What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by Biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring this question, Hans Hummer offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high middle ages, the period bridging Europe's primitive past and its modern future. Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when Biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deep prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. Hummer argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. He delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. This study reveals that kinship in the middle ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor was it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages, kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and which wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by 'the most righteous principle of love'.

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by Biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring this question, Hans Hummer offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high middle ages, the period bridging Europe's primitive past and its modern future. 'Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe' critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when Biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deep prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. Hummer argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe.

In this critical introduction to the poetry and fiction of Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965), David Scrase elucidates the literary subtleties of one of the most prominent writers to live and work in the German Democratic Republic. Despite the fact that Bobrowski won such prestigious accolades as the Heinrich Mann Prize and Charles Veillon Prize and held an important position in the literature of postwar Germany, very little English-language scholarship has been published about his work. Scrase fills this gap by exploring the heralded writer's novels, poems, and short stories. Contending that Bobrowski's writing can be understood only by those who appreciate the ethos that pervaded East Prussia during the writer's childhood, Scrase begins by reviewing the region's history and profiling the diverse ethnic and religious communities that Bobrowski encountered there. In looking at a representative sampling of Bobrowski's work, Scrase exposes the writer's attempts to come to terms with Germany's destructive role in eastern Europe. Scrase offers close readings of selected Bobrowski poems, most of which depict the landscape of Sarmatia, its rural traditions, and the daily tasks of its people. He also reviews Bobrowski's two novels, Levin's Mill and Lithuanian Pianos, and explains how to read Bobrowski's short stories.

Examines the careers and contributions of nine major scholars who have been influential in the development of historical sociology. Covers the work of Marc Bloch, Karl Polanyi, S. N. Eisenstadt, Reinhard Bendix, Perry Anderson, E. P. Thompson, Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Barrington Moore, Jr.

The earliest complete morality play in English, The Castle of Perseverance depicts the culture of medieval East Anglia, a region once known for its production of artistic objects. Discussing the spectator experience of this famed play, Young argues that vision is the organizing principle that informs this play's staging, structure, and narrative.

In Communities of Kinship: Retrieving Christian Practices of Solidarity with Lepers as a Paradigm for Overcoming Exclusion of Older People, Carlo Calleja describes kinship as a moral category, arguing that practicing kinship with others can cultivate virtues that shape the character of the agent. Contemporary Western society tends to focus on kinship as the sharing of blood ties or genetic material. On the other hand, the spiritual kinship that is proposed by religions tends to be exclusive and often nominal. For this reason, Calleja proposes practices and structures of solidaristic kinship, which involves sharing in the suffering of the other person. Finding parallels between the exclusion of lepers and the efforts of Christian communities to reforge kinship bonds with them in ancient and medieval times, he argues that communities of kinship with older persons can help cultivate the virtues needed for the flourishing of oneself and society.

Focuses on one of the most attractive features of late medieval manuscript illumination: the portrait of the book owner at prayer within the pages of her prayer-book.

The language of heritage permeates Scripture, encouraging Christians to approach church history like a family history. But the notion of ancestry also constrains the world’s Catholics and Protestants to trace their confessional descent from Europe, rendering them perpetual latecomers in the historical chain. "Ancestral Feeling" systematically diagnoses the postcolonial problems generated by an ancestral outlook. But, applying critical theories in cultural studies to the study of church history, the book experiments with ways that the Western Christian inheritance can awaken the memory of one’s own ancestors. Writing a personal reflection on her family’s history in British-ruled Hong Kong, Renie Chow Choy engages autobiographically with England’s ecclesiastical art, architecture, music, and literature, in order to affirm her attachment to a heritage normally associated with English national identity. For global and immigrant Christians brought into a relationship with English Christianity by colonialism but are bypassed by its history, this book makes a bold declaration: England’s Christian heritage is also our story.

Medieval Christianity in Practice provides readers with a sweeping look at the religious practices of the European Middle Ages. Comprising forty-two selections from primary source materials--each translated with an introduction and commentary by a specialist in the field--the collection illustrates the religious cycles, rituals, and experiences that gave meaning to medieval Christian individuals and communities. This volume of Princeton Readings in Religions assembles sources reflecting different genres, regions, and styles, including prayer books, chronicles, diaries, liturgical books, sermons, hagiography, and handbooks for the laity and clergy. The texts represent the practices through which Christians conducted their individual, family, and community lives, and explores such life-cycle events as birth, confirmation, marriage, sickness, death, and burial. The texts also document religious practices related to themes of work, parish life, and devotions, as well as power and authority. Enriched by expert analysis and suggestions for further reading, Medieval Christianity in Practice gives students and general readers alike the necessary background and foundations for an appreciation of the creativity and multiplicity of medieval Christian religious culture.

Illustrated throughout with over 80 full colour images, Empowering Visions explores the role of images and mass media in Hindutva, the cultural-nationalist movement that moved to the forefront of politics in India in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The author investigates when, why and in what way the moving image, and videos in particular, came to play a central role in the process of self-representation and self-constitution of Hindu nationalist groups and organizations in the overlapping domains of politics, religion and economics.The videos analysed here have been included in massive public political spectacles such as election rallies and patriotic pilgrimages. They have also been employed for in-house indoctrination and emotive mobilization of militant cadres for temporary, often violent, agitation. With the help of these media, different political and cultural-religious organizations, subsumed under the umbrella of Hindutva, have attempted to constitute notions of 'Indianness' as 'Hinduness', to challenge and provoke both the government in power and specific minority groups such as the Muslims in India. How this was done, who stood behind the making of the videos and how they were made up and distributed, are questions that lie at the heart of this study. At a time when public attention is focused on transnational, and mostly Islamicist movements, "Empowering Visions" argues that both transnationalism and nationalism have to be treated with equal attention, and to some extent ought to be seen as intertwined processes. This book is unique in its presentation and discussion of profound ethnographic data through interviews with a variety of spokesmen for the Hindutva movement. It also offers an in-depth analysis of visual and audio-visual material that has so far been unrecognized and unexplored in scholarly works.