Search results for ""Author Bernhard Maier""

The definitive reference work on this topic. `[The author takes] the Celtic world to include both the European continent and the more recent settlements in the British Isles. The entries, admirably broad in scope, conceive religion and culture as including not only the usual gods and myths but shamanic practices and totems. Maier also provides entries for important scholars of Celtic culture.' CHOICE

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William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) was successively the embattled champion of the emergent "higher criticism" as applied to the Old Testament, chief editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University. Today he is acknowledged to have been a pioneering figure in both social anthropology and the study of comparative religion, deeply influencing the thinking of J. G. Frazer, Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. The first full-length biography of Robertson Smith to be published for almost a hundred years, this text makes use of hitherto unknown material preserved by the Smith family and draws upon the extensive range of correspondence between Smith and such scholars as Albrecht Ritschl, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Wellhausen, Abraham Kuenen and Theodor Nöldeke. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the biography locates and defines the place of this remarkable polymath within the context of Free Church Calvinism, the Scottish Enlightenment and 19th century German Protestant theology. It highlights Smith's interest in physics and philosophy, his friendship with contemporary artists, his Oriental travels, and his involvement in the social life of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In recent years, the image of Smith as a comparative religionist has come to dominate all other perspectives and indeed tends now to overshadow his fame as an Old Testament scholar. This book seeks to redress the balance, aiming to discover the theological drive behind Smith's manifold activities.

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Now in its second edition, this comprehensive history of the Celts draws on archