bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Persian Keys of the Quranic Paradise
Authors: Courtieu Gilles
Published: January 2021

The descriptions of paradise are numerous and precise in the Qur’ān: in relation to their total coherence with one another, they surely come from a unique source. Furthermore, they reflect a social model present in many regions of the seventh-century Near East: the Persian banquet, as enjoyed in the Sasanian Empire. Not only the vocabulary, but the objects, the people, the physical or mental attitudes, the food, and the beverages are all taken from the imagery of the banquets at the Persian court. Hence the quranic paradise is clearly not of religious, but of profane origin. And this offers evidence that one should consider not only Palestine, but also Mesopotamia, as a source of inspiration for the authors of the Qur’ān – and as a site of excavation for the original quranic milieu.
Divine Attributes of ‘Alī in Shi’ite Mysticism : New Remarks on ‘Heresy’ in Early Islam
Authors: Amir-Moezzi Mohammad Ali
Published: January 2021

Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi examines the heresiographic sources, both Sunnite and so-called moderate-Shi’ite, that accuse the first Shi’ites of ideological ‘extremism’ due, firstly, to their alleged messianism, and, secondly, and somewhat complementarily, to their more-or-less-straightforward divinisation of their imām or ‘spiritual leader’. Considering that these accusations may well be to some extent reliable, how are we to envisage the connection that apparently existed between such doctrines and Muhammad’s own early message, with its emphasis on the more-orless- imminent end of the world and its subsequent announcement of the coming of the Messiah, be he Jesus or ‘Alī?
From Colonial to Global : Visuals and the Historiography of Body Government beyond Europe
Authors: Gaudillière Jean-Paul
Published: January 2021

The chapter considers the dialectics of body government from the perspective of the recent historiography of health outside Europe, and its decentring of the Eurocentric gaze on modernity. It proposes to distinguish between a colonial, a subaltern, and a global historiography in order to discuss the ways in which these genres can engage in a more significant dialogue with the history of visuals. Commenting a small set of films, the chapter argues that such engagement is possible since colonial offices, industrial firms, the WHO, multinational pharmaceutical firms, decolonized nation-states, anthropologists or NGOs have produce diversified mediascapes, which do not only document colonial or postcolonial health interventions but also the visions and agency of subaltern subjects.
Making an Emotional ‘History of the People’
Authors: Melchior Inge
Published: January 2021

Chapter 1 explores how historians, political elites, and cultural figures since the National Awakening have been involved in the writing of a ‘collective story of Estonians’. The chapter shows why ‘Estonia’s story’ has become an emotional story of rupture. The independence activists of the Singing Revolution, being non-political actors, have mobilized a sense of collective responsibility among the masses for creating and preserving the nation. As ‘a people’ they wrote a new national history, literally based on Estonians’ personal stories. Since the late 1990s, the intellectual and cultural elite increasingly voice a more open, critical narrative, while remaining loyal to the former independence activists and their family’s stories. In politics a fairly non-pluralist narrative of rupture prevails.
Postmemory: The Inherited Obligation to Secure the Future
Authors: Melchior Inge
Published: January 2021

Chapter 4 follows the postgeneration and questions what the emotional rupture narrative means to young Estonian intellectuals. Because of a ‘belated postmemory’, they encountered the still unnarrated emotions of Soviet suffering during the Singing Revolution. Moreover, they lively remember that they and their relatives have participated in the rebuilding of the nation-state. The chapter explores the moral obligations that they still experience today. Independence is not something they take for granted but a merit that needs to be cherished. Their belief in the necessity of a strong national culture for Estonia’s survival makes it difficult for these young intellectuals to criticize nationalist memory politics, especially in times of insecurity. They would not only betray their nation, but also their (grand)parents.
Southeast Asia on Screen
Authors: Khoo Gaik Cheng , Barker Thomas , Ainslie Mary , Yngvesson Dag , Alarilla Adrian , Arriola Joyce L. , Ferguson Jane M. , Hanan David , Soehadi Gaston , Driskell Jonathan , Campos Patrick F. , Sebastiampillai Chrishandra , Imanjaya Ekky , Siddique Sophia , Khuankaew Sasinee , Khoo Gaik Cheng , Ainslie Mary J , Barker Thomas , Irawanto Budi , Nguyen Qui-Ha Hoang
Published: January 2021

