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This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the tenth to the fourteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability-medieval and otherwise-with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

The identification of ceramic imports within prehistoric and historic assemblages has long been the primary indicator for identifying connections between different sites and regions. Yet this has fostered a presence/absence diagnosis for contact between different communities. Approaches such as post-colonial perspectives and network analysis, which focus on the nature of the connections, are now beginning to offer more meaningful ways of considering past interactions. These approaches can bridge the traditional divide between "prehistoric" and "historic" and offer a valuable contribution to the wider study of past interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. The geographical or topographical setting of an archaeological site is often acknowledged as an important factor in their significance or how well connected the community was within the cultural landscape. But to what extent do geographical categories such as "island," "coast," "mainland" or "hinterland" influence modern ideas on the dynamics of these ancient communities? This volume uses ceramic studies across multiple spatial and diachronic scales to provide new insights into the connectivity of ancient Mediterranean communities.

Human beings have always been concerned with fundamental questions about their selves, including the deeply personal nature of human experience, the persistence of the self over time, the relation between mind and body, and the interdependence between self and community. The goal of this volume is to rethink these questions against the backdrop of Chinese philosophical traditions, covering the ideas of major thinkers from Classical to late imperial China, with a particular focus on the fact that human experience is necessarily characterized by the first-person perspective. The contributors to this volume employ different methods (historical, comparative, phenomenological), but they all aim at bringing the rich resources of Chinese philosophy to life in our global present.

In the context of modern global exchanges, an imagined and essentialised notion of 'East Asia' has served as both a source of inspiration and a catalyst for new connections, extending beyond the geographic boundaries of China, Japan, and Korea. This volume explores the global circulation of practices, technologies, and ideas identified as 'East Asian' in alternative therapies and spiritual practices since the 1970s. Case studies range from the incorporation of traditional Chinese medicine into Brazilian naturopathy to self-development seminars promoting Korean national identity. Rather than focusing on questions of authenticity, the book uniquely interrogates how and why the cultures of China, Japan, and Korea have been invoked over the last fifty years to promote specific therapeutic, spiritual, and political agendas worldwide.

With the birth of the cult of the saints, their relics became valuables whose possession would guarantee prestige, protection, and spiritual benefits to a town, church, or monastery. For this reason--at first with the aim of preserving the bodies of newly-executed martyrs from destruction and later of increasing the power of a particular faction or community--, the relics began to be stolen, with numerous cases documented throughout Europe. At the same time, a rich hagiographic literature flourished to describe the contexts in which the thefts occurred and to demonstrate their authenticity. Justifications, legitimations, ordeals, and supernatural interventions are dotted throughout the stories of hagiographers over the centuries. This book seeks to reconstruct the cultural history of the theft of relics in the specific context of Italy, from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, availing itself of an interdisciplinary perspective.

Independent cinema in China is not only made outside the commercial system but also without being submitted for censorship. We know that for several decades it has been the crucible out of which China's most exciting new films have flowed. The essays in this volume interrogate what else we think we know. Did it really start with Wu Wenguang and Bumming in Beijing in 1990, or can its roots be traced back much earlier? What are its aesthetics? And its ethics, including of gender and class? Where do audiences watch these films in China and how do they circulate? And, since the 2017 Film Law defined uncensored films as illegal, is independent Chinese cinema still alive? What does it mean today? And does it have a future? The essays in this anthology-many by exciting new scholars-explore these urgent questions.

Gentrification is extensively discussed in the media, where coverage can describe changing neighbourhoods and analyse the causes and consequences of such change. The media are also arenas in which the voices of those who advocate or resist gentrification can be heard. How can this profusion of content be examined? What methods can be used to critically address the role of the media in constructing and propagating discourses on gentrification? Central to this book is the idea that new research should engage with the theoretical and methodological issues that emerge when media products are used as a corpus to study gentrification. This edited volume considers a range of means that are used to shape and publicize representations: contributions investigate printed and online newspapers, websites, blogs, television programmes and social media. It also aims to highlight the diversity of players who produce and disseminate media discourses on gentrification.

This book charts the broad cultural impact of the medieval and early modern female performer: how she engages with her historical origins in classical drama, works within contemporary cultural and professional networks, and sets the terms for female performance in subsequent historical periods. Moving beyond the archival evidence that establishes that medieval and early modern women and girls performed, it explores how their performances resonated across national boundaries and historical periods, revealing wide patterns of influence and inspiration. This collection of original essays brings together well-established authorities with new and emerging scholars, offering innovative and ground-breaking discussions of medieval dramatic cultures, the Shakespearean stage, professional actresses in Spain and Italy, the performance of music and dance, artistic representations of the female performer, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations. Ranging from tenth-century Germany to twenty-first-century London, the chapters in this volume offer a new set of paradigms for understanding and interpreting women and girls on stage.

