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 ...

The revised prose version of the Babad Tanah Jawi was originally prepared by C.F. Winter Sr. (1799-1859), with the twofold aim of providing Javanese-language teaching material and of setting a standard for formal Javanese prose writing. At that time, Javanese was almost exclusively written in verse, which was not a medium suitable for the modern world that was dawning on Java. Although Winter achieved his aims in other ways and publications, the present text was mostly forgotten, or was just ...

Whose international matters, and why? How are geographic regions constructed? What are the channels of engagement between a place, its people, its institutions, and the world? How do we understand the non-West’s influence in contemporary global interactions? From humanitarianism and activism to diplomacy and institutional networks, South Asia has been a crucial place for the elaboration of international politics, even before the twentieth century. South Asia Unbound gathers an interdiscipli...

'Discourses of Disruption in Asia: Creating and Contesting Meaning in the Time of COVID-19' makes a unique contribution to research on meaning making in times of crisis. Using diverse analytical approaches to the study of languages in societies from the Asia-Pacific region, this volume explores the struggles over national identity and manifestations of socio-political issues in the context of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Each chapter interrogates how social actors in diverse c...

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...

For around 150 years, the richly illustrated Wigalois manuscript from Amelungsborn Abbey in Germany has rested largely unnoticed in the collections of Leiden University Library. Only recently has this unique codex, known as LTK 537, begun to attract the scholarly attention it deserves.

This volume offers the first full transcription of the manuscript's Middle High German text, accompanied by an accessible introduction and detailed commentary. In combining textual accuracy with contextual dep...

This book contains five legends from the German Middle Ages, presented in the Middle High German source language, with a modern English translation. These include the narratives of Veronica, Vespasian, Theophilus, Mary Magdalene and the miraculous history of the True Cross. Thisoutstanding and timely translation of these Middle High German texts will make them more accessible to an English speaking academic community.

The introduction provides an overview of Germanic legend research, discusses...

This book considers the interplay between the affordances of technologies, the experiences and processes of technological systems, and the process of learning and adaptation by state actors as part of governance reform in China. It offers detailed studies of specific projects and applications that are automated or quasi-automated in organising and governing social, economic, and cultural lives in the world’s largest techno-authoritarian regime. Written by scholars from six countries across ...

For the first time more than seventy South African women’s voices, from 1652 until today, are collected and published in one volume. Initially we hear their voices in Dutch, then in different varieties of Afrikaans, bearing witness to the fascinating development of a new language. We share the joys and sorrows of these women; their entertaining, sometimes gruesome stories.

The printing press arrived late at the Cape, and when it finally did, it took another century before the first publica...