After the end of World War II when many Southeast Asian nations gained national independence, and up until the Asian Financial Crisis, film industries here had distinctive and colourful histories shaped by unique national and domestic conditions. Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998) addresses the similar themes, histories, trends, technologies and sociopolitical events that have moulded the art and industry of film in this region, identifying the unique characteristics that continue to shape cinema, spectatorship and Southeast Asian filmmaking in the present and the future. Bringing together scholars across the region, chapters explore the conditions that have given rise to today’s burgeoning Southeast Asian cinemas as well as the gaps that manifest as temporal belatedness and historical disjunctures in the more established regional industries.
Gender, Nation and Spatial Mobility in On Top of the Wave, on Top of the Wind
Authors: Hoàng Nguyễn Quí-Hà
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines women’s mobility as presented in Vietnamese revolutionary cinema in its heyday following the Gulf of Tonkin incident (in 1964). Focusing on Ngọc Quỳnh’s On Top of the Wave, on Top of the Wind, it argues that this film offers a timely reflection upon the reality of fighting and the labour of the Vietnamese people in the American War. Through the film’s spatial narrative and visuality of cultural and physical geography, the filmmaker conflates nation and home, blurring the separation of domestic and public spaces and creating a national/ familial space for both sexes. Yet while this narrative invokes patriotism and mobilizes women’s participation in the national struggle, it also limits women’s agency and subjectivity after the war.
Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages
Authors: Vaughan Theresa
Published: January 2021

What can anthropological and folkloristic approaches to food, gender, and medicine tell us about these topics in the Middle Ages beyond the textual evidence itself? Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours uses these approaches to look at the textual traditions of dietary recommendations for women’s health, placed within the context of the larger cultural concerns of gender roles and Church teachings about women. Women are expected to be nurturers, healers, and the primary locus of food provisioning for families, especially women of the lower social classes, typically overlooked in the written record. This work illuminates what we can know about women, food, medicine, and diet in the Middle Ages, and examines how the written medical tradition interacts with folk medicine and other cultural factors in both understanding women’s bodies and their roles as healers and food providers.
Introducing Massive Media
Authors: Colangelo Dave
Published: January 2021

This chapter introduces the concept of massive media, a term used to describe the emergence of large-scale public projections, urban screens, and led façades such as the illuminated tip of the Empire State Building. These technologies and the social and technical processes of image circulation and engagement that surround them essentially transform buildings into screens. This chapter also introduces theoretical concepts surrounding space, media, cinema, monumentality, and architecture in order to provide a framework for the analysis of the emergence of the building as screen. These concepts are key axes upon which the ongoing transformations of the public sphere revolve. Subsequent chapters are introduced in which massive media is probed, in case studies and creation-as-research projects, for its ability to enable new critical and creative practices of expanded cinema, public data visualisation, and installation art and curation that blend the logics of urban space, monumentality, and the public sphere with the aesthetics and affordances of digital information and the moving image.
Curating Massive Media
Authors: Colangelo Dave
Published: January 2021

A curatorial approach to the building as screen is crucial in order to create suitable spaces and opportunities for the development of massive media as a legitimate artform capable of shaping the critical discourse of cities and citizens. Based on two in-depth case studies of curatorial organisations in the field, Connecting Cities and Streaming Museum, I propose that massive media requires the sustained provision of technical support and coordination as well as an ongoing negotiation with corporate, institutional, and civic owners and operators. While massive media exists primarily as a highly commercialised phenomenon it can also be pressed into service through coordinated curatorial and artistic efforts to critique or co-opt commercialisation and to re-envision the role of urban media environments in shaping collective identity, historical consciousness, and public display culture.
The Labyrinthine Baroque
Authors: Waller Gary
Published: January 2021

This chapter surveys current theories of the Baroque, distinguishing between those that see it historically and those that view it as a recurring stylistic quirk. I draw particularly on José Antonio Maravall to advance a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics – fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch and plateauing. Some concepts will seem unfamiliar to scholars used to considering the Baroque as primarily concerned with music, painting or sculpture, or inextricably connected with the Counter-Reformation. These concepts are concerned less with the surface characteristics of the period’s culture and more with underlying ideological trends. I also ask how we can speak of the ‘English’ Baroque, since it has long seemed an alien concept to the residual tradition of English literary and cultural history.
Protestant Baroque
Authors: Waller Gary
Published: January 2021

Much traditional scholarship on the Baroque sees the notion of the Protestant Baroque as contradictory. This chapter explores ‘emergent’ or ‘partial’ Baroque characteristics in two Protestant poets, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, followed by the Protestant women of Little Gidding, the ‘Arminian nunnery’, whose ‘storying’ and biblical harmonies show how broader cultural dynamics could permeate even a marginalised group of women, who have only recently attracted critical attention. I look across the Atlantic to examine the English equivalent of the colonial Baroque prominent in Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic culture, and consider two New England writers – briefly, Anne Bradstreet and more thoroughly, Anne Hutchinson – to analyse the extent to which New England can be set within the scope of not just colonial but specifically Protestant colonial Baroque.
“Founded upon the Rock Which Is Christ”
Authors: Callan Maeve Brigid
Published: January 2021

