BOB2025MIOT

Sacrifice has long been a central topic in scholarly debate. Since the publication of Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert's groundbreaking work in 1898-99, the concept has gained prominence as a distinct theme in comparative religion, anthropology, and the history of religions. Throughout the twentieth century, many distinguished scholars and intellectuals examined the meaning and function of sacrifice to better understand various aspects of human cognition and social interactions. While some explored its connections to violence—particularly forms of self-inflicted violence, such as martyrdom—others sought to disentangle the concept from violent practices altogether.

Building on this rich tradition, this collection of articles gathers contributions from leading scholars who explore the theme of sacrifice, examining its diverse meanings and roles across various religious traditions. While the book places particular emphasis on the history of Christianity and the early modern period, it also provides valuable insights into a broad spectrum of religious traditions, including Judaism, Islam, Greek and ancient religions, as well as Japanese religions. Its geographical scope spans regions such as India, China, Africa, and Brazil, offering a truly global perspective.By mapping the varied interpretations and transformations of sacrifice in the early modern period, this book seeks to illuminate its evolving significance. It also strives to offer a comparative framework that highlights the concept's complexity and adaptability across cultural and historical contexts.

This volume is a collection of reflections from leading senior and junior historians regarding the merits of historical comparativism in the field of Iberian history. The first purpose of the book is to encourage a dialogue between scholars of the Iberian Empires and to foster a reconsider how they see the broader history of the early modern world in light of recent historiography. The second aim of the book is to prompt scholars of other regions in global history to consider the recent literature on the Iberian Empires anew, to move beyond the tropes of the Black Legend and narrative of growth, splendour, and decline, and to study those imbrications had connected disparate parts of the world and which the postcolonial turn has unearthed. In a series of articles and interviews, contributors were encouraged to consider the role of linguistic divides in the growth of historiographical strands, and to speak plainly about the possible siloes that have emerged in the field. Contributors discuss the Atlantic turn, corporate cultures, the Catholic adoption of Protestant ideals, gender and race, all while drawing on insights from scholars who work on early modern nuns, the material history of sugar and coffee, or those who are exploring the uses of the concept of barbarity in borderlands.

In recent decades, the Ancient Egyptian realm of pictorial script and meta-textuality has been the focus of many research projects. Foremost among them is the innovative and ground-breaking sub-field that was helmed by Prof. Orly Goldwasser, exploring the study of classifiers and the ways in which Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs mirror the Ancient Egyptian mind. Taking Goldwasser’s pioneering work as its inspiration, this volume draws together contributions from some of the leading voices in Egyptology and neighbouring fields to illuminate different aspects of the use of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, their semiotic value, and of the language that they record, as well as looking more broadly at the use of signs, pictorial systems, script, learning processes, and classifications. Together, these chapters offer a unique and multi-layered picture of the ways in which Ancient Egyptian language and Hieroglyphs emerged within Ancient Egyptian culture, and the means by which they interacted with other script systems and languages.

The phenomenon of the Septuagint is a matter of interest for several areas of research – not only for Old Testament scholars, but also for researchers of Hellenistic Judaism, patristic exegesis, translation theory and practice, and others. What they all have in common is the text of the Septuagint. Unfortunately, the research is often so compartmentalized that scholars do not know about each other’s work and cannot profit from it. The aim of the conference “The Septuagint: Multilateral Focus on the Text” was to bring together scholars studying the text of the Septuagint in its various aspects: its reconstruction, peculiarities of language, and lexical semantics in their relationship with the Semitic background and within the Greek-speaking world, whether Jewish or Christian. These different approaches to the same matter are bound to lead to mutual enrichment.