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.

Posits a New German Jewish Literature that has surprising implications for today's German Jewish - and Jewish - identity, including solidarity with others, even after October 7, 2023.


Eighty years after the Holocaust, it is now possible to speak of a New German Jewish Literature. Emerging out of a community that, following the arrival of more than 200,000 people of Jewish ancestry from the former Soviet Union, is now vastly larger, increasingly diverse, and culturally vibrant, German Jewish writers are re-articulating what it means to be Jewish in the "land of the perpetrators." More generally, they are also rethinking Jewish values and Jewish solidarity against the backdrop of global events and trends such as the resurgence of antisemitism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and growing intolerance toward ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.

Stuart Taberner's book provides the first comprehensive account of the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism that characterizes this New German Jewish Literature. To what extent should Jewish identity be focused on the "Jewishness" of the Jewish experience, including the Holocaust? Or does "Jewish purpose" reside in expressing solidarity with persecuted minorities everywhere? Taberner argues that this new literature presents an aesthetically engaging and politically nuanced deliberation on Holocaust memory, on worldliness, and on solidarity - with sometimes surprising and radical implications for modern-day German Jewish and Jewish identity. He also examines authors' responses to the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, and speculates about the future of German Jewish writing.

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

The first full English translation of one of the most important sources on Thomas Becket.


Benedict of Peterborough's Passion and Miracles of St Thomas Becket puts the reader in Canterbury on the day of one of the most famous murders of all time, when four of King Henry II's knights killed the archbishop inside his cathedral on 29 December 1170. It reveals how a monk thrust into the role of chronicler attempted to understand the earliest cures at Thomas Becket's tomb and the rapid growth of his reputation as a miracle-worker. With its description of Becket's murder and some 275 miracles, all dating to 1171-1173, Benedict's text, which went on to circulate across Europe, is by far our most important source for the beginnings of the cult that would draw hundreds of thousands of medieval pilgrims to Canterbury.

This book provides the first full English translation of Benedict's Passion and Miracles from the original Latin. It includes an introduction that assesses the relationship of the Canterbury monks to the archbishop, analyses the story of the murder as told in the Passion, and examines the ways in which Benedict gathered material and constructed the Miracles. The translation is also accompanied by full explanatory notes, while two appendices provide biographical information and a translation of the eighteen stories in the Miracles that are also recounted in a slightly later Canterbury collection. This translation will make Benedict's hugely significant text accessible to a wider audience for the first time.

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

 In-depth examination of the inherent tensions and dynamics of transport corridors in Africa: between short-term optics and long-term durability; between regional integration and national interest; between the facilitation of trade and the generation of corridor revenue. The image of the corridor, a central pathway of road and rail carving its way through Africa's interior, has guided the coordination of transport and trade developments on the continent in recent decades. Existing analysis of the "Corridor" - a label with a great capacity to change shape, guiding funding and infrastructural priorities at different times and in different settings - tends to be presentist, technical, and conveyed in the language of transport economics. The chapters collected here showcase a more varied approach, offering perspectives from academics and policy-makers coming from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. They capture the varied forms of the corridor concept (developmental, transport, and trade corridors), the multiplicity of actors (including China and the European Union), as well as the different permutations of the infrastructure itself, in corridors linking coastal states and in others that link coastal states with the hinterland. The breadth of cases allows for a comparative perspective of East, West, and Southern Africa, as well as the basis of comparisons outside of the continent in Europe, South Asia, and elsewhere.
The motivations behind corridor initiatives in Africa range enormously, from resource extraction to urban development and poverty reduction. A lot depends on scale, and this collection places the grand designs thrashed out at continental and regional economic forums alongside the individual concerns of drivers and cross-border traders hauling goods across the continent's checkpoints. What emerges are a number of central tensions in the study of transport corridors: between short-term optics and long-term durability; between road and rail as modes of transportation; between regional integration and national interest; between the facilitation of trade and the generation of corridor revenue; between different port configurations; and between local dynamics and the dynamics of long-distance transportation.

This memoir by a prominent Ukrainian dissident, now in English translation, offers a unique account that spans the entire postwar period, from the author's childhood in newly Soviet western Ukraine and coming of age within the Communist system to the collapse of the Soviet Union, concluding with his reflections on culpability and justice in the post-Soviet context. Marynovych's description of the varied landscape of Ukrainian dissent in the 1960s and 1970s focuses on the emerging human rights movement, especially the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, of which he was a founding member. He vividly recounts his encounters with the Soviet repressive apparatus, including his arrest and trial, and offers a rich picture of daily life in a Siberian prison camp and his internal exile in Kazakhstan.