While little can be said with certainty about Irish Christianity’s first few
centuries, Patrick’s concern and respect for women provide powerful
testimony about gender relations and female agency in the fifth century.
He acknowledged male ecclesiastical hierarchy outside of Ireland, but in
country his primary partners in the faith were female. His seventh-century
and subsequent biographers proclaim his dominance over virtually everything
and everyone in Ireland, but they allow us to hear echoes of women’s
voices and spheres of activity. Patrician texts, which serve primarily
male interests, attest to the wide range of possibilities for women in the
Irish church and proclaim women’s rights over both their property and
themselves, as they also show how those rights were negotiated within
the early Irish church.
Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas
Authors: Walters Holly
Published: January 2021

For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge.
Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture
Authors: Bondestam Maja , Kavvadia Maria , Cotton Parker , Paulsson Holmberg Tove , Garcia Pinar Pablo , Tresfels Cecilie , Long Kathleen , Moore Rosemary
Published: January 2021

Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources, including medicine, satires, play scripts, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders, this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, moral and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena and hybrids are examined in a period before all varieties and differences became normalized to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it expands our understanding of early modern culture and deepens our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.
Curious, Useful and Important: Bayle’s ‘Hermaphrodites’ as Figures of Theological Inquiry
Authors: Cotton Parker
Published: January 2021

This essay examines Pierre Bayle’s use of the hermaphrodite figure in his Dictionnaire. Bayle repeatedly connects the hermaphrodite to mythic tales and language, rather than engaging ‘real’ accounts of intersexed persons. Bayle’s hermaphrodite functions as an entry point into theological discussions of sin and leads his readers across articles considering a hermaphroditic first man (‘Adam’) and the potential for humans unmarred by sin (‘Sadeur’). The hermaphrodite is employed as a sceptical figure to aid in raising questions and becomes part of a larger Baylean challenge to a dogmatic and rigid theology of the age. Bayle’s hermaphrodite articles and the questions of human nature he raises within them demonstrate how discussions of exceptional bodies contribute to ongoing theological debates in the early modern period.
Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence
Authors: Terry-Fritsch Allie
Published: January 2021

Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetics. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic experience of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth- and sixteenth century Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.
Independence, Affection and Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Authors: Barclay Katie
Published: January 2021

If early modern marriage was often imagined as centred on a household, some families were mobile. This was particularly the case for travelling salespeople and chapmen and women (pedlars) who moved across Europe to sell their wares. This Chapter focuses on two Scottish families – a married couple, and a couple and their adopted child – to explore how family, emotion and gender relationships were shaped when couples did not form a stable place of belonging but instead produced family in relation to landladies, networks of hospitality, and travel. It argues that families sought to explain their connection as an intimacy produced through an engagement between independent actors, but which still sought to be interpretable under the strictures of patriarchy.
New Christian Family Networks in the First Visitation of the Inquisition to Brazil
Authors: O’Leary Jessica
Published: January 2021

This chapter provides a case study of João and Diogo Nunes during the
First Visitation of the Inquisition to Brazil (1591–1595). The Nunes brothers
were part of a broader commercial network of New Christian merchant
families who controlled the sugar trade in northeastern Brazil during its
rapid expansion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
However, the social ascendency of New Christians in colonial Brazil
threatened the existing elite who used the Inquisition to banish them
via spurious denunciations. Using Inquisition testimony, this chapter
will underscore the importance of New Christian networks to the sugar
trade. It was their success, which both brought them to the attention of
the Inquisition and saved them by virtue of royal intervention.
‘These Happy Effects on the Character of the British Sailor’
Authors: Dooley Gillian
Published: January 2021

Songs about sailors were popular during the late Georgian period in Britain. Some were directed towards men in the navy or potential recruits, but they were also part of the musical repertoire of the middle-class drawing room. A common theme is the importance of family life. With large numbers of men needed to serve in the military in this time of war and colonial expansion, it was essential for the home front that their families remained cohesive, and ballads were sometimes written with the express purpose of promoting fidelity and patience on the part of both men and women. This chapter examines the varieties of family and conjugal relations presented in the verbal and musical rhetoric of a selection of these songs.
Understanding the Causes of Border Deaths
Authors: Gombeer Kristof , Ulusoy Orçun , Basilien-Gainche Marie-Laure
Published: January 2021

