Brill on the Wire

Enrique Fernández and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, eds. Death and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2024). In premodern Europe, the gender identity of those waiting for Doomsday in their tombs could be reaffirmed, readjusted, or even neutralized. Testimonies of this renegotiation of gender at the encounter with death is detectable in wills, letters envisioning oneself as dead, literary narratives, provisions for burial and memorialization, the laws for the disposal of those executed for heinous crimes and the treatment of human remains as relics.

Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010 (Brill, 2017) examines the mutual images formed between Japan and Germany from the mid-nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, and the influence of these images on the development of bilateral relations. Unlike earlier research on Japanese-German relations, which focused on the similarity of these countries' historical trajectories, this publication presents a more nuanced picture. It relativizes perceptions of a special "spiritual relationship" between Japan and Germany as well as their commonalities of "national character" through an exploration of previously untapped historical visual and textual sources. With essays by sixteen leading scholars in the field, th...

A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill, 2024) by Dr. Elena Jackson Albarran explores how and why culture-makers in the Americas tuned into to children as producers of cultural capital to advance their transnational projects. In many instances, prevailing conceptions of children as innocent, primitive, dependent, and underdeveloped informed perceptions of Latin America as an infantilized region, a lesser "Other Am...

Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia (Brill, 2024) explores the visual culture of national recollection in modern and contemporary East Asia by emphasizing memories that are under the continuous process of construction, reinforcement, alteration, resistance, and contestation. Expanding the discussion of memory into visual culture by exploring various visual sites of recollection, and the diverse ways commemoration is represented in visual, cultural, and material forms, this book produces cross-cultural and interdisciplinary conversations on memory and site by bringing together international scholars from the fields of art history, history, architecture, and theater and d...

The African cities of Bata and Al-Hoceima were created during the Spanish colonial rule of Equatorial Guinea and Morocco. Spain’s African Colonial Legacies: Morocco and Equatorial Guinea Compared (Brill, 2022) constructs their local history to analyse how Spanish colonialism worked, what its legacies were and the imprints it left on their national histories. The work explains the revision of collective memories of the past in the present as a form of decolonisation that seeks to build different foundations for the future in a transnational and glocal framework. The result is an exciting puzzle of individual and collective memories in whic...

What does Islam, particularly Shīʿī Islam, really say about same-sex sexual relations? Can Islamic legal frameworks, rooted in centuries of jurisprudence, ever be used to imagine the possibility of an Islamically valid same-sex marriage? What terms and categories did pre-modern Islamic sources use to describe what we might now call “homosexuality,” and what is meant by the claim that “homosexuality,” as a form of identity, is a modern concept? Is the story of Lot in the Qur’an really about homosexuality? And crucially, what Islamic perspectives exist in response to the deeply homophobic statement “Navigating Differences: Clarifying Sexual and Gender Ethics in...

Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts (Brill, 2015) offers an integrated study of the texts and images of illustrated Malay manuscripts on magic and divination from private and public collections in Malaysia, the UK and Indonesia. Containing some of the rare examples of Malay painting, these manuscripts provide direct evidence for the intercultural connections between the Malay region, other parts of Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. In this richly illustrated volume many images and texts are gathered for the first time, making this book essential reading for all those interested in the practice of magic and di...

Why does the Gospel of Mark make specific and repeated reference to the compassion of Jesus in the miracle stories? Compassion and the Characterization of the Markan Jesus (Brill, 2024) discusses the function that compassion has in the Markan characterization of Jesus, particularly in how the terminology employed depicts Jesus as entering the suffering of others. In doing so, it underscores how this portrayal is exceptional among the stories of miracle workers in ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish literature. In Mark, this compassion toward the suffering other is a central feature of the kingdom of God, an attribute the Markan audience is...

Those of us who have some background in Jewish history are taught that the Ottoman Empire encouraged Jews, particularly those of the Spanish and Portuguese Expulsions, to settle in Ottoman Lands. 

In Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy (Brill, 2024), Professor Ayalon debunks what he calls that myth. The Ottomans, according to Yaron, were interested in stability - economic and otherwise. Minorities, with their additional taxes, would bring more financial benefits. Many were merchants who would pay higher taxes. With this premise, we discussed the world of the Ottoman Jews as one of creating community and society. There were...

Though European administrative laws have gained global significance in the last few decades, research which provides both theoretical analysis and original empirical research has been scarce. The Common Core of European Administrative Laws Retrospective and Prospective (Brill/NIjhoff, 2023) an important account of the evolution of judicial review and administrative procedure legislation, using a factual analysis to shed light on how the different legal systems react to similar problems. Discussing the concept of a ‘common core’, Giacinto della Cananea reveals the commonalities in, and differences between, the foundational assumptions of European administrative adjudication and rule-making.