In China, every phase of modernization had its particular poetic forms and lyrical articulations. The 1919 May Fourth movement was the breeding ground for poetical experiments by authors inspired by new world literary trends. Under Mao Zedong, folk songs accompanied political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward. Misty Poetry of the 1980s contributed to the humanistic discourse of the post-Mao reform era. The most recent stage in Chinese poetry resonates with entangled local and global concerns, such as technological innovation, environmental anxieties, socio-political transformations, and the return of nationalist sentiments and Cold War divisions. In search for creative responses to the crisis, poets frequently revisit the past while holding on to their poetic language of self-reflection and social critique. This volume identifies three foci in contemporary poetry discourses: formal crossovers, multiple realities, and liquid boundaries. These three themes are anything but mutually disjunctive and often intersect within texts from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan discussed in the book.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Jirim League witnessed a linguistic wrestle between Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian powers. The Qing Empire envisioned a trilingual educational system, with the aim of improving the Jirim Mongols' ability to read Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian. Through this policy, the Qing sought to transform loyal imperial subjects into modern patriotic nationals and incorporate them into an integrated and united China under a Manchu constitutional monarchy. The late Qing's linguistic practice for ruling the Mongols of Manchuria was an attempt to cope with the enduring legacies in Qing administration and people's everyday life, growing local ethnic tensions, cross-boundary connections, imperial rivalries, and the rise of new ideas concerning nation, modern state, and international relations in East Asia. This book challenges the notion of Chinese language reform as a story of linear progress towards national monolingualism, unfolds the power of multilingualism in Chinese nationalist discourse from a peripheral, non-Han Chinese perspective, and questions the extent to which national languages dominate the writing of history.

This book provides a thorough revision of the image of the public church under the Dutch Republic after the Peace of Westphalia and before the onset of the 'high Enlightenment'. Traditional church history considers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a period of decline. Yet this was the high tide of Dutch expansion when Dutch society was extremely rich. In its five universities and its highly literate population internationally acknowledged scholarship, arts and sciences flowered. Did really nothing of all this vitality rub off on the public religion? Rather than the traditional static image of a rather joyless and ossified orthodoxy, an exploration of the interface between the Reformed church and Dutch society at large reveals a religious culture that had much to offer to various audiences, in the sphere of knowledge production as well as in the form of spiritual solace and everything in between.

Marin Mersenne and the Study of Harmony delves into the central role of music among the early modern sciences by focusing on the work of the French polymath Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). Although now considered more an art than a science, music was for many early modern scholars a universal science for studying the harmonies present in all beings. Music's ability to be quantified while being experienced aesthetically meant that, for Mersenne, it was the central science to approximate the sounding and inaudible harmonies present in the world and universe at large. Bringing together Mersenne's interests in the physics of sound and hearing, combinatorics, musical instruments, curiosities, and music from outside of Europe, this book shows why so many early modern scholars were drawn to music and how the discipline of music was transformed in the seventeenth century.

Tadeas Hajek of Hajek (1526-1600), Latinized as Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hagek/Hayek, was a key figure in early scientific debates not only in his native Bohemia. A versatile scholar and polymath, he was prolific in medicine, botany, mathematics and astronomy. Modern interpreters tended to point out his astronomical interpretations to emphasize his greatest achievements and his "modernity." However, Hajek also drew extensively on traditional arts such as alchemy, astrology and metoposcopy. In this volume, the contributors study various aspects of Hayek's thought to present a less tendentious intellectual portrait of him in the context of his times. Even from this more adequate perspective, he remains an important figure in the dialectical process of transmitting ideas whose influence extended far beyond the Czech lands.

When he returned to the Netherlands in 2009, decades after World War II, Jefferson Wiggins realized that no one he met knew about the segregated US Army during the war, nor did they know about the contribution of Black American soldiers to the liberation of the Netherlands. They were not mentioned anywhere in Dutch history books or in archives. Together with oral historian Mieke Kirkels, Wiggins sat down to record his memories. Wiggins passed away in 2013, and his widow, Janice Wiggins-Paterson, continued the project in his memory. With newly discovered archival material, and richly illustrated, this book gives a lively account of an undocumented story of WWII, Black American, and Dutch military history.

This volume is a collective attempt on the part of a community of academics, film festival curators, and archivists to come to terms with practical and intellectual challenges of the pandemic and post-pandemic realities affecting cultures of film festivals. The collection draws contours of critical inquiry orienting current film festival research and practice to explore new directions in archiving and decolonizing practices and big data analysis in the post-Covid-19 context and beyond. The four-part study gathers the voices of academics and practitioners who engage in a dialogue to articulate critical areas for both study and practice of film festivals, and identifies conceptual tools to address them: "Archival Turn," "Decolonizing Film Festival Studies," "Post-Covid-19 and Film Festival Studies" and "Data Visualization and Film Festival Research and Practice."