‘What causes border deaths?’ triggers a large variety of views and – often opposing – explanatory arguments. Is it the fault of individuals taking risks? Is it the reckless migrant smugglers who wreak havoc? Or should administrations in the Global North express mea culpa for the detrimental effects of their border policies? Rather than arguing in favour of one explanation, this chapter asserts that how border deaths are understood depends on a wide range of interacting factors. We map these factors through five dimensions, which we visualize in an integrated model and illustrate through examples. The five identified dimensions converge towards pathways for analysis of the phenomenon of border deaths without necessarily detracting from other relevant factors and arguments.
Inventorizing, situating, transforming : Social semiotics and data visualization
Authors: Aiello Giorgia
Published: January 2021

This chapter is an overview of social semiotics as a productive framework for research on data visualization. It provides conceptual instruments that can be used to explore the relationship between the formal properties of data visualization and the meanings and practices that these may promote or hinder among users. In particular, the chapter argues that a social semiotic framework can be used to inventorize, situate, and transform visualization resources. Overall, it links descriptive, interpretive, and critical objectives to generate a framework aimed at understanding how data visualization ‘works’ from a formal standpoint, what meanings are consistently associated with particular semiotic resources, and how both key semiotic ‘rules’ and dominant meanings may be questioned and changed.
Exploring narrativity in data visualization in journalism
Authors: Weber Wibke
Published: January 2021

Many news stories are based on data visualization, and storytelling with data has become a buzzword in journalism. But what exactly does storytelling with data mean? When does a data visualization tell a story? And what are narrative constituents in data visualization? This chapter first defines the key terms in this context: story, narrative, narrativity, showing and telling. Then, it sheds light on the various forms of narrativity in data visualization and, based on a corpus analysis of 73 data visualizations, describes the basic visual elements that constitute narrativity: the instance of a narrator, sequentiality, temporal dimension, and tellability. The paper concludes that understanding how data are transformed into visual stories is key to understanding how facts are shaped and communicated in society.
Visualizing diversity: Data deficiencies and semiotic strategies
Authors: Wihbey John P. , Jackson Sarah J. , Cruz Pedro M. , Foucault Welles Brooke
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores the complicated dynamics that are inherent to the
practice of data visualization involving issues of race and identity. We focus
on data from the US Census and the profound questions that are raised
as visual forms purport to represent groups. After reviewing historical
context and related limitations and controversies, we present a project
that explores a novel approach to visualizing US immigration patterns, an
approach that relies on visual metaphors and algorithmic construction of
visualization patterns based on massive sampling of Census microdata.
The chapter suggests that the use of innovative expressive techniques
to convey insights through poetic, and thus less literal, and limiting,
forms is a way of grappling with underlying deficiencies in administrative
population data.
The Neuroplastic Paradox
Authors: Szymanski Adam
Published: January 2021

Chapter Two turns to a discussion of the Berlin School, one of cinema of poetry’s contemporary inheritors. It provides a close analysis of Angela Schanelec’s film Afternoon (2007) and proposes the first of four event-based symptoms of melancholy: the depotentialization of neuroplasticity. To explain the political significance of this symptom and the reason why the cinema is particularly apt to perceive it, Chapter Two delves into the neuroscience of mental illness and invokes Deleuze’s writing on the neurology of the cinematic image. One of the terms that appears recurringly throughout this chapter is “plastics.” It is used in dual reference to “neuroplasticity,” or the malleability of the brain, and to Bazin’s “plastics of the image.”
The (Almost) Silenced Epistolary Pen of María de San José
Authors: Mujica Bárbara
Published: January 2021

Teresa de Ávila had hoped that María de San José (1548–1603) would succeed
her as foundress of convents and head of the Carmelite reform. However,
María clashed with the Discalced hierarchy when the Provincial, Nicolás
Doria, sought to modify the Constitutions of the order. She and Ana de Jesús
appealed to the Pope in what came to be known as the “nuns’ revolt”, but,
in the end, Doria won out. María was imprisoned and eventually exiled to
a remote convent, where she soon died. María had received an excellent
education as a child at the palace of Duchess Luisa de la Cerda, and she
wrote many well-reasoned, legalistic letters defending her position.
He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen
Authors: Ho Selina C.F.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explicates the museum circuit of the He Xiangning Art
Museum in Shenzhen as a process of interplay between the state’s political
and cultural-economic agents, the museum’s curators and academic stakeholders,
and the migrant educated elites. The museum’s intermediaries
play a role in negotiating meaning at the interface of expertise and official
discourse, and they arguably act as reflexive producers, contributing to a
public sphere that has links to Habermasian ‘communicative rationality’.
Besides, visitors can be categorized into six distinct identities, and they
display limited alignment with the state interest in Chineseness or political
patriotism. The study reflects on the national museum’s contingent
institutional framework, the ideological dilemma driven by its curatorial
activities, and the rise of a middle-class museum public.
‘Sempre la’o ho ita’
Authors: Winch Bronwyn
Published: January 2021

