Carsten Wilke

The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been considered as the Bible's most beautiful and enigmatic book. The present study questions the still dominant exegetical convention that merges all of the Song's voices into the dialogue of a single couple, its composite heroine Shulamit being a projection screen for norms of womanhood. An alternative socio-spatial reading, starting with the Hebrew text's strophic...

In this volume, six historians explore new approaches to Isaac Orobio de Castro (1617-1687), an Amsterdam physician who was the most widely-read among the early modern defenders of Judaism against Christian proselytizing. He was also the major author who rebutted Benedict Spinoza's Freethought from inside his own Sephardic community. Reflecting on the developments in early modern studies that have appeared since the publication of Yosef Kaplan's seminal...

Historians of the early modern Ottoman Empire have long been pointing out that in the early sixteenth century the religious outlook of the sultans and the imperially sponsored hierarchy of religious scholars underwent a shift: while heretofore they had been largely unconcerned with defining, observing or enforcing a Sunni 'orthodoxy' and 'orthopraxy', they now became increasingly invested in precisely such a project. How did the understanding of what...