Socrates, Or On Human Knowledge, published in Venice in 1651, is the only work written by a Jew that contains so far the promise of a genuinely sceptical investigation into the validity of human certainties. Simone Luzzatto masterly developed this book as a pièce of theatre where Socrates, as main actor, has the task to demonstrate the limits and weaknesses of the human capacity to acquire kno…
Did King Alfred the Great commission the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, probably the masterpiece of medieval Anglo-Latin Literature, as part of his famous program of translation to educate the Anglo-Saxons? Was the Old English Historia, by any chance, a political and religious manifesto for the emerging ‘Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’? Do we deal w…
This volume is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion. It considers religious groups as both producers of historical narratives and topics of historiography. From different disciplinary perspectives, the authors explore how religions are historicised. In so doing, they address the biases and elisions of current analytical and des…
The Handbook of Leaving Religion introduces a neglected field of research with the aim to outline previous and contemporary research, and suggest how the topic of leaving religion should be studied in the future. Readership: All interested in conversion, deconversion and apostasy processes, and anyone concerned with methodological and theoretical questions related to leaving or changing religion.
"The authors of the present volume, Myth, Materiality, and Lived Religion, focus on the material dimension of Old Norse mythology and the role played by myths in everyday life. More broadly expressed, the collection looks at the social, ceremonial and material contexts of myths. This topic has been underexplored in previous research on Old Norse myths, despite its important theoretical implicat…
The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems– both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretic…
Contrary to a common conviction, original sin is one of the fundamental Patristic issues, because it is the starting point of Patristic anthropology and sets the stage for the need for salvation.The Church Fathers before Augustine did not used the term original sin, but described its reality, having the greatest possible feeling for the mystical unity of mankind with its first ancestor. As rega…
This book is a pioneering attempt to understand the prehistory of Hinduism in South Asia. Exploring religious processes in the Deccan region between the eleventh and the nineteenth century with class relations as its point of focus, it throws new light on the making of religious communities, monastic institutions, legends, lineages, and the ethics that governed them. In the light of this prehis…
This volume is the first in-depth study of a recently discovered Sanskrit dharani spell text from around the 5th century CE surviving in two palm-leaf and three paper manuscript compendia from Nepal. This rare Buddhist scripture focuses on the ritual practice of thaumaturgic weather control for successful agriculture through overpowering mythical Nagas. Traditionally, these serpentine beings ar…
Migration and Islamic Ethics, Issues of Residence, Naturalization and Citizenship contains various cases of migration movements in the Muslim world from ethical and legal perspectives to argue that Muslim migration experiences can offer a new paradigm of how the religious and the moral can play a significant role in addressing forced migration and displacement Readership: All interested in migr…