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Item Twelfth-Century Scholars on the Moral Exemplarity of Ancient Poetry(2023) van den Berg, Baukje; Department of Medieval StudiesSeveral twelfth-century scholars make exemplarity a central element of ancient poetry’s moral value for contemporary readers, especially Eustathius’ comments on Homer as a vehicle for ethical reflection and moral education.Item The Many Nationalities of Tamara Khanum : Friendship of the Peoples at Home, Abroad, and Within(2023-04-29) Shaw, Charles D.; Department of Historical StudiesInspired by scholarship on empire and historical biography, this article examines the life of Soviet entertainer Tamara Khanum (1906–91) and her formation as a socialist intermediary. First, it considers how an ethnic Armenian born in the Uzbek SSR came to represent an image of liberated Eastern femininity to domestic audiences. Then it considers her genre of song, dance, and costume of various nationalities as a technology of Soviet cultural politics, suited to mediate interethnic harmony at home and as a weapon of Cold War cultural diplomacy. It proposes her genre as a linking strand between various eras of Soviet internationalism, helping to define a distinctive emotional dimension to Soviet Central Asia’s role as model for the Third World. Integrating autobiographical, biographical, and archival sources, the article contends that one of the byproducts of a career spent facilitating interethnic connection was Khanum’s adoption of firm but heterodox convictions on nationality and the Soviet doctrine of Friendship of the Peoples.Item Intermediaries as Change Agents : Translating, Interpreting, and Expanding Socialism(2023-04-27) Shaw, Charles D.; Iordachi, Constantin I.; Department of Historical StudiesItem For the love of literature: a Byzantine perspective(2025-03-27) van den Berg, Baukje; Department of Historical StudiesItem Abolitionist Ways of Seeing: Artists in the Penal Colony Complex(Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2023) Liebeskind, Ros; von Zinnenburg Carroll, Khadija; Fuggle, Sophie; Forsdick, Charles; Massing, Katharina; Department of Historical StudiesThis chapter explores the tension caused by the attempts towards the absorption of abolitionist politics into the academy. Focusing on art produced in immigration detention facilities and prisons in the United Kingdom and Australia Carroll and Liebeskind critique various forms of cultural production that ultimately uphold the frame work of the carceral imagination.Item The Pursuit of the Sanhedrin : The Hungarian Jewish Congress in the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century Synods(2020) Wilke, Carsten L.; Department of Historical StudiesThis article studies the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869 from a European perspective. During the run-up to the Congress, the Jewish press discussed intensely the organizational models found in Jewish history, in modern Jewries abroad, as well as in the minority churches of Hungary. Central European Jews challenged the success narrative that had come to be associated with the Napoleonic Sanhedrin and the central administration of French Jewry. Comparison with other religious unification attempts can teach us about the expectations that were projected onto the effort to control the Hungarian Jewish pluralization processes with the devices of parliamentary democracy.Item Le «Messie Mystique» et la Bourse d'Amsterdam, le 3 Mai 1666(2007) Wilke, Carsten L.According to an opinion voiced by G. Scholem, the messianic movement of Shabbatai Zevi owed much of its success to the attraction that his paradoxical message exerted among Conversos returning to Judaism in the 17th C. With the intention of criticizing this explanation, the author presents and analyzes in this article a recently discovered satyrical pamphlet that was distributed by the anti-Shabbatean party in Amsterdam following the arrival of news concerning Shabbetai's prison on May 3, 1666. This text shows that some of the more influential and prosperous Jewish communal leaders did not believe in the false Messiah. Confronting the Shabbatean party, these "unbelievers" used tactics of literary deceit similar to those used in their relation to Catholic Spain. Their Iberian Marrano origins did not arouse in them any mystical enthusiam. To the contrary, they were concerned with keeping the reputation of