When cholera hit the small village of Scheveningen on the west coast of Holland in June 1832, it took everybody by surprise. It had been generally assumed that the deadly disease would come from the east. From India the pandemic had spread throughout Asia, reaching Russia, Poland, then Prussia…… Soldiers had fired their rifles to clear the air, ships had been quarantined, travellers had been stopped and questioned, all to no avail.

The first cases of cholera in the Netherlands were fierce...

What is fundamental for living objects?

They possess the potential to keep a number of surrounding variables within certain boundaries by using prepared behavior. At first glance, the way in which human behavior is determined reveals an enormous complexity in people. Consider the enormous diversity of cultures and the many ways in which behavior determination – both reactive and proactive – may change and develop throughout one lifetime. How can this great diversity between people as wel...

The earliest Christian myths emerged in the melting pot of Gnostic Alexandria, not in orthodox Jerusalem, classical Athens or legalistic Rome. In this book, Tjeu van den Berk traces the sources of the Christian faith to the banks of the river Nile.

In terms of symbolism, the Christian religion is virtually identical to that of the ancient Egyptians. From the perspective of religious history, we can agree with the theologian Eugen Drewermann who described ‘ a complete dependence of Christia...

Solitary Persons? describes the autism theories of George Frankl (1897-1975), Hans Asperger (1906-1980) and Leo Kanner (1894-1981). These medical doctors were among the first to work with autistic children. Frankl’s role in the history of autism was discovered in 2015 and is clarified here. Asperger and Kanner are well-known founders of autism research, but this dissertation presents new discoveries about their work and a new interpretation of their work as a whole.

Frankl, Asperger and Kan...

Rian de Waal (1958-2011) has written a book about the piano, and how the development of piano playing has been very much dependent upon musicians who were able to cross borders. In 'Metamorphoses, the Art of the Virtuoso Piano Transcription', De Waal takes us on a journey through the capricious history of the piano transcription. At first revered by musicians and audience alike (and often the sole reason for the great fame of some pianists), the piano transcription later became despised and c...

Since time immemorial, wet rice farming has been practised in Java, the main island of the Indonesian archipelago. For those people there was something divine about running water. Such water was attributed to the gods. The Solo, the biggest river of Java, was for them the Bengawan: the auspicious Lord of the Waters. In the nineteenth century, Dutch irrigation engineers arrived from overseas to subject these water gods to their own technical regimes. In terms of their own religious beliefs, th...

Jesus Tradition – early Christian traditions from and about Jesus – plays an important role in New Testament letters, not only in the Gospels and Corpus Paulinum, but also in the seven Catholic Epistles (the epistles of James, I and II Peter, I John, and Jude, which are addressed to the universal Church rather than to an individual or a particular church). This dissertation revolves around the relationship between the Catholic Epistles and the traditions about Jesus that have informed the...

What can music ‘move’ in a hospital setting? This intriguing research question is at the heart of this book. The project Meaningful Music in Healthcare, in short MiMiC, described here, emerged from a collaboration between the research group Lifelong Learning in Music at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen and the department of Surgery at the University Medical Center in Groningen. There seemed to be interesting possibilities in bringing a ‘person-centred’ musical app...

Who am I as a musician and how can I contribute to society?

It is the key question in this reflective handbook on Lifelong Learning in Music, in which Rineke Smilde reflects on today’s musicians’ emerging identity and its relationship with their professional performance. For many years she has been leading the research group Lifelong Learning in Music of Prince Claus Conservatoire (Hanze University Groningen), examining questions about the relationship between musicians and society. What ...

Bij het inrichten van de Nederlandse ruimte komen ruimtelijke planners en infrastructuurplanners elkaar veelvuldig tegen. Ruimtelijke ordening en transportplanning hebben veel met elkaar te maken. Toch zijn de relaties tussen beide plannerswerelden niet eerder beschreven.

Dit boek gaat over de ontmoeting tussen de builders uit de infrastructuurwereld en de planners, die de ruimte wilden ordenen. Beschreven wordt hoe sinds de jaren 1920 de professionalisering van builders en planners verliep, ...