With the power to impact people’s lives in any number of ways, the ancestors
play a prominent role in ensuring (or in some cases, jeopardising) the
safety and well-being of their living descendants. This chapter explores a
range of different forms and practices of protection, risk mitigation, and
methods of managing anxiety and dread. This includes an examination
of items imbued with protective powers; rituals and prayers conducted
to receive ancestral blessings and protection; and rituals aimed at identifying
which transgressions or inadequate ancestor veneration have
caused problems. These ongoing acts of exchange and engagement will
be examined in the context of the ‘everyday’, as well as at more specific
instances of heightened occasions of insecurity, violence and conflict.
The Politics of Loss and Restoration
Authors: Kumala Sakti Victoria
Published: January 2021

This chapter engages with the after-effects of the Bobometo village
massacre in Oecussi on the lives of surviving family members and the
social and cultural world in which they live. Focusing on the dead and
their ongoing relations with the living, it explores the multiple ‘lives’
and potencies of the ‘bad’ and political dead and their interplay. Based
on cross-border ethnographic research, this chapter explores how these
dynamics shape new forms of relatedness between the living and the
dead, the local and the state, and within family networks now separated
across the borderlands. It discusses what acts of remembrance for the
conflict dead can tell us about the politics of loss and restoration in the
aftermath of massive violence and bad death.
Introduction
Authors: Kent Lia , Graça Feijó Rui
Published: January 2021

This introductory chapter considers the diverse ways in which dead influence
the living in the new nation-state of Timor-Leste. We argue that experiences
of acute suffering, loss, dislocation, and protracted struggle are intensified
by the spiritual dangers posed by the vast numbers of missing or unburied
bodies and disrupted mortuary rituals. We consider how deceased beings
perceived as ‘ancestors’ are thought to hold the capacity to influence the lives
of the living. We also examine how the dead – especially those designated
heroes or martyrs – are manipulated by the living to achieve certain aims.
We argue that, because the dead continue to profoundly shape relationships
amongst families, communities, and the nation-state, they must be
understood as pivotal to ongoing processes of nation and state formation.
Care of the Breast in the Late Middle Ages
Authors: Tuten Belle S.
Published: January 2021

The Tractatus de passionibus mamillarum, a short treatise written in fifteenth-century Italy, details treatments for women who experienced painful breast engorgement while lactating. It is primarily a translation of a chapter concerning the breast taken from the Lilium medicine of the Montpellier physician, Bernard de Gordon. The author of the Tractatus, however, eliminates most of Bernard’s commentary. The treatments are simple combinations of herbs, minerals, and liquids meant to be applied to the skin as plasters or poultices. This essay contextualizes the Tractatus within the historiography and literature of breastfeeding and provides a brief transcription and translation of its original recipe. It argues that the Tractatus represents a ‘hybrid’ form of healthcare and body knowledge that bridged household and academy.
Gender Segregation and the Possibility of Arabo-Galenic Gynecological Practice in the Medieval Islamic World
Authors: Verskin Sara
Published: January 2021

There is a widespread assumption that, in the medieval Islamic world, a cultural emphasis on female modesty and gender separation resulted in male physicians never having the expectation or opportunity to put their gynecological and obstetrical knowledge to practical use. However, a wide range of textual evidence suggests that, in many communities, there was a broad acceptance of intimate interactions between male practitioners and female patients. These interactions included verbal consultations, manual examinations, and physical procedures relating to fertility and childbirth, as well as diseases of the sexual organs. Some male authors of medical texts also convey the expectation that the information in their texts would come to be known and utilized by women themselves, through female medical intermediaries.
The emergence of grammar in the Western world
Authors: Swiggers Pierre , Wouters Alfons
Published: January 2021

The origins of Western grammar (and grammar teaching) lie in ancient Greece. Grammar took shape as a text-based discipline, taking as its object the literary language of the past. The focus was on mastering the morphological structures of classical Greek, of which the forms had to be memorized, and activated through the analysis of literary texts. The teaching of grammar involved the flexible use of manuals, offering the indispensable terminological apparatus and the descriptive categories. The parts-of-speech system remained the corner piece of Western grammar. The condensation of grammatical doctrine in manuals was supplemented with grammatical exercising, focusing on verbal and nominal morphology, and, sporadically, issues of syntax. Grammatical education was extended, through copying, memorizing and analysing of model texts, with lexical and phraseological materials.
Learning grammar in eighteenth-century Russia
Authors: Kislova Ekaterina , Kostina Tatiana , Rjéoutski Vladislav
Published: January 2021

