In the ten years following the publication of the infamous Reports on the State of Education in Wales (1847) that had classified the Welsh population as a vice-ridden nation of working-class drunkards and promiscuous hoydens, the middle-classes in Wales strongly rejected this Anglo-centric condemnation at first in the press and, later on, in…[Read more]

Presentation of the paper given by Marco Heiles.

Paper given by Dr. Sven Limbeck, Herzog Augst Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel

This article examines the Costobar Affair, a narrative aside in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities and a moment in the history of Idumeans, to revisit the parting of the ways and the relationship of early Judaism and early Chistianity to their next-door neighbors in other Hellenistic Levantine traditions (such as “Idumaism”).

While the kingdom of Israel experienced eight military coups in its shorter history, the kingdom of Judah saw only four assassinations of its monarchs, three of which were Athaliah, her usurper, and his successor. This sequence of untimely royal deaths in Judah stands in contrast to the stability of Israel’s royal line under the Jehuite d…[Read more]

Only a small number of fragments, which could be categorized (generously) as “medieval,” actually survive in modern ballad traditions. As it turns out, however, one could in fact hear hundreds of verses about the Cid being recited in the streets of Spanish towns and cities in the nineteenth century. But they were verses that survived pre…[Read more]

The open-cbgm library is an open-source software implementation of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) designed with customizability and performance on large-scale collations in mind. The library is free to use or modify and has been tested on real data from the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) of the New Testament. This presentation first…[Read more]

The Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville was one of the most widely read works of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the number of surviving manuscripts. August Eduard Anspach’s handlist from the 1940s puts their number at almost 1,200, of which approximately 300 were estimated to have been copied before the year 1000. This article, based on a…[Read more]

This graphic provides an overview of the different hand which made entries in the Codex Donaueschingen A III 19 of the Badische Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe.

What about insāniyat (humanity)? Or put differently, how are morality and ethics compelled and shaped in the pahars (mountainscapes) of Kashmir? Insāniyat is an emotion and ethics that expresses interdependencies between people. Insāniyat is moral and ethical proclivity. It is not enforced by an external authority but inheres in human en…[Read more]

In an article that exposes the roots of Brexit-era Germanophobia, Rita Singer details how Welsh press coverage and poetry about U-Boat attacks on Welsh ships evolved into racialised depictions of German U-Boat combatants as ‘Huns’, monsters, ghouls and Satanic fiends

Collected volume review. Paweł Kowal, Georges Mink and Iwona Reichardt (eds.) “Three Revolutions: Mobilization and Change in Contemporary Ukraine.” Volume one. Stuttgart, Ibidem Verlag, 2019.

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]

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]

This article challenges the historical existence of the ‘Johannine community’ – a hypothesized group of ancient churches sharing a distinctive theological outlook. Scholars posit such a community to explain the similarities of John to 1, 2 and 3 John as well as the epistles’ witness to a network of churches. Against this view, this article calls a…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Algunas reflexiones sobre (auto)engaño e ideología por vía de un comentario sobre el libro Ideología de Teun A. van Dijk. Los poderosos engañan. Creen tener un acceso privilegiado a la realidad, y utilizan esa perspectiva dominante (‘topsight’) para dominar. Con frecuencia para dominar engañando. Pero también se engañ…[Read more]

This article presents the collation map, a diagrammatic method for visually mapping the texts of complex medieval Western manuscripts against their material structures. Beginning with an overview of collation formulae – currently the most frequently used method of representing collation – the article argues that the collation map is a more use…[Read more]

This paper was presented as part of an online symposium titled “Research as a Radical Act of Creativity” organized by the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University. As a response to “radical creativity” – one of the current cross-cutting, strategic themes of Aalto University – the paper addresses the need to learn from dec…[Read more]

Over the last four decades of the 18th century, the image of Sparta began to include a few characteristic elements that later became an important point of reference for 19th-century writers, philosophers and historians. Issues of Spartan equality of citizens, fully responsible for their country, and also soldierly honour and Sparta’s military c…[Read more]

This book first proves that the rationale behind Russia’s aggressive actions in its neighborhood resides in its goal of achieving certain geostrategic objectives which are largely predefined by the state’s imperial traditions, memories, and fears that the Kremlin may irretrievably lose control over lands which were once Russian. In other words,…[Read more]