Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse

This Reader is the first of its kind. Tracing the evolution of literary modernity across national borders, it brings together texts from three different spheres of Persian Studies. “Literary Modernity in the Persophone Realm” explores theoretical literary discussions as they unfolded in Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia from the early 20th century to the Second World War. The compilation presents contextualized primary sources by writers, poets and critics of the time, including both famous...

Beethoven, the loner – that is the historiographical image that has long dominated biographies and research on Beethoven. But while this image resonates with the enduring impression of the artistic genius, its credibility founders when one examines more closely his life and environment during his first decades in Vienna. Here, as a pianist and composer, as a teacher and witty conversationalist, Beethoven belonged to an expansive and close-knit tapestry of social, artistic, professional, family...

The classical philologist Albin Lesky and the physician and historian of medicine, Erna Lesky, née Klingenstein, embodied the successful "dual-career couple" internationally. Their academic careers were influenced by various political systems, structures and functioning. To what extent were they, representatives of their generation, willing to use individual room for manoeuvring to achieve success in the scientific community? Albin Lesky, appointed prorector of the University in Innsbruck in...

“A Soviet Sultanate” is the first English-language social history of Islam in Soviet Central Asia after WWII, and it focuses on a key question: what did it mean to be a Muslim in Socialist Uzbekistan? The notion that in the eyes of many Soviet citizens Socialist Uzbekistan was an abode of Islam forms the book’s framing device for understanding how the atheist project of the Soviet empire ultimately failed, but also how it simultaneously helped shape the range of meanings of Muslimness. The...

This book presents a textual edition and English translation of an important historical source about the Khanate of Khiva. The text was written in 1912 by N.S. Lykoshin (1860–1922), a Russian colonial officer and renowned Orientalist. In his capacity as Commandant of the Amu-Darya Department (ADO), an administrative-territorial unit within the Turkestan Governor-Generalship, Lykoshin was tasked with overseeing affairs in the Khanate of Khiva, which since the Russian takeover of 1873 had been a...

The contributions in this volume address the complex history of the Indian deity Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa, whose conception evolved across various traditions in India, particularly in South India, during the first millennium CE. This development is reconstructed through philological exegesis, the history of ideas, and iconographic evidence. Contributors examine a range of textual materials in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Maṇipravāḷa, including early Caṅkam literature (3rd–6th century CE), the Vaiṣṇava text...

The book contextualizes and analyzes the unknown or unpublished writings of the Carniolan-Slovenian Jesuit missionary Marcus Antonius Kappus (1657–1717). He is the first Carniolan known to have been sent as a Jesuit missionary to the Spanish Viceroyalty of “Nueva España” in North America. Kappus originally applied to serve as a missionary in the Orient, but was selected and sent to Sonora in Mexico, bordering today with the federal state of Arizona in the United States of America, instead. The...

We are currently confronted with disconcerting signs of polarization in the societies of many democratic countries of North America and Europe. The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, is only the tip of the iceberg of such developments. Conflicts are manifest in the relations between the generations and the genders, between ethnic groups in individual countries and between religious denominations, between migrants and the native residents of countries, between the so-called elite and...

"Voices from the Steppe" presents 101 sources on the history of the Kazakh Steppe and Russia’s South Urals region from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It offers a range of texts—local histories, songs, poems, letters, memoirs, religious-legal writings, and official documents—that shed light on politics, culture, spirituality, economic activities, gender, and daily life in one of the world’s great grasslands. The volume foregrounds the voices and experiences of ethnic non-Russians in...

The differentiation of derivation and inflection within morphology is a classical and always challenging topos of linguistics – both for individual languages and from a contrastive perspective. With ten recent contributions from different disciplines (language history, variational linguistics, language acquisition research), but also from different methodological perspectives of various disciplines (e.g. Arabic studies, Finno-Ugric studies, German studies, Romance studies), this edited volume...

The mantra known as Gāyatrī or Sāvitrī (Ṛgveda III 62.10) is one of the most frequently recited texts of mankind. Over the course of time it has not only been personified as the mother of the Vedas – the oldest religious literature of South Asia –, but has even come to be venerated as a goddess. Today many consider it the most important, most efficacious, or holiest mantra of all. In "Gāyatrī: Mantra and Mother of the Vedas", Dominik A. Haas reconstructs the history of the Gāyatrī-Mantra for...