Provides the English-speaking reader with the tools needed to appreciate Thomas Mann's most ambitious novel, one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, now timely once again.


In 1938, the great German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann emigrated to the United States. There, he became a figurehead for the intellectual opposition to Nazism, giving more than 150 public lectures and recording more than fifty anti-Nazi radio addresses that the BBC broadcast into Germany. His political activities also left a profound mark on his fiction, most importantly on the 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Ostensibly the biography of a fictional modern composer, Doctor Faustus also serves as a post-mortem of Nazism and a reckoning with five centuries of cultural history that led to dazzling heights but failed to prevent Germany's ultimate fall.

Doctor Faustus is an astonishingly complex novel, both because of the range of its intellectual references and because of its stylistic inventiveness, which has provoked comparisons with Joyce. And yet, at a time when democracy around the world once again seems in retreat and the forces of irrationalism are in advance, it is also an extremely timely book. This guide will equip English-speaking readers with all the tools necessary to appreciate one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.

On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Incorporates etymology, history, art, drawing, and reflective writing to support medical students in the integration of the science and humanity of anatomy. A comprehensive and holistic understanding of human anatomy is foundational to the care of patients. The Reflector is an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the learning of human anatomy; it incorporates etymology, history, art, drawing, and reflective writing to integrate the learning of anatomical structures with the nonanatomical curriculum of the anatomy lab, thus establishing the foundation for a biopsychosocial approach to medicine. To develop visual skills, this work features drawings that illustrate the original inspirations for anatomical terminology while also providing the space to artistically reimagine these structures. Together, these activities enhance the comprehension and retention of anatomical information for application in medical sciences. The Reflector employs thought-provoking questions that emphasize humanity in anatomy, in order to prompt consideration of the anatomical structures beyond basic science. Reflecting on the experiences of anatomical dissections, specifically in relation to development of habits of mind necessary for patient- and family-centered care, continually connects students to the purpose of their studies - to become a knowledgeable, compassionate, self-aware, reflective, and skilled member of a healing profession.
Edited by a medical student with a Master's of Science degree in Medical Humanities; an anatomical science faculty member dedicated to the holistically educated medical provider; an expert in visual learning and self-reflection; and a bioethicist, The Reflector is a valuable resource for all who want to understand the human in human anatomy.

This book explores resistance as a widespread motif in medieval romance to consider themes of consent, gender, and desire.

Medieval romance is usually considered a genre that celebrates love, desire, and sexuality within marriage. However, moments of resistance within it offer a point of tension, where normative scripts and expectations are exposed and opened up to challenge.

This book explores such resistance as a widespread motif in the genre, tracing the subversive possibilities it presents, and through them uncovering how romance constitutes particular kinds of love as desirable, shaped by intersecting factors, including gender, status, race, religion, and morality. Drawing upon contemporary work on consent, the politics of desire, and asexuality, it examines how resistance is often transformed into acceptance, through consensual negotiation or coercive force: the romances discussed here demonstrate that a certain level of force, pressure, and persuasion is accepted as a means of forming relationships within the genre, but this reliance on coercion reveals the effort to which romances must go to uphold normative structures of desire. Considering a variety of works, from Marie de France's twelfth-century Guigemar to Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, Geoffrey Chaucer's Franklin's Tale to William Caxton's fifteenth-century prose romances, this book argues that romance teaches its readers what and whom to desire, as well as how to behave when negotiating their desires, and explores the wider implications for understanding consent, gender, and desire in medieval England.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative-Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND

Exploring a wide variety of visualizations of pregnancy and fetuses through 300 years of history, this timely volume offers a fresh look at the influential feminist concept of the "public fetus."

Images of pregnant and fetal bodies are today visible everywhere. Through ultrasound screenings at maternity clinics, birth videos on social media platforms, or antiabortion propaganda, visualizations of pregnancy are available and accessible as never before. The origins of today's visual culture of pregnancy are often traced back to the 1960s, when Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson's stunning photographs of human development were published in Life magazine and widely disseminated over the world. But the public display of pregnant and fetal bodies actually has a much longer and more complex history.

In this timely book, a group of scholars from a range of disciplines explores this multifaceted history by highlighting visualizations of pregnant and fetal bodies in a variety of geographical and cultural contexts, spanning a period of more than 300 years. By reengaging with the crucial concept of the "public fetus," coined by feminist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, the volume aims to revitalize the scholarly discussion on the visual culture of pregnancy and demonstrate the constructed nature of fetal images. Including chapters on a wide variety of representations in different media, such as wet specimen collections, papier-mâché models, sculpture, film, and photography, the book provides a much-needed argument against the widespread notion of the "universal" fetus.

