Search Results

What was life like in Scotland between 4000 and 2000BC? Where were people living? How did they treat their dead? Why did they spend so much time building extravagant ritual monuments? What was special about the relationship people had with trees and holes in the ground? What can we say about how people lived in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age of mainland Scotland where much of the evidence we have lies beneath the ploughsoil, or survives as slumped banks and ditches, or ruinous megaliths? Each contribution to this volume presents fresh research and radical new interpretations of the pits, postholes, ditches, rubbish dumps, human remains and broken potsherds left behind by our Neolithic forebears.

What is a miracle? Who believes in their possibility? What is the historical context within which they emerge?These and related questions have vexed, puzzled and, indeed, enthused scholars and believers, atheists and non-believers alike down the ages.This book examines this perennially fascinating subject of miracles with a comparative focus on two of the world’s great monotheistic religions, Islam and Christianity. Other texts have often approached the subject from a strictly theological, faith or, alternatively, rationalistic, perspective and made it their concern to prove or disprove the possibility of an alleged miraculous event. The approach adopted in this volume is quite different. It is strictly anthropological and phenomenological and the miracles are viewed in a new and dynamic fashion through the lens of narratology. The book examines the stories behind these miracles, the contexts which gave rise to them and allowed them to garner belief and flourish. Perspectives covered include the views of believers and non-believers alike in these phenomena. Similarities and differences in context and approach are explored with a primary focus on the five main anthropological topoi of food, water, blood, wood and stone, and cosmology. A range of intertextual elements in both these Islamic and Christian traditions is discerned.

The medical humanities, we claim, names a series of intersections, exchanges and entanglements between the biomedical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities introduces the ideas, individuals and scholarly approaches that are currently shaping the field. The medical humanities is an area of inquiry that is highly interdisciplinary, rapidly expanding and increasingly globalised. As this Introduction and the chapters that follow demonstrate, The Companion is both a reinvigoration and a critical reorientation of the medical humanities: an identification of new challenges for research, which also expands the methodologies, perspectives and practices that might be called upon to meet them.

For Britain, the Second World War exists in popular memory as a time of heroic sacrifice, survival, and ultimate victory over Fascism. In the Irish state, the years 1939–1945 are still remembered simply as ‘the Emergency’. Éire was one of many small states that in 1939 chose not to stay out of the war, but one of the few able to maintain its non-belligerency as a policy. How much this owed to Britain's military resolve or to the political skills of Éamon de Valera is a key question that this book explores. It also examines the tensions Éire's policy created in its relations with Winston Churchill and with the United States, and furthermore explores propaganda, censorship, and Irish state security, and the degree to which it involves secret co-operation with Britain. Issues such as the IRA's relationship to Nazi Germany and ambivalent Irish attitudes to the Holocaust are also raised. Drawing upon both published and unpublished sources, the book illustrates the war's impact on people on both sides of the border, and shows how it failed to resolve sectarian problems in Northern Ireland while raising higher the barriers of misunderstanding between it and the Irish state.