This volume sets out to explore the world of domestic devotions and is premised on the assumption that the home was a central space of religious practice and experience throughout the early modern world. The contributions to this book, which deal with themes dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, tell of the intimate relationship between humans and the sacred within the walls of the home. The volume demonstrates that the home cannot be studied in isolation: the sixteen essays, that encompass religious history, the histories of art and architecture, material culture, literary history, and social and cultural history, instead point individually and collectively to the porosity of the home and its connectedness with other institutions and broader communities. Contributors: Dotan Arad, Kathleen Ashley, Martin Christ, Hildegard Diemberger, Marco Faini, Suzanna Ivanič, Debra Kaplan, Marion H. Katz, Soyeon Kim, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Borja Franco Llopis, Alessia Meneghin, Francisco J. Moreno Díaz del Campo, Cristina Osswald, Kathleen M. Ryor, Igor Sosa Mayor, Hanneke van Asperen, Torsten Wollina, and Jungyoon Yang.

This insightful volumes the use of imitation and the modern cult of originality through a consideration of the disparate fates of two Venetian painters - the canonised master Titian and his artistic heir, the little-known Padovanino.

Focusing on the situation of both Muslim and non-Muslim religious minorities in the Middle East, this volume offers an analysis of various strategies of resilience and accommodation from a historical as well a contemporary perspective.

In this reconstruction of the history of the Catawba Indians, Charles M. Hudson first considers the "external history" of the Catawba peoples, based on reports by such outsiders as explorers, missionaries, and government officials. In these chapters, the author examines the social and cultural classification of the Catawbas at the time of early contact with the white men, their later position in a plural southern society and gradual assimilation into the larger national society, and finally the termination of their status as Indians with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This external history is then contrasted with the folk history of the Catawbas, the past as they believe it to have been. Hudson looks at the way this legendary history parallels documentary history, and shows how the Catawbas have used their folk remembrances to resist or adapt to the growing pressures of the outside world.

Jesuits established a large number of astronomical, geophysical and meteorological observatories during the 17th and 18th centuries and again during the 19th and 20th centuries throughout the world. The history of these observatories has never been published in a complete form. Many early European astronomical observatories were established in Jesuit colleges. During the 17th and 18th centuries Jesuits were the first western scientists to enter into contact with China and India. It was through them that western astronomy was first introduced in these countries. They made early astronomical observations in India and China and they directed for 150 years the Imperial Observatory of Beijing. In the 19th and 20th centuries a new set of observatories were established. Besides astronomy these now included meteorology and geophysics. Jesuits established some of the earliest observatories in Africa, South America and the Far East. Jesuit observatories constitute an often forgotten chapter of the history of these sciences.