On publication this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC-BY-NC-ND.

Essays on and interviews with minoritized writers of contemporary Germany, mostly women or non-binary, whose literary interventions write radical diversity into the dominant culture and challenge fixed frames of identity.

In Germany today, an increasing number of minoritized authors - many of them women, nonbinary, or other marginalized genders - are staging literary interventions that foreground the long-standing complexity and radical diversity of German identities. They are reconceiving, redefining, and rewriting understandings of "Germanness" by centering previously marginalized perspectives and challenging fixed frames of nationality, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, and even time and space. In so doing, they open new ways of conceiving of self and other, individual and collective, and thus envision alliances and communities that do justice to the range of lived experiences in Germany.

Drawing on frameworks of postmigration, postcolonialism, intersectionality, critical race and whiteness studies, and feminist and queer theory, this volume investigates various literary strategies employed by writers representing diverse subject positions to engage creatively with questions of hegemonic culture and belonging, exposing the exclusionary if not violent practices that these entail. The volume showcases cutting-edge scholarship by established and early career researchers, and is innovative in format: essays treating works by authors such as Fatma Aydemir, Shida Bazyar, Asal Dardan, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Antje Rávik Strubel, Noah Sow, Jackie Thomae, and Olivia Wenzel, along with original interviews with Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo, Özlem Özgül Dündar, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and Mithu Sanyal illustrate the plurality, agency, and increasing resonance of these literary figures and their works.

The chapter by Leila Essa, "Seen as Friendly, Seen as Frightening? A Conversation on Visibilities, Kinship, and the Right Words with Mithu Sanyal," is made freely available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.

The first modern English edition of Richard Wagner's essays on conducting, extensively annotated, with a critical essay on Wagner as conductor: his aesthetic, practices, vocabulary, and impact.

Richard Wagner was one of the leading conductors of his time. Through his disciples Hans von Bülow, Hans Richter, Anton Seidl, Felix Mottl, Arthur Nikisch, and their many notable protégés, a Wagnerian art of interpretation became the norm in Europe and America until well into the twentieth century. Wagner's essays on conducting had an even longer impact, and were upheld as central to their art by later generations of conductors from Mahler to Strauss, Furtwängler, Böhm, Scherchen, and beyond.

This is the first complete, modern translation of Wagner's conducting essays to appear in English, and the first-ever edition to offer extensive annotations explaining their reception and impact. The accompanying critical essay offers a detailed analysis of Wagner's conducting practices, his innovations in tempo and the art of transition, his creation of a new vocabulary to describe his art, and his success in establishing a school of conductors to promote his works and his aesthetic.

A digital edition of this book is openly available thanks to generous support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

A fresh perspective on conflict and peace-making that highlights the cosmologies and invisible entities that state, society and religious authorities draw on to claim or reclaim legitimacy and control.

Peace-making can be a violent, arbitrary assertion of power. At the same time, the spheres of power, politics and religion are rarely discrete: when governments behave like gods through demonstrations of arbitrary violence, the remaking of moral and spiritual worlds can provide radical ways to contest the brutality of both conflict and peace. This book is an exploration of the way that Nuer- and Dinka-speaking communities living around the Bilnyang and connected river systems in Warrap and Unity States in South Sudan have experienced peace-making and conflict in an increasingly militarized South Sudan. The book traces patterns of violence in peace-making back to colonial and mercantile activities in the late 19th century, but focuses on the period since the 1980s. Challenging dominant understandings of conflict and peace centred on neo-liberal brokerage and settlements or a politics entirely driven by instrumentalist, neo-patrimonial, marketized logics, this book shows how South Sudanese authorities, particularly religious authorities, have contested the legitimacy of violence and peace by drawing on divinely inspired notions of authority and norms of conduct. Drawing on archive, ethnographic and oral history research, as well as participant observations of the elite peace negotiations since 2013, Pendle describes the peace-making efforts of a range of actors from international diplomats to chiefs, Nuer prophets and local priests, to show how peace-making in South Sudan became an instrument used by actors to build authority by reshaping rituals, remaking hierarchies and re-encoding moral protest against oppressive regimes. By recasting anthropological and historical scholarship on divine authorities and moral communities in South Sudan, this book brings a new perspective to conflict, peace and governance that will be invaluable not only to scholars but to policymakers, practitioners and NGOs.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC.