rationality and trust they had enjoyed in the European world of finances. This controversy includes an ironical reference to the sanctions that the Amsterdam Jewish community imposed on their heretics Uriel da Costa and Baruch Espinoza.Item Semi-Clandestine Judaism in Early Modern France : European Horizons and Local Varieties of a Domestic Devotion(Brill Academic Publishers, 2019) Wilke, Carsten L.; Kaplan, Yosef; Department of HistoryItem Isaac Orobio : The Jewish Argument with Dogma and Doubt(De Gruyter, 2018) Wilke, Carsten; Department of HistoryIn this volume, six historians explore new approaches to Isaac Orobio de Castro (1617–1687), an Amsterdam physician who was the most widely-read among the early modern defenders of Judaism against Christian proselytizing. He was also the major author who rebutted Benedict Spinoza’s Freethought from inside his own Sephardic community. Reflecting on the developments in early modern studies that have appeared since the publication of Yosef Kaplan’s seminal monograph in 1982, the authors revisit Orobio’s intellectual personality with a focus on transcultural processes, clandestine book culture, philosophical rhetoric, and literary reception. Born in Portugal to Christian parents of Jewish ancestry, Orobio left behind a brilliant career as a court physician in Spain and France when he publicly embraced Judaism. With academic erudition, he translated Jewish religious positions into the eclectic philosophy of the day, using both rationalist and sceptic arguments. His work leaked out into the non-Jewish world and armed Enlightenment philosophers for their attacks on Christianity, showing the impact of Jewish criticism on the early modern quest for philosophical certainty and religious pluralism.Item Imaginary Controversists : Abraham Gómez Silveyra and the Theologians of the Huguenot Exile(2021-12-30) Wilke, Carsten L.; Department of HistoryIn the Huguenot refugee community in The Netherlands, known as a hotbed of the early Enlightenment, literary interest in Judaism was ubiquitous, yet actual Dutch Jews were relegated to a marginal position in the exchange of ideas. It is this paradoxical experience of cultural participation and social exclusion that a major unpublished source allows to depict. The ex-converso Abraham Gómez Silveyra (1651–1741), a merchant endowed with rabbinic education and proficiency in French, composed eight manuscript volumes of theological reflections in Spanish literary prose and poetry. This huge clan-destine series, which survives in three copies, shows the author’s insatiable curiosity for Christian thought. While rebutting Isaac Jacquelot’s missionary activity, he fraternizes with Pierre Jurieu’s millenarianism, Jacques Basnage’s historiography, and Pierre Bayle’s plea for religious freedom. Gómez Silveyra, however, being painfully aware of his voicelessness in the public sphere, enacts Bayle’s utopian project as a closed perform-ance for a Jewish audience.Item Introduction : Isaac Orobio, the Sceptic Dogmatiser(De Gruyter, 2018) Wilke, Carsten; Department of HistoryItem From the inquisitorial prison to an Amsterdam synagogue(2008) Wilke, CL; Department of HistoryItem Item Doubting divine justice and human knowledge : Qohelet's cultural dialectics(De Gruyter, 2021-07-19) Wilke, Carsten L.; Department of HistoryItem High precision laser scanning assisting in the service of historical and art historical research. The burial monument of Queen Gertrude (13th century)(2017-12-14) Szabó, Beatrix; Bödő, Gábor; Fehér, András; Hadzijanisz, Konsztantinosz; Lovas, Réka; Surina, Dóra; Vári, Barnabás; Dabrónaki, Gyula; Laki, Boglárka; Pipis, László; Laszlovszky, József; Department of Medieval StudiesOne of the most important and controversial burial sites of medieval Hungary is the grave of Queen Gertrude of Meran with its decorated burial monument at the Cistercian Abbey of Pilis. The circumstances of her assassination are hotly debated in Hungarian history and are described in a large number of local and foreign contemporary documents. Archaeological excavations have revealed the fragments of her burial monument with high artistic qualities (human figures, architectural elements, inscriptions, decorated patterns). Over the last three decades, art historical research has discussed the foreign artistic influences of the monument and proposed several reconstructions based on the drawings and photos of the excavated