Esotericism is the search for an absolute but hidden knowledge accessed through mystical
vision, the mediation of higher beings, or personal experience. In Western cultural history …

" In his sixth satire, Juvenal deplores the pastimes of Roman women, foremost of which is
superstition. Speculating about how wives busy themselves while their husbands are away …

Winner of the AAR's 2016 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies
How Repentance Became Biblical tells the story of repentance as a concept. Many today, in …

Geoffrey Chaucer was not a writer, primarily, but a privileged official place-holder. Prone to
violence, including rape, assault, and extortion, the poet was employed first at domestic …

This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that
examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and …

This book makes the case for Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance philosopher and priest, as a
canonical thinker, and provides an introduction for a broad audience. Sophia Howlett …

This is a study of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic of all seventeenth-century figures.
Like its famous predecessor The Cheese and The Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth …

The Wisdom of Egypt examines the sources of evidence about Ancient Egypt available to
scholars, and the changing visions of Egypt and of Egypt's role in human history that they …

This article examines the cosmological theories of the so-called Dahrīs and Zindīqs from
their pre-Islamic roots until the fourth/tenth century, when they and their Muʿtazilite …

The origins of this collection of studies lie in Patricia Crone's February 2013 visit to Leiden,
where she received an honorary doctorate from Leiden University and gave a lecture on …