This book provides a timely discussion of the creative practices in fandom and media culture. Within their participatory cultures, fans produce a wealth of content, data and materials. They write fan fiction, curate wikis and design costumes. This international collection offers a diverse exploration of contemporary fan practices through different cases, such as Yuri!!! On ICE, Harry Potter and Mass Effect. This book reveals how expression, emotion and agency are central to fan activity. Fans are highly adept at transmedia, as well as the critical use of different media and platforms. Fandom can apply to wider concepts within new media, the humanities and design, as the authors in this collection show. They also rely on different approaches, ranging from textual analysis to different forms of ethnography. Overall, Affect in Fandom offers a deliberately diverse exploration of exactly what contemporary fans create and curate, and how.

No Japanese leader has dominated Japan's recent political landscape more than the late Abe Shinz.. With the this as the basic premise, the main objective of this compiled volume is to examine and assess Japan's foreign and domestic polices during the 2010s, a decade which largely overlaps with Abe's tenure as prime minister. This book is much more than a mere study of Abe's leadership, however, as it ventures far beyond the traditional scope of diplomatic and political history by incorporating a multidisciplinary approach. As such, the contributors comprise not only historians and political scientists, but also sociologists, economists, legal experts, journalists, and practitioners of diplomacy. This diversity in backgrounds makes it possible to examine a much wider range of topics and themes that clearly illuminate the multitude of challenges that Japan faced in the decade as well as how it responded to those challenges, leading to a more thorough understanding of the path that Japan took in the 2010s.

Civil society in Japan is a large and multifaceted sphere with a diversity of actors pursuing various social, political, and economic objectives. The sphere has experienced major waves of transformation in the post-1945 era, especially in the 1990s when volunteering and nonprofit activities came to the forefront of political and popular attention. This handbook brings together twenty-one leading experts to provide comprehensive and up-to-date analyses of civil society in Japan. What is the history of Japanese civil society and how has it evolved in recent decades? Who have been the key participants and what are their objectives? How have international actors and conditions influenced civil society in Japan? More broadly, what do recent developments in Japanese civil society tell us about the condition of democracy, state-society relations, and the public sphere in the country? And how might Japanese civil society develop into the future? The contributions to the handbook offer innovative perspectives based on the most-recent fieldwork and data available. The handbook is divided into three sections: Institutions, Justice and Transnationalism. Topics include nonprofit organizations, volunteering, philanthropy, new media, gender, pacifism, nuclear power, territorial politics, international cooperation and transnational solidarity. The volume will be valuable for scholars in both research and teaching as well as essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the diversity and vibrancy of Japanese civil society today.

In this book, I discuss the mishu (.., staff member, secretary) system and the operation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) between 1921 and 2022. In particular, I focus on the system's impact on high-level politics and decision making during four periods: the Revolutionary War (1921-1945), the founding of the People's Republic of China to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1950-1966), the Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976), and the period of reform and opening up to the present (1976-2022). This is, I believe, the first systematic analysis of the mishusystem, and as such will fill a gap in the literature on the CCP.

Sex work is often called the oldest profession in the world. It manifests itself in a plethora of forms. A move to private locations is now taking place: contacts are established via the Internet and meetings take place at appointed places. This makes it more difficult to monitor forced work, and exploitation therefore risks remaining undetected. This book presents empirical findings regarding exploitation in various countries, considering sex workers, traffickers and clients, and the fight against human trafficking. Countries differ vastly in their legislative approaches, ranging from highly repressive to very liberal. This volume asks whether the ongoing process of making and changing laws is sufficiently effective in fighting human trafficking. Other interventions could obtain better outcomes, such as promoting more independence among women and helping trafficked individuals to get out. Less ideology and more attention to the facts of exploitation and sex work might help to achieve these aims.

With the rising tide of scholarly and societal interest in the history and legacy of colonialism and slavery, this collection offers a much needed diachronic analysis of the cultural representations of the lives and afterlives of those subjected to slavery and indenture. It focuses on the history of the 'neerlandophone' space, defined as the complex linguistic space spanning former Dutch colonies. This collection gives a longue durée overview, with cases encompassing the period from the early modern period to the present-day, revealing the deep roots of the colonial 'cultural archive'. A wide variety of scholars demonstrate how attention to the layered and polyphonic qualities of narratives can reveal silent and disruptive voices in colonial discourse, as well as collective emotions and imaginations that have hitherto remained unrecorded in most historical sources. They discuss different aesthetic, poetical, and storytelling practices, including literature, photography, performance, philosophy, and other forms of knowledge production that were formed both in the metropolis and by enslaved and indentured peoples in the colonies.