In eighteenth-century Russia, Latin was the main language of tuition in Church seminaries and the grammatical approach played a very important role. In schools for nobility, the word ‘grammar’ was hardly used for living languages. Early grammar teaching was combined with translation, dialogue memorization, reading, etc. The shift in focus towards more grammar in French and German classes had likely begun by the middle of the century, and was related to the general proliferation of the grammatical approach. A greater emphasis was placed on analysing grammatical form. These changes mark a shift away from the syncretic language learning approach of the Age of Enlightenment towards a new age characterised by the increasing separation of the aspects of language learning and the erosion of the links between them.
Grammar in English schools: a century of decline and rebirth
Authors: Hudson Richard
Published: January 2021

The survey of grammar teaching in foreign language (FL) teaching starts in 1920 with some important government reports on the teaching of language, and ends in 2016 with another report on pedagogy in FL teaching. In between these points, we find two significant dates: 1951, when O-level and A-level were introduced as the official school-leaving qualification for 16-year olds; and 1988, when O-level and CSE were merged into the present GCSE exam. Grammar instruction was important in the 1920s, contested in the 1950s, almost dead in the 1980s, and reviving in the 2010s. These changes are linked to English teaching, undergraduate FL syllabuses, and the target population for FL teaching.
Réflexion épistémologique en didactique du français langue étrangère sur la place de la grammaire de l’oralité?
Authors: Weber Corinne
Published: January 2021

This chapter aims to highlight that learners of the French as a foreign language need to understand the characteristic patterns of oral grammar in order to be autonomous in their communication. I identify the main trends in the way spoken discourse (lexical and syntactic) is organized, which differs from the explanations of traditional morphological grammars. These orientations, in the service of teacher reflexivity, help to move away from representations based on the ideological paradigm of several centuries of history that must first be understood. The insights from oral linguistics studies and authentic resources underpin our discussion.
The politics of social media manipulation
Authors: Rogers Richard , Niederer Sabine
Published: January 2021

This chapter gives an overview of the contemporary scholarship surrounding ‘fake news’. It discusses how the term has been deployed politically as a barb against the free press when publishing inconvenient truths since the mid-nineteenth century. It also addresses how such notions have been used in reaction to novel publishing practices, including to the current social media platforms. More generally, the scholarship could be divided into waves, whereby the first related to the definitional issues and the production side, whilst the second has been concerned with its consumption, including the question of persuasion. There is additionally interest in solutions, including the critique of the idea that automation effectively addresses the problems. It concludes with research strategies for the study of the pervasiveness of problematic information across the internet.
Political news on Facebook during the 2019 Dutch elections
Authors: Peeters Stijn , Rogers Richard
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses Facebook-based engagement with news sources during the campaigns for two Dutch election campaigns in 2019. Building on earlier journalistic and academic work, a broad typology of ‘junk’ versus mainstream news is developed, as well as a number of more specific alternative categories. Engagement with news articles within these categories on Facebook is then analysed with BuzzSumo (a media monitoring service built atop CrowdTangle). While mainstream news receives significantly more engagement than other types of news during both campaigns, junk news also receives consistent and significant engagement, though no substantial engagement with outright disinformation is found. We conclude with a cursory comparison of the findings with those for other social media platforms, positioning Facebook as the platform where engagement with junk news is most significant.
Political news in search engines
Authors: Torres Guillén , Rogers Richard
Published: January 2021

The research enquires into the susceptibility of Google’s search engine to provide users with questionable information when querying political parties and their issues during the run-up to the Dutch provincial and European parliamentary elections. Which rankings has the search engine assigned to problematic sources when querying political parties and their issues? Are there particular political issues and party spaces where these sources are prevalent or entirely absent? Do the ranks and amounts increase as the elections draw near? In all, it was found that hyperpartisan sources are rather pervasive in the search-demarcated political space, but far more so for certain actors and their issues on the far right of the political spectrum.
Conclusions
Authors: Rogers Richard , Niederer Sabine
Published: January 2021

