The Codex Borbonicus Veintena Imagery: Visualizing History, Time, and Ritual in Aztec Solar-Year Festivals

The sixteenth-century pictorial manuscript known as the Codex Borbonicus contains a remarkable record of the eighteen Mexica (or “Aztec”) festival periods of twenty days, known as veintenas, celebrated during the 365-day solar year. Because its indigenous artists framed the Borbonicus veintenas with historical year dates, this volume situates the annually recurring rituals within the march […]

The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period

The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period examines the important role of Ibn ʿAsakir (1105–1176), including his “Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad,” in the promotion of a renewed jihad ideology in twelfth-century Damascus as part of sultan Nūr al-Din’s (d. 1174) agenda to revivify Sunnism and fight, under the banner […]

Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology

Drawn from greater Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the sources in this anthology—many of which are translated into English for the first time here—provide eyewitness and contemporary historical accounts of what unfolded in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Despite their importance, the Muslim sources remain relatively marginal […]

The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games

An avatar is an agent who serves as a vehicle or vessel for another’s consciousness and will. In spirit possession in India and elsewhere, possessed spirit mediums transform into avatars of divine will. In online roleplaying games like World of Warcraft, digital avatars do players’ bidding. Relevant to psychosocial well-being in these two contexts is […]

The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697-1726

This comprehensive collection brings together every extant text known to have been penned by Elizabeth Webb, a missionary for the Society of Friends who traveled and taught in England and America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Webb’s work circulated widely in manuscript form during her lifetime, but has since become scarce. This annotated collection […]

Buddhist Philosophy and the Embodied Mind: A Constructive Engagement

In the last 30 years, embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended (4E) accounts of mind and experience have flourished. A more cosmopolitan and pluralistic approach to the philosophy of mind has also emerged, drawing on analytic, phenomenological, pragmatist, and non-Western sources and traditions. This is the first book to fully engages the 4E approach and Buddhist […]

Sweeping the Way: Divine Transformation in the Aztec Festival of Ochpaniztli

Incorporating human sacrifice, flaying, and mock warfare, the pre-Columbian Mexican ceremony known as Ochpaniztli, or “Sweeping,” has long attracted attention. Although it is among the best known of eighteen annual Aztec ceremonies, Ochpaniztli’s significance nevertheless has been poorly understood. Ochpaniztli is known mainly from early colonial illustrated manuscripts produced in cross-cultural collaboration between Spanish missionary-chroniclers […]