The Stockholm Bloodbath on November 7-9, 1520, during which Kristian II had more than 100 persons executed on charges of heresy, is a turning point in the history of the Northern kingdoms. This bloodbath eventually led to Kristian II's lifelong incarceration, the rise of the Swedish Vasa dynasty, and the end of the Kalmar Union. It has commonly been perceived both as part of Swedish-Danish conflict and also as part of a Swedish civil war. In this volume, fifteen researchers offer new insights both into the events themselves and also, most significantly, into their background and aftermath, which stretch far beyond Stockholm and the year 1520.

This volume presents a comparative analysis of three key cities-Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei-during the Cold War. Strategically positioned within international trade networks, these cities also served as critical nodes for both regional conflicts and cooperation. The comparison primarily focuses on their urban landscapes, drawing on the memories embedded in their collective memoryscapes, the imagery presented in their filmscapes, and the perceptions of their inhabitants, as reflected in fiction and films that portrayed urban life and the experiences of ordinary people. The Cityscape of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei during the Cold War explores both the shared characteristics of these cities as frontiers in the bipolar global system (divided between Communism and the Free World) and their distinctive features as unique spaces shaped by their own meanings and opportunities.

In this book, Henk van Rinsum provides an in-depth description of the colonial past of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, from its foundation in 1636. He describes the development of (scientific) knowledge and knowledge transfer about and in the Dutch colonies, especially in the Dutch East Indies. The central theme of his book is the idea of Western superiority - the assumption that we are 'developed' and therefore modern, while those in the colonies are 'not (yet) developed' and therefore primitive or traditional. This colonial past is also the framework in which Utrecht University became involved in slavery and its abolition. Henk van Rinsum shows how the knowledge acquired in the colony also contributed significantly to the scientific development of the university, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century. Utrecht University and Colonial Knowledge is therefore an important contribution to both colonial and intellectual history.

The Canadian War Cemetery in Groesbeek is the burial place of 2,618 soldiers from Canada and the British Commonwealth. Most died during the liberation of the Netherlands and the decisive Rhineland Offensive at the end of World War II. This book brings their individual stories to life and offers a moving tribute to the young men who fought for freedom, democracy and peace. With the names of all the fallen and the 1,012 missing on the Memorial Wall, this is a valuable unique reference work that permanently honours their sacrifices. The book tells the history of the cemetery through a transatlantic lens with a special focus on the efforts of Dutch volunteers and local heritage institutions to keep the collective memory alive. Through rich illustrations, this book shows how the Canadian War Cemetery in Groesbeek has become a living tribute to the ties between the Netherlands and Canada.

Meet Takeda Kiyoko (1917-2018), a remarkable woman, whose life-course defies the stereotypes of Japanese women in modern Japan. Told in her own words, these memoirs focus on "encounters"- the individuals whom she met in her travels to Asia, the United States and Europe, and through her involvement in organisations such as the YWCA and World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), and the progressive Japanese thinkers that came up in her research (the encounter between Christianity and Japanese thinkers of the modern period (from 1867)). Takeda introduces us to her mother, whose thoughts on women's higher education and marriage were ahead of her times, and to her encounter with Christianity at the Christian girls' school she attended after Japanese high school. Her intellectual world expanded with her involvement with Christian organisations such as the YWCA, and the WSCF, and when she went to the USA as an exchange student.

Communication is at the heart of politics, and certainly in East Asia, where vibrant media systems and cultural industries connect with political processes that range from the democratic to autocratic. If we are to understand East Asian societies, and 21st-century politics more broadly, we need to take media and communication seriously. This textbook provides a flexible toolbox of methods and theories for studying political communication. Taking its examples and exercises from Japan, Korea, and the Chinese-speaking world, it walks readers through core issues, media contents, and communicative modes. Readers will learn how to systematically analyse the politics of media environments, written and spoken words, images and visual designs, moving image, space and spatial interactions, (video)games, and more. The chapters can be used individually or, optionally, as a playful 'gamified' course that offers learners a first-hand experience of how complex 'information societies' incentivise behaviour.

What is the meaning of love in modern Chinese politics and why has it been a crucial political discourse over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through to the present day? How has it been appropriated by generations of political leaders as a powerful instrument? This book offers a systematic examination of the ways in which the notion of love has been introduced, adapted, and engineered as a political discourse for the building and rebuilding of a modern nation, all the while appropriating Confucianism, Christianity, popular religion, socialism, and their religious affects. The insights of this exploration expand not only the discussion of the role of emotions in the project of Chinese modernity, but also the study of post-secular politics around the world today.