Imbued with the author's deep Christian convictions, this memoir sheds light on the key role faith played for some participants in the Soviet human rights movement, a movement that has most often been seen as having a secular inflection. It also provides a fresh look at the complex place of Ukrainian dissidents within the broader Soviet human rights movement, as well as the interplay between human rights advocates and other dissident groups in Soviet Ukraine.

MYROSLAV MARYNOVYCH is a Ukrainian social and political activist and commentator. He is vice-rector for University Mission at Ukrainian Catholic University.

KATHERINE YOUNGER is a historian and Research Director of the program Ukraine in European Dialogue at the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna).

Explores the significance of postwar German representations of violence in other places and times.

Germany's twentieth-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture challenging, meaning that it can be difficult to locate and explore critically the significance of violence in and for the postwar German states. This volume approaches that challenge through critical analysis of "violence elsewhere," that is, constructions of violence in distant, imagined, or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of "violence elsewhere" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged meanings and functions of violence in German culture.

The essays in this volume explore selected, emblematic works from East, West, and, later, unified Germany, which imagine violence in, for example, Latin America, Vietnam, Cambodia, the USA, and the Middle East, as well as in the respective "other" German state and in the German past. Drawing on fields including cultural, literary, film, visual, and gender studies, it introduces multidisciplinary theoretical approaches to the topic of violence elsewhere that may be transferable beyond German studies too. As such, the volume allows us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities, and to look beyond binary notions of "here" and "elsewhere," "self" and "other." It thus expands our understanding of what German culture is and could be.

Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. Contributors: Seán Allan, Martin Brady, Evelien Geerts, Katharina Karcher, J.J. Long, Ernest Schonfield, and Katherine Stone.

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

Examines ideas of violence in German culture after 9/11 through the lens of "violence elsewhere" - exploring works and discourses about violence in distant locations or times.

Following the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, in postwar Germany thinking or speaking about that extreme violence seemed distinctively difficult - even perhaps, at times, impossible. Yet we can learn about understandings of violence in this period in novel ways by exploring images and constructions in German culture of faraway violence, as shown in the recent volume Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany, 1945-2001.

As of September 11, 2001, violence came to appear transnationally, spectacularly mobile in new ways. Consequently, Violence Elsewhere 2 explores ideas about "violence elsewhere" in German-language culture since 2001. Here, "elsewhere" can mean not only distant places; it may also be violence perceived as foreign, or in the past. Simultaneously, this work suggests that the idea of 9/11 as a watershed in thinking about violence is more complex than meets the eye.

Here, nine essays consider classic literary forms like poetry and prose fiction, from the short story to the intergenerational German family novel to Black feminist speculative fiction. Contributors examine, too, philosophy, performance and multimedia art, political and other forms of public discourse, and film. Topics include, amongst others, the "war on terror," slow environmental violence, the Armenian genocide, portrayals of refugees and migrants, legacies of colonial violence, space travel, and the persistent resonance of the German past.

Contributors: Sofía Forchieri, Susanne C. Knittel, Marie Kolkenbrock, Priscilla Layne, Joanne Leal, Francesca Lewis, Frauke Matthes, Lizzie Stewart, Nicola Thomas, and Kathrin Wunderlich.

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

An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book.

The Annunciation remains one of the most recognizable scenes in western Christianity: the angel Gabriel addressing the Virgin Mary, capturing the moment when Christ becomes incarnate. But one consistent detail has evaded our scrutiny - Mary's book. What was she reading? What does her book mean?
This innovative study traces the history of Mary's book at the Annunciation from the early Middle Ages through to the Reformation, focusing on a wide variety of religious treatises, visionary accounts, and art. It argues that the Virgin provided a sophisticated model of reading and interpretation that was foundational to devotional practices across all spectrums of society in medieval England, and especially for enclosed female readers. By imitating the Virgin, readers learned how to read; they learned how to pray; they learned how to channel God through vision and revelation. Most of all, they learned how to conceive God spiritually, just as Mary had conceived him physically, and just as she had conceived intellectually her reading of the Old Testament prophecies foretelling the Incarnation - that she herself was part of their fulfillment. The Annunciation offered a hermeneutic model of conception radically based on the reproductive female body, otherwise deeply problematic in medieval culture.
Scholars have long studied the importance of the Virgin Mary for medieval people. But few would think of her as an intellectual role model. Yet that is what this book contends - that Mary's reading at the Annunciation is, essentially, a missing link for understanding how reading, interpretation, and devotion worked in the Middle Ages.

LAURA SAETVEIT MILES is associate professor of English literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, Norway.


The Introduction and Chapter 4 are available below as Open Access.