fragments. A full-size sculpted model has also been created on the basis of one of these hypothetical reconstructions. This paper will present the results of a new research project to create the first virtual reconstruction of the burial monument. By using 3D technology, the results and conclusions derived from the fragments have been made more accessible than through traditional methods.Item The Mongol Invasion of Hungary in Its Eurasian Context(2023-12-18) Laszlovszky, József; Nagy, Balázs; B. Szabó, János; Uhrin, Dorottya; Department of Medieval StudiesThis report gives an account of the historiography of the Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241–1242, and the ongoing research of the project “The Mongol Invasion of Hungary in its Eurasian Context.” The research has been carried out by an interdisciplinary team comprising representatives of diverse academic institutions and fields. The primary objective of the project was to reassess existing scholarship by comparing it with the findings of the project team members, ultimately generating new scholarly insights. The team members concentrated on various aspects, including archaeology, military history, and the short- and long-term impacts of the Mongol military invasions in the mid-thirteenth century.Item Climate of doubt : A re-evaluation of Büntgen and di Cosmo's environmental hypothesis for the Mongol withdrawal from Hungary, 1242 CE(2017-12-01) Pinke, Zsolt; Ferenczi, László; Romhányi, Beatrix F.; Laszlovszky, József; Pow, Stephen; Department of Medieval StudiesIn their recent article published in the journal Scientific Reports, Büntgen and Di Cosmo have attempted to solve the historical mystery of the sudden Mongol withdrawal from Hungary after a year-long occupation. We cannot share the authors' viewpoint that environmental circumstances contributed to the decision of the Mongols to abandon Hungary since the hypothesis lacks support from environmental, archaeological and historical evidence. Historical source material in particular suggests that the Mongols were able to settle and sustain their herds in Hungary as is clearly stated in a letter by King Bela IV to the pope. The Mongol army arrived in the kingdom at the end of a severe drought, and we present empirical evidence that the abundant rain in the spring of 1242 CE did not worsen but rather improved their prospects for sufficient food supplies and pasturage. The marshy terrain of the Hungarian Plain likely did not precipitate the Mongol withdrawal as the Mongol high command ultimately stationed their main forces around the marshy Volga Delta. In contrast to what Büntgen and Di Cosmo have suggested, we argue that the reasons for the sudden withdrawal cannot be explained largely by environmental factors.Item 14th-16th-Century Danube Floods and Long-Term Water-Level Changes in Archaeological and Sedimentary Evidence in The Western and Central Carpathian Basin: an Overview with Documentary Comparison(2013-11-23) Kiss, Andrea; Laszlovszky, József; Department of Medieval StudiesIn the present paper an overview of published and unpublished results of archaeological and sedimentary investigations, predominantly reflect on 14th-16th-century changes, are provided and evidence compared to documentary information on flood events and long-term changes. Long-term changes in flood behaviour (e.g. frequency, intensity, seasonality) and average water-level conditions had long-term detectable impacts on sedimentation and fluvio-morphological processes. Moreover, the available archaeological evidence might also provide information on the reaction of the society, in the form of changes in settlement organisation, building structures and processes. At present, information is mainly available concerning the 16th, and partly to the 14th-15th centuries. These results were compared to the available documentary evidence on 14th-16th century Danube floods occurred in the Carpathian Basin.Item Per Pippin Aspaas, Maximilianus Hell (1720–1792) and the Eighteenth-Century Transits of Venus: A Study of Jesuit Science in Nordic and Central European Contexts (Tromsø: University of Tromsø, 2012), 490 pp.(2013-08-31) Kontler, László; Department of HistoryItem Distances Celestial and Terrestrial. Maximilian Hell’s Arctic Expedition of 1768–1769 : Contexts and Responses(Brill, 2013) Kontler, László; Holenstein, André; Steinke, Hubert; Stuber, Martin; Department of Historical Studies