What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors?00This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000-1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.

Reflecting debate around hospitality and the Baltic Sea region, this open access book taps into wider discussions about reception, securitization and xenophobic attitudes towards migrants and strangers. Focusing on coastal and urban areas, the collection presents an overview of the responses of host communities to guests and strangers in the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, from the early eleventh century to the twentieth. The chapters investigate why and how diverse categories of strangers including migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries and vagrants, were portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity, shedding light on the current predicament facing many European countries. Emphasizing the Baltic Sea region as a uniquely multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict, this book demonstrates the significance of Northeastern Europe to migration history.

"The early modern period was arguably the greatest 'age of the imagination' in Europe, and certainly the period in which the powers attributed to that faculty had the greatest consequences - both in theory and in ordinary people's lives. Theologians and physicians debated the reality of witchcraft (no simple battle between Religion and Science, as believers and doubters could be found on both sides); the existence and pathology of werewolves and vampires; the role of the imagination in influencing the unborn child and in causing disease even in remote others. The essays in this volume, by established and emerging scholars from diverse intellectual and cultural traditions, explore Latin and vernacular, philosophical, medical, poetic, dramatic, epistolary, and juridical sourcesto expose the tangled conceptual roots of our modern aff ective, anxiety and somatoform disorders. (some of the content)"--OCLC.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." —The Wall Street Journal One of our greatest scientists—and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants—gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.

Modern civilization faces a broad spectrum of daunting problems, but rational solutions are available for them all. This book explores the following issues: (1) Threats to the environment and climate change; (2) a growing population and vanishing resources; (3) the global food and refugee crisis; (4) intolerable economic inequality; (5) the threat of nuclear war; (6) the military-industrial complex; and (7) limits to growth. These problems are closely interlinked, and their possible solutions are discussed in this book.