How did African armed forces in postcolonial states in francophone West Africa influence decolonization and state-building in African states? How did foreign assistance from ex-colonial powers, the USSR and the US and colonial state structures influence political systems, and sometimes result in weak and unstable governance? This book explores the development of national militaries in Cote d'Ivoire, Dahomey (now Benin), Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and Togo during the 1960s and 1970s. Revealing the strength of decision-making power by African political elites, the study also shows the decisive impact of foreign economic and military assistance on countries that did not experience a prolonged armed conflict. The author provides new insights into the way the decisions of African governments in building their national militaries impacted postcolonial states' autonomy, legitimacy, sovereign control and governance.
In West Africa, during the 1960s, France sought to maintain exclusive relations with its former colonies through military assistance, economic aid and close personal relations with African political and military elites. State coercive capacities extended far beyond the strength of political institutions, with soldiers' assumption of political roles linked to the weaknesses of colonial and postcolonial structures. Disagreements between French and American officials, as well as Arab-Israeli and Sino-Russo conflicts, increased African presidents' opportunities to mobilize external resources. Yet in the late 1980s, it became evident that national militaries and police were often the main causes of personal insecurity, rather than providing protection, and that some economies remained weak and political structures unstable.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC. The open access version of this publication was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

This edited volume explores the emergence of the stress concept and its ever-changing definitions; its uses in making novel linkages between disciplines such as ecology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, public health, urban planning, architecture, and a range of social sciences; its application in a variety of sites such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the emergence of techniques of stress management in a variety of different socio-cultural and scientific locations. In short, this volume explores what happened when stress entered the discourse around modernity.

Examining the complex dynamics of medical treatment options and the variable character of surgical technologies, this volume broadens and transcends the notion of technological innovation.

Surgery is an ideal field for examining the processes of technological change in medicine. The contributors to this book go beyond the concept of innovation, with its focus on a single technology and its sharp dichotomy of acceptance versus rejection. Instead they explore the historical contexts of change in surgery, looking at the complex dynamics of the various treatment options available -- old and new, surgical and nonsurgical -- as well as the variable character of the new technologies themselves, thus broadening and transcending the notion of technological innovation.

CONTRIBUTORS: Christopher Crenner, Sally Frampton, Delia Gavrus, Lisa Haushofer, David S. Jones, Beth Linker, Shelley McKellar, Thomas Schlich

Thomas Schlich is the James McGill Professor of the History of Medicine at the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University. Christopher Crenner is the RalphMajor and Robert Hudson Professor and chair of the Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center.

A groundbreaking volume that radically refocuses our study of early modern Catholicism within a wider geographical and cultural context.


The intricate relationship between the Roman Church and the Christian East has long been underestimated in shaping early modern Catholicism. Similarly, scholarship on the Inquisition has largely overlooked how it interacted with members of the Eastern branch of Christianity. Yet these groups frequently faced the scrutiny of the judges of the faith, who were, in turn, exposed to alternative disciplinary and doctrinal models that questioned Catholic certainties.

This volume delves into the debates surrounding the compatibility of Eastern norms and traditions with the principles of the Counter-Reformation, focusing on Greek, Arab, and Slavic communities, as well as Armenians, Ethiopians, and Syriac Christians from the Ottoman Empire and India, among others. The essays examine topics such as the confessional surveillance of Eastern Christians in Catholic territories and the responses of Roman theologians to thorny questions posed by missionaries around the globe.

Through a meticulous study of rich, untapped archival resources in a wide array of languages, this collection reveals how the interaction with Eastern Christianity exposed some of the contradictions and unresolved problems of Tridentine Catholicism, while providing the Inquisition with a set of cultural tools and interpretive lenses that would eventually be applied in the missionary and theological controversies that shook the Catholic world from the seventeenth century onwards.

Chapters 1, 2, 7 and 12 are available here as Open Access under the Licence CC BY-NC-ND

The series has from the beginning been instrumental in sustaining this field of study. JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY


The rich tradition of pre-modern mystical writing from England is explored in this collection of essays from the ninth Exeter Symposium. The twelve chapters include studies of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. There is work, too, on less familiar authors and texts, from the thirteenth-century Wooing Group to the sixteenth-century Carthusian Richard Methley; the English reception of continental mystics such as Bridget of Sweden and Mechthild of Hackeborn; and writers treading (and sometimes crossing) the line between mysticism and heresy. The authors employ a range of approaches, from detailed manuscript study to mystical theology, and from material culture to comparative mysticism.

Chapters 10 and 11 are available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.