To what extent do (foreign) disinformation and so-called fake news resonate in political spaces online within social media around the 2019 provincial elections and the European parliamentary elections in the Netherlands? We found no foreign disinformation, fake advocacy groups or imposter news organizations, but we did take notice of a polarised media landscape, where problematic information, including extreme content, is engaged with (liked, shared, retweeted, etc.) or returned in search engines when querying political parties, political leaders as well as social issues. The study ultimately recommends media training as well as disengagement with extreme content, together with a call for continued access to social media platform data for media monitoring purposes.
Excolentes sacra fontium vel arborum: Pagan Cults, Kinship, and Regimes of Sacralization in the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo
Authors: Dell’ Elicine Eleonora
Published: January 2021

In the case of the Visigothic realm, information about tree and fountain ‘pagan’ cults is particularly terse, limited to a handful of conciliar canons and scarce allusions in scientific treatises and hagiographies. In any event, the existence of some non-ecclesiastical regimes of sacralization can be detected. They activate other ways of promoting religious authority and other cultic actors. These regimes of sacralization uphold memories and powers of parental or local communities that locate effective points of articulation in the soil and its signs. In this chapter, I explore the regimes of sacralization instituted by these actors and examine which logics they could be articulating through their practices.
The Enlightenment of the West
Authors: Guo Yi
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the introduction of the Western concept of press
freedom into imperial China. The initial introduction of freedom of the
press was a product of the transnational interaction between China and
the West in the nineteenth century. From the 1830s, Western businessmen,
European Protestant missionaries, and Chinese diplomats introduced
scattered ideas of press freedom into China, though these had very little
influence at the time. This chapter documents this initial process of
conceptual transplantation and summarizes the differing interpretations
of press freedom through an in-depth textual analysis of primary sources.
Introduction
Authors: Guo Yi
Published: January 2021

Observers of the media landscape in China often express the criticism
that individual speech still suffers from arbitrary restriction and that
mass media is run in an ‘authoritarian mode.’ Yet how did the state of
press freedom in China end up like this? Was this an inevitable outcome,
or are there historical antecedents that predate the communist system?
To answer these questions, we need to conduct a comprehensive inquiry
into China’s history of press freedom because today’s conception of press
freedom is fundamentally related to its past. In the case of China, this
conceptual history has so far received little attention. This chapter delineates
theoretical backgrounds and methodological issues relating to the
conceptual history of press freedom in China.
Buddhist Revitalization and Chinese Religions in Malaysia
Authors: Tan Lee
Published: January 2021

Buddhist Revitalization and Chinese Religions in Malaysia tells the story of how a minority community comes to grips with the challenges of modernity, history, globalization, and cultural assertion in an ever-changing Malaysia. It captures the religious connection, transformation, and tension within a complex traditional belief system in a multi-religious society. In particular, the book revolves around a discussion on the religious revitalization of Chinese Buddhism in modern Malaysia. This Buddhist revitalization movement is intertwined with various forces, such as colonialism, religious transnationalism, and global capitalism. Reformist Buddhists have helped to remake Malaysia’s urban-dwelling Chinese community and have provided an exit option in the Malay and Muslim majority nation state. As Malaysia modernizes, there have been increasing efforts by certain segments of the country’s ethnic Chinese Buddhist population to separate Buddhism from popular Chinese religions. Nevertheless, these reformist groups face counterforces from traditional Chinese religionists within the context of the cultural complexity of the Chinese belief system.
Adam Easton’s Office for the Feast of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary
Authors: Wendling Miriam
Published: January 2021

Adam Easton’s Office for the Visitation is a large-scale liturgical poetic
work. With texts for Vespers, Matins, Lauds and the minor Offices, its
sung performance could literally take hours. Easton’s Office was chosen
from among several composed for the promulgation of the new Feast of the
Visitation, but how it was circulated remains a mystery. It survives in more
than a dozen notated sources from the late fourteenth through the sixteenth
centuries, none of them identical. This chapter is the first study to examine
the surviving sources of the Office with musical notation to provide the
most likely explanation for how it was transmitted across Europe.
On the edge of the Italian Renaissance
Authors: Vester Matthew
Published: January 2021

This chapter situates René de Challant on the edge of Renaissance historiography in several ways. The geographic reach of his fiefs and political activities spanned from northwestern Italy across the Alps into the borderlands between France and the Empire. His service to the House of Savoy raises questions about the boundaries of scholarly work on the Italian Renaissance. His activities as a feudal lord with pretensions of sovereign status help us to reevaluate the relationship between the historiography on the European nobility and studies of Italian Renaissance elites. Biography as a genre of history is perched between contextual narrative description and comparative analysis. Recent work on the spatial dimensions of early modern history draw our attention to this material dimension of René’s experiences.
Finance and brokerage
Authors: Vester Matthew
Published: January 2021

