This book presents the first-ever English translation of 'The Open Door to Hidden Paganism', one of the earliest and most detailed studies of South Indian Hinduism. Written in 1651 by Abraham Rogerius, a Dutch East India Company clergyman and missionary, it offers an unexpectedly balanced account of the customs and traditions of the South Indian Brahmins. This made it a cornerstone of early European Indology.

In addition to the Dutch original, this edition includes a full English translation...

What do scholars do when they talk about virtues (impartiality, accuracy) or vices (dogmatism, prejudice)? Against the common view that such high-minded talk is largely irrelevant to actual scholarly practice, this volume proposes to treat it as a practice in its own right.

Drawing on case studies from the nineteenth-century humanities (with occasional forays into physics, chemistry, and medicine), Paul shows that notions of virtue and vice were an evaluative discourse used across the academi...

By the closing decades of the 19th century, photography and postcard-production arrived in British Malaya. The colonial-era postcards that were produced up to the 1940s captured virtually all aspects of life in the British colony and remain as visual testimonies of how the colonial subjects at the time lived and worked, as well as their relationship to the land. And yet, despite the developments in photography and postcard-production, the images that were produced also reiterated and reproduc...

This book provides a fresh reinterpretation of the global spread of modern leisure travel in the middle of the nineteenth century through a critical comparative reading of twenty-two works of popular travel writing from maritime Southeast Asia and Ceylon. The examination of these books reveals a coherent genre that was seemingly frivolous yet in fact intensely political, with shared rules and tropes that served to legitimise colonial rule and codify aspects of colonial culture in the popular ...

In Multispecies Dialogues Eva Meijer develops a new understanding of the concept ‘dialogue’, which includes embodied, material and spatial interaction. Meijer does not do this alone: each chapter of the book is devoted to a dialogue, or set of dialogues – with street dog Olli, a community of former lab mice, amphibian neighbours, the North Sea, and many other beings. Taking multispecies dialogues seriously is a way to do justice to more-than-human agency and to become more worldly in a ...

Het Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis publiceert Nederlands- en Engelstalige wetenschappelijke artikelen op het gebied van de boekgeschiedenis van de Lage Landen in alle perioden. Elke editie bestaat uit een thema-dossier en een selectie aan andere artikelen. Het thema-dossier van het 32e Jaarboek (2025) is gewijd aan artikelen die over de grenzen van de Lagen Landen heen kijken. Aan bod komen voorbeelden van boeken die buiten de Republiek in de zeventiende eeuw werden gedrukt, die i...

Why is it that in France one finds a disproportionally larger number of statues of the Black Madonna than in other countries? Why is she found here preferably in power places in a landscape with an increased energy level? Why is it that in France the character of the Black Madonna is closely related to Mary Magdalene?

To these questions, this book holds the answers. It traces the path of the Dark Mother from the primal Black Venus from prehistoric times along the Celtic and Oriental Black God...