Many Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in Japan sell small wooden votive tablets (ema) which are meant to be left on a rack at the sanctuary. The reverse of these tablets offers space to send a self-written wish or personal thank you message to the enshrined deity or buddha. Their front usually has a pre-printed or hand-painted design that is indicative of the intended purpose.

In this book hundreds of contemporary ema designs for health-related purposes are reproduced and placed into thei...

Felix Meritis, the remarkable 'Temple of Enlightenment', adorns the Amsterdam canals since 1788. The building accommodated the most ambitious attempt in the Netherlands for the integration of activities regarding literature, music, the visual arts, commerce, and the sciences. What so far went unnoticed is that, from the very start, Felix Meritis was also equipped with an astronomical and meteorological observatory. In fact, it was the first scientific observatory in the Netherlands designed f...

After World War II huge land consolidation projects measuring thousands of hectares were carried out in West-Frisia. Large scale excavations of Bronze Age settlement sites were carried out resulting in a convincing model for the Bronze Age habitation of West-Frisia. This model envisaged settlement sites situated on creek ridges in an open almost treeless landscape. After a sudden change in climate c. 800 cal BC parts of the landscape were inundated, peat bogs developed and West-Frisia was aba...

How has European Private Law responded to the property and mortgage markets crisis? And in what way is this reaction likely to model domestic systems? The financial and economic crisis that has marked the beginning of the century has had a devastating effect on the property and mortgage markets in many Member States of the European Union. Despite this, the European legislator took its time to respond. This book analyses the impact of the Mortgage Credit Directive (Directive 2014/17) in twelve...

MINOAN LINEAR A, VOLUME I: HURRIANS AND HURRIAN IN MINOAN CRETE, PART 2: The author identified the idiom written with Linear A as a language of agglutinative character. The Hurrian language appeared to be the best candidate from a linguistic and historical point of view. The predominantly Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni, with its vassal states in Syria such as Alalakh and Aleppo (Khalba in Hurrian, Khalab in Semitic), was the only great political and military power next to Egypt, contemporary with...

The Hollandsche Schouwburg is a former theatre in Amsterdam where, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, tens of thousands of Jews were assembled before being deported to transit and concentration camps. Before the war, the theatre had been an example of Jewish integration in the Netherlands, and after the war it became a memorial for the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. This book is the first international publication to address all the historical aspects of the site, putting it ...

Anthropocene, post-humanism, biopolitics ... These terms are often used first in an academic context before being used outside the academic world, once their usefulness has become known to the wider public. Whether in official policy documents, in catalogues of expositions or in applications for subsidies, these terms tend to show up regularly.

In this book, 50 terms that are important in contemporary cultural theory are explained by experts in the field. They clarify what the term means, how...

Although thinkers in the field of architecture have embraced ideas emerging from philosophy through the works of continental philosophers since the late 1980s, references to analytic philosophy have remained distinctly absent within architecture history and theory. In part this may be attributable to a perception of analytic philosophy as historiophobic and politically conservative. However in recent decades the philosophical camp is readjusting its relation to language, and notably returning...

In this book, Gert Biesta presents a new approach to contemporary art education by showing the unique possibilities the arts offer to establish a dialogue with the world around us. This approach to art education is based on teaching as a process of showing, where the teacher shows the student what could be good, important or meaningful to master in the world. As a starting point for illustrating this method, the book proposes 'How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare' (1965) by Joseph Beuys, wh...

Dit boek onderzoekt welke plaats een kunstwerk kan innemen in het publieke domein, hoe het de aandacht kan richten op ethische vraagstukken in de samenleving, en hoe het individuen en groepen kan aanzetten tot actie. Met haar hybride karakter wil het een casestudy zijn voor een onderscheidende vorm van kunstanalyse, die via een verkenning van het conceptuele kunstwerk Vlag van Compassie, geiniteerd door Rini Hurkmans, ook de specifieke rol van kunst bevraagt: haar autonomie, haar plaats in ma...