Isabel Karremann

Cornel Zwierlein

Inga Mai Groote

For the last decade, early modern studies have significantly been reshaped by raising new and different questions on the uses of religion. This ‛religious turn’ has generated new discussion of the social processes at work in early modern Europe and their cultural effects ‑ from the struggle over religious rites and doctrines to the persecution of secret adherents to forbidden practices. The issue of religious pluralisation has been mostly debated in terms of dissent and escalation. But confessional controversy did not always erupt into hostilities over how to symbolize and perform the sacred nor lead to a paralysis of social agency. The order of the day may often have been to suspend confessional allegiances rather than enforce religious conflict, suggesting a pragmatic rather than polemic handling of religious plurality. This raises the urgent question of how 'normal' transconfessional and even transreligious interaction was produced in a context of highly sharpened and always present reflexivity on religious differences. Our volume takes up this question and explores it from an interdisciplinary and interconfessional perspective. The title “Forgetting Faith?” raises the question whether it was necessary or indeed possible to sidestep religious issues in specific contexts and for specific purposes. This does not mean, however, to describe early modern culture as a process of secularization. Rather, the collection invites discussion of the specific ways available to deal with confessional conflict in an oblivional mode, precisely because faith still mattered more than many other social paradigms emerging at that time, such as nationhood, ethnic origin or class defined through property.

Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe

Forgetting Faith?

Zeno Ackermann

Simi Malhotra

Nishat Zaidi

TERRAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS emerges from an Indian-German-Swiss research collaboration. The book makes a case for a phenomenology of globalization that pays attention to locally situated socioeconomic terrains, everyday practices, and cultures of knowledge. This is exemplified in relation to three topics: - the tension between 'terrain' and 'territory' in Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' as a pioneering work of the globalist mentality (chapter 1) - the relationship between established conceptions of feminism and the concrete struggles of women in India since the 19th century (chapter 2) - the exploration of urban space and urban life in writings on India's capital - from Ahmed Ali to Arundhati Roy (chapter 3).

Multilogical Perspectives on Globalization

Terrains of Consciousness

Martin Mulsow

Friedrich Vollhardt

Gideon Stiening

Feministische Aufklärung in Europa / The Feminist Enlightenment Across Europe

Erica Sheen

This essay collection examines the Shakespearian culture of Cold War Europe - Germany, France, UK, USSR, Poland, Spain and Hungary - from 1947/8 to the end of the 1970s. Written by international Shakespearians who are also scholars of the Cold War, the essays assembled here consider representative events, productions and performances as cultural politics, international diplomacy and sites of memory, and show how they inform our understanding of the political, economic, even military, dynamics of the post-war global order. The volume explores the political and cultural function of Shakespearian celebration and commemoration, but it also acknowledges the conflicts they generated across the European Cold War ‘theatre’, examining the impact of Cold War politics on Shakespearian performance, criticism and scholarship. Drawing on archival material, and presenting its sources both in their original language and in translation, it offers historically and theoretically nuanced accounts of Shakespeare’s international significance in the divided world of Cold War Europe, and its legacy today.

Conflict, Commemoration, Celebration

Shakespeare in Cold War Europe

Isabel Karremann

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