This is the fourth...

The small town of Vṛndāvana is today one of the most vibrant places of pilgrimage in northern India. Throngs of pilgrims travel there each year to honour the sacred land of Kṛṣṇa’s youth and to visit many of its temples. The Building of Vṛndāvana: Architecture, Theology, and Practice in an Early Modern Pilgrimage Town (Brill, 2023) explores the complex history of this town’s early modern origins. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines to examine history, architecture, art, ritual, theology, and literature in this pivotal period, the book examines how these various disciplines were used to create, de...

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest and urgency to questions of racial oppression and emancipation. We’ve now had about a decade of activists fighting for the idea that Black Lives Matter which eventually culminated in the summer of 2020 with millions taking to the streets. The actual concrete victories have been more of a mixed bag, which leads us to the question: what sort of politics are needed to achieve real emancipation? This led Kyle Edwards and August Nimtz back to the American Civil War, and more specifically to the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Do...

The Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity: Authors, Texts, and Ideas (Brill, 2024) focuses on the history of early Christianity, covering texts, authors, ideas, and their reception. Its content is intended to bridge the gap between the fields of New Testament studies and patristics, connecting a number of related fields of study including Judaism, ancient history and philosophy, covering the whole period of early Christianity up to 600 CE.

The BEEC aims both to provide a critical review of the methods used in Early Christian Studies and also to update the history of scholarship.

The BEEC addresses a rang...

In his recent monograph, David DeJong traces the history of Deuteronomy's concept of a prophet like Moses from the seventh century BCE to the first century CE, demonstrating the ways in which Jewish and Christian texts were influenced by and responded to Deuteronomy's Mosaic norm for prophetic claims.

Join us as we speak with David DeJong about "a prophet like Moses."

David DeJong (PhD, Notre Dame) is Assistant Professor of Religion at Hope College; his research and teaching focus on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and its interpretation in ancient Judaism and early Christianity.

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What does it mean that God hears? Can a God who is "pure act" be affected in such a way? What does this mean for those whom God hears? Who are those people? Join Benjamin Phillips as he asks such questions of Charles Helmer IV, author of The Lord Who Listens: A Dogmatic Inquiry into God as Hearer (Brill, 2024).

More about the book: In The Lord Who Listens, Charles C. Helmer IV draws on Holy Scripture and the theology of Karl Barth to offer a theological intepretation of God's hearing. Prioritizing this neglected biblical theme, Helmer develops a th...

Dangerous Anarchist Strikers (Brill, 2023) explores the ideas of three largely forgotten radical women who participated in labor union strikes in Argentina and Uruguay, Canada, and the United States: Virginia Bolten (c.1876-1960), one of the most militant anarchists of southern South America; Helen Armstrong (1875-1947), a major leader of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, whose involvement in that important event in Canadian history was, for a long time, obscured by accounts that emphasized the accomplishments of men; and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964), the Wobbly leader who directed many industrial strikes throughout the United States, and was one of the f...

In Delicious Prose: Reading the Tale of Tobit with Food and Drink (Brill, 2018), Naomi S.S. Jacobs explores how the numerous references to food, drink, and their consumption within The Book of Tobit help tell its story, promote righteous deeds and encourage resistance against a hostile dominant culture. Jacobs' commentary includes up-to-date analyses of issues of translation, text-criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, and issues of class and gender. Jacobs situates Tobit within a wide range of ancient writings sacred to Jews and Christians as well as writings and customs from the Ancient Near East, Ugarit, Greece, Rome, including a tr...

In this episode, we interview Prof. Bernard Freamon on his new book Possessed by the Right Hand.

Dan La Botz's book Riding with the Revolution: The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1925 (Brill, 2024) tells the story of Americans who from 1900 to 1925 became involved with the Mexican Revolution. John Reed actually saddled up and rode with Pancho Villa. Later, American war resisters crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they helped found the Communist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and a Feminist Council. Protestant ministers, Socialist Eugene Debs, Samuel Gompers head of the AFL, the anarchist Emma Goldman, and Communists John Reed, Louis Fraina, Bertram Wolfe, as well as foreign politicos M.N. Roy, Sen...

In Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939 (Brill, 2015), Zeev Levin seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of government efforts to socialize the Jewish masses in Uzbekistan, a process in which the central Soviet government took part, together with the local, republican and regional administrations and Soviet Jewish activists. This research presents a chapter in the history of the Jews in Uzbekistan, as well as contributing to the study of the socialization process of the Jewish population in the USSR in general. It also contributes to the study of relations among political and government bod...

Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War: Essays on Philology and Responsibility (Brill, 2019) is the first book-length study that examines the conspicuous absence of the Palestinian Nakba in modern Hebrew literature. Through a rigorous reading of canonical Hebrew literary texts, the author addresses the general failure of Hebrew literature to take responsibility for the Nakba. The book illustrates how the language of modern Hebrew poetry and fiction reflects symptoms of Israeli national violence, in which the literary language produces a picture of Palestine as an arena where the violent clash between the perpetrators and the victims takes place. In doing so, t...

Today I talked to Iemima Ploscariu about Alternative Evangelicals: Challenging Nationalism in Interwar Romania's Multi-ethnic Borderlands (Brill, 2024).

Evangelicals in interwar Romania were a vibrant mix of ethnicities, languages, and social statuses. Jews, Roma, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and Russians sang, prayed, and preached in their native languages. Romanian statesmen perceived them as a danger for the construction of a strong post-WWI national identity. The lived religion of interwar Romanian evangelicals and their struggle through music for legitimacy demonstrates the close ties between national self-understanding and religion. The diverse groups of Romanian evangelicals reveal how minorities in 20th cen...

Recent scholarship focused on the role of embodiment within cognition and communication reminds us that part of how we “know” is through our physical senses. We only know the softness of a kitten by touching its fur, or the tastiness of bread by eating. How might this influence our understanding of biblical texts, such as Jesus’s claim, “I am the bread of life,” and the invitation to eat? Sensing Salvation in the Gospel of John: The Embodied, Sensory Qualities of Participation in the I Am Sayings (Brill, 2023) explores the I am sayings of John’s Gospel, their sensory elements providi...

Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for South Asian Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view.

Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2023) situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic intellectual and religious histories. Central to this story are the Mughal siblings, Jahanara Begum and Dara Shikoh, and their Sufi guide Mulla Shah. Through detailed art historical analysis supported by new translations, this study contextualizes artworks made for Indo-Muslim pa...

This book puts two of the most significant Jewish Diaspora communities outside of the U.S. into conversation with one another. At times contributor-pairs directly compare unique aspects of two Jewish histories, politics, or cultures. At other times, they juxtapose. Some chapters focus on literature, poetry, theatre, or sport; others on immigration, antisemitism, or health. Taken together, the essays in Promised Lands North and South: Jewish Canada and Jewish Argentina in Conversation (Brill, 2024) offer sparkling insight and new depth on the modern Jewish global experience.

Despite global undertakings to safeguard the full enjoyment of human rights, culture, traditional practices and religion are widely used to discriminate against women. In Women’s Human Rights and the Elimination of Discrimination (Brill/Nijhoff, 2016), 17 scholars approach women’s human rights globally, regionally and nationally, combining the perspectives of public and private international law in a hitherto unique manner. Comprehensive legal, culture-based and theoretical overviews are combined with analyses of topical issues, such as unbalanced sex-ratios, intercountry adoption, women as refugees or as “surrogate mothers”, violence against women and cross-border enforcement of protection orders.

Several trends justify why it is worth analysing the concept of citizenship in international law. On the one hand, human mobility enhanced in the last decades of the twentieth century contributed largely to the multiplication of multiple citizenship. The phenomenon of migration, often linked to crises, fosters statelessness and presents new challenges to international law. The internationalization of human rights can accordingly have an impact on the law of nationality. Moreover, within the framework of regional organizations, new forms of citizenship are emerging. This phenomenon, going hand in hand with the traditional, historybased citizenship is also contributing to the...

Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two hundred years. These booklets were called kusazōshi (“grass books”). Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi (Brill, 2024) is the first English-language publication of its kind. It enables anyone new to kusazōshi to gain comprehensive knowledge of the field. For the specialist, our edited volume marks a turning point in scholarship, uncovering fresh research avenues. While exploring the powerful effects of the visual-verbal imagination, this collection opens up bold new vistas on the act of reading and...

The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans. 

In Priesthood, Cult, and Temple in the Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran: Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonean Jewish Literary Tradition (Brill, 2023), Robert Jon...

Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, and outlining potential directions for future discussions.

In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the early twentieth century, over-the-counter-patent medicines, and, more alarmingly, morphine, had become mass commodities, fueling debates over opiates in Japan's expanding imperial territories.

The fall of the empire and the occupation of Japan by the United States created conditions favorable for heroin use, followed, in time, by glue sniffing and psychedelic mushroom ingestion.

