Food holds an important place in people’s lives and in the social values of individuals and groups, shaping identities along religious, ethnic, linguistic, and national lines and according to gender, class, place (including identification with particular towns or landscapes), and other variables. In the Middle East and among Middle Eastern diasporic communities today, culinary culture remains a source of deep pride, while reflecting ethical values that people place on sharing food with gues...

Prometheus was punished by the supreme god Zeus for giving to mankind the Olympic fire with which they learned to think and feel. He was chained to a cliff in the Caucasus, where, to make matters worse, he was visited daily by an eagle who ate part of his liver. At night, however, his liver grew back. We now know that the liver can regenerate, but were the ancient Greeks aware of this quality?

The myth of Prometheus has been a source of inspiration for many visual artists over the centuries....

From time immemorial, thunder and lightning were seen as a wrathful Deity’s instruments of punishment. But then, in 1752, came Benjamin Franklin’s paradigm-shifting invention of the lightning rod, and the way we view God and nature was changed forever.

In Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin. Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art Jan Wim Buisman shows how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, our scientific, religious, and artistic conceptions of one of nature’s...

In the ‘Anatomy lessons’ that were painted for the Surgeons’ Guild in Amsterdam, the surgeons portrayed, their teachers, the corpse and the dissection are described and discussed.

The year 2024 marks the opening of the new Middle Eastern Library of Leiden University, a purpose-built facility to serve the needs of all those who engage in the study of the Middle East and North Africa from the dawn of history to the present day. To celebrate the occasion, more than 40 authors from Leiden and beyond have contributed to this special volume on the library’s rich and multifaceted Oriental holdings.

Topics range from the Ancient Near East to the material and conservational ...

Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourses of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. 'Black Transnationalism and Japan' introduces the diverse activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and African American people. While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were often e...

Institutions across the globe are increasingly questioned on how their foundations are rooted in colonialism and how they aim to ‘decolonize’. The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices. It also explores possible futures: What can heritage institutions learn from (international) best practices regarding the ‘decolonization’...

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...

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 ...