is preserved in the form of a number of related but distinct textual units that allow us to examine the discursive nature of texts such as these. This discursiveness is illus…[Read more]

‘Passio Iudeorum Pragensium’, a late fourteenth–century pogrom narrative from Bohemia, provides many unique insights into the medieval tradition of pogrom narratives. It is preserved in the form of a number of related but distinct textual units that allow us to examine the discursive nature of texts such as these. This discursiveness is illus…[Read more]