By illuminating the neglected history of drugs, Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan (Brill, 2023) highlights both the tr...

How is Buddhism seen and practiced in Taiwan? And how do neighbouring countries influence Taiwanese Buddhism? In this episode we explore the religious landscape of Taiwan in conversation with Dr. Yushuang Yao, a leading expert on religion in contemporary Taiwan.

Yushuang Yao is an Associate Professor at Fo Guang University, Taiwan, specializing in contemporary religions of Taiwan. She is also a research fellow at Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, and currently professorial fellow at the University of Tartu with "Taiwan Studies Programme”.

Heidi Maiberg, the host of the episode, is the Head of Communication at th...

Nahj al-Balagha is among the most powerful, consequential, and linguistically brilliant masterpieces of Arabic and of Islamic thought and literature. Based on the orations, letters, and sayings of wisdom of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661), the first Imam or successor to Prophet Muhammad in Shi‘i Islam and the fourth caliph in Sunni Islam, this oral treasure was compiled and brought together as a text by the late tenth/early eleventh scholar and poet Al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015). 

In this episode I speak with Professor Tahera Qutbuddin who has provided us with a majestic and brilliant complete English transl...

In Implications of Pre-Emptive Data Surveillance for Fundamental Rights in the European Union (Brill Nijhoff, 2023) Julia Wojnowska-Radzińska offers a comprehensive legal analysis of various forms of pre-emptive data surveillance adopted by the European legislator and their impact on fundamental rights. It also identifies what minimum guarantees have to be set up to recognize pre-emptive data surveillance as a legitimate measure in a democratic society. The book aims to answer the essential question of how to strike the proper balance between fundamental rights and security interests in the digital age.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Boo...

In this beautiful new book, Dr. Youngna Kim draws on her vast understanding of Korean art to provide an overview of the peninsula’s contemporary art scene. Korean artists have become increasingly active at an international level, with many being invited for residencies and exhibitions all over the world. Nonetheless, for various reasons, the general understanding of Korean contemporary art remains insufficient.

Korean Art since 1945: Challenges and Changes (Brill, 2024) is volume 9 in the series Modern Asian Art and Visual Culture. The book draws on primary sources to discuss the ideological stakes that affected the art world, modernist art...

One orthodoxy of critical biblical scholarship on the Third Gospel, attributed by later Christian tradition to a companion of Paul named Luke, holds that its author was not ethnically Jewish but rather a Gentile of some kind, either a proselyte to Judaism, a “Godfearer” once attached to a diasporic synagogue, or perhaps a pagan convert to a form of early Christianity reverent to Israel’s scriptures. 

In Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism (Brill, 2024), Joshua Paul Smith addresses the consensus for the supposedly Gentile Luke and concludes that no solid New Testa...

Arjen F. Bakker's book The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill, 2023) contributes to the rethinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an essential and integral part of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. The Qumran manuscripts attest to the reconfiguration of Jewish wisdom concepts in this period. Strikingly, reflection on time as the organizing principle behind all of reality is formative for these emerging concepts, which are expressed by the enigmatic phrase rāz nihyeh. The secret of time invites us to venture beyond existing categorizations and explore a rich conceptual framework that is manifested acros...

In Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918-1945 (Brill, 2019), Mirjam Rajner traces the lives and creativity of seven artists of Jewish origin. The artists - Mosa Pijade, Daniel Kabiljo, Adolf Weiller, Bora Baruh, Daniel Ozmo, Ivan Rein and Johanna Lutzer - were characterized by multiple and changeable identities: nationalist and universalist, Zionist and Sephardic, communist and cosmopolitan.

These fluctuating identities found expression in their art, as did their wartime fate as refugees, camp inmates, partisans and survivors. A wealth of newly-discovered images, diaries and letters highlight this little-known aspect of Jewish life and art in Yugoslavia, ill...

While many have noted the general Jewishness of the Gospel of John, few have given it a seat at the ideologically crowded table of ancient Jewish practice and belief—until now.

Join us as we speak with Wally Cirafesi, whose book, John Within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel (Brill, 2021), offers a reading of the Gospel of John as an expression of the fluid and flexible nature of Jewish identity in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Wally V. Cirafesi obtained his PhD from the University of Oslo, where he is Visiting Rese...

Global risks present formidable challenges to international law. Although they have long been identified in many other scientific disciplines, they are currently only considered on a sectoral basis in international law in the absence of a legal definition. 

The aim of Sarah Cassella's book Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023) is threefold: to identify the main elements that characterise global risks in a legal perspective, to determine the characteristics that make them a new category of risk, and to analyse the changes they bring about in the main mechanisms of in...