Saint Birgitta of Sweden (d. 1373), one of the most famous visionary women of the late Middle Ages, lived in Rome for the last 23 years of her life. Much of her extensive literary work was penned there. Her Celestial Revelations circulated widely from the late 14th century to the 17th century, copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into vernacular, and printed in several Latin and Italian edi…
In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature – and modes of literary thinking – as a key resource for such a task.
Covering the entire continent from Morocco, Libya, and Egypt in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, and the surrounding islands from Cape Verde in the west to Madagascar, Mauritius, and Seychelles in the east, the Encyclopedia of African History is a new A-Z reference resource on the history of the entire African continent. With entries ranging from the earliest evolution of human …
Until recently relations among siblings did not attract much interest among scholars studying the history of the early medieval family. They were mentioned primarily in discussions of marriage strategies used to safeguard the interests of family groups and in analyses of relations between families linked by marriage. Fraternal relations appeared as a research topic …
Sir George Buc (1560-1622), one of the careful antiquarian scholars of the English Renaissance, is famous in literary history as Master of Revels under King James I. In 1619 Sir George wrote The History of King Richard the Third, a study of Richard’s life and reign and a defence of his historical reputation. In the late 1960s/early 1970s Arthur Kincaid embarked on creating the first authentic…
Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literatur…
The libraries of Tunis are considered lost since the sack of the city by European armies in 1535. This study reconstructs the original holdings of Tunis’ medieval libraries by bringing together dispersed manuscripts from over 30 library collections worldwide. The outcome is twofold: the book maps the networks of the first European Orientalists and, by doing so, retrieves from oblivion an impo…
This title is published in Open Access with the support of the University of Helsinki Library. The book surveys and analyzes changes in religious groups and identities in late antique Arabia, ca. 300-700 CE. It engages with contemporary and material evidence: for example, inscriptions, archaeological remains, Arabic poetry, the Qur??n, and the so-called Constitution of Medina. Also, it suggests…
Albert Hoffstädt was the architect of a unique cooperation between Brill pub-lishers and the Leiden Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguis-tics, a cooperation that has so far resulted in a series of twelve etymological dictionaries and an online publication of fifteen etymological databases (). In all the years that Albert was directly involved …
Some people are one-book people; their lives and their workare dominated, usually with conscious complicity, by a single book.William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham (1708-78), seems to have found a"politician's vade-mecum" in Spenser's Faerie Queene.1 Umberto Eco,despite the vast range of reference apparent in all that he writes, in-sists that the guiding star of it all is…