René’s influence was rooted in his role as a financial broker, which was based, in turn, on his role as a transregional lord. Borrowing money, whether for himself or for others, depended on the lands and rights that he could offer as collateral. The attractiveness of this collateral depended on whether potential lenders saw benefits in acquiring it. The spatial situation of René’s lands (and their productivity) with respect to the location of various lenders was thus crucial, as were his personal relationships with various Swiss creditors. René instrumentalized his landed position and became a key financial broker for the House of Savoy and others. His two imprisonments seriously harmed his financial position, but he eventually recovered.
Visser 't Hooft, 1900-1985
Authors: Zeilstra Jurjen , Jansen Henry
Published: January 2021

God’s diplomat, the pope of the ecumenical movement, but also an acerbic theologian and a difficult person: this is how journalists characterised Willem Adolf Visser ’t Hooft (1900-1985). He was one of the best-known Dutch theologians outside the Netherlands and he left his mark on the world church. Even at an early age, he made profound efforts in support of international ecumenical youth and student organisations (Dutch Student Christian Movement, YMCA and World Student Christian Federation). He led the World Council of Churches during its formative stages (from 1938), and after its formal establishment in 1948 became its first general secretary, serving until 1966. To Visser ’t Hooft, the unity of the church was both an article of faith and a pragmatic organisation of church influence in a disunited world.
Church Unity in Wartime, 1939-1945
Authors: Zeilstra Jurjen A.
Published: January 2021

Chapter 3 explores Visser ’t Hooft’s thinking and activity during the
Second World War. Against the background of this war, Visser ’t Hooft
saw the unity of the church as a counter to a world ripped asunder by
violence. This involved the role of the church as prophet, a role Visser
’t Hooft took on himself. This chapter thus looks at how this basic issue
was worked out in Visser ’t Hooft’s activity in relation to government
officials and programmes, organisations, and to his own government in
exile. While his public statements could sometimes offend colleagues,
Visser ’t Hooft’s reputation as a reliable representative of the ecumenical
movement was confirmed under the difficult circumstances of the war,
and his self-confidence grew.
From ‘Spiritual Contact’ to Political Involvement
Authors: Zeilstra Jurjen A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks at Visser ’t Hooft’s political involvement during the war.
It shows his own vision of how the war could bring revival for reconstruction.
He hoped the war would lead to a revival of the church in preparation
for reconstruction. The chapter sketches his involvement in setting up
the Swiss Road, the tensions between civilian and military resistance,
his disappointment in the Dutch government in exile. He had wanted
to concern himself with spiritual contact, Geestelijk Contact, between
the government in exile and the people of the occupied Netherlands,
contributing to reflection and repentance. His task was more than passing
on messages – it was also exercising spiritual influence.
In the Mirror of Rembrandt and the Perspectives of Others
Authors: Zeilstra Jurjen A.
Published: January 2021

Chapter 10 discusses Visser ’t Hooft’s use of Rembrandt as a mirror for his
favourite themes. He recognised profound biblical truths in both the life
of the painter and his work. The chapter explores several of these themes.
It also traces the sometimes extremely divergent opinions other people
had of him. While some could find no wrong in anything he did, others
could be quite critical of his approach and style of leadership.
Announcing the End of the Film Era
Authors: Andrew Dudley
Published: January 2021

In what at first appears a book review of Francesco Casetti’s The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, Dudley Andrew’s paper provides an overview of the most general and crucial discussion that the post-cinema theme brings to the fore. Not only does he bring together several theorists who participate in the debate throughout the globalized world – Mulvey, Aumont, Bellour, Dubois, Gaudreault, Marion, Rodowick, Casetti – but Andrew also reignites this debate that could be considered a scholastic quarrel about a process whose outcome is still uncertain – the end of cinema! – if it were not a historical mutation, the practical consequences of which we experience every day. Some partners in the dialogue initiated by Andrew appear in this book with new questions.
The Happy Failure
Authors: Viart Christophe
Published: January 2021

Among the most interesting and humorous artists that Marcel Duchamp
has inspired, Christophe Viart proposes considering another of Marcel’s
incursions into film. Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian contemporary
artist whose range of activities also covered poetry and (post-)cinema. A
single film can have considerable theoretical power. This is the case with
La pluie (Projet pour un texte) [The Rain (Project for a Text)], a
1969 two-minute 16mm black-and-white film, which presents Broodthaers
attempting to write on paper in the rain. Is it a film? Is it cinema? This
may be the material of a regular film, but not the spirit. We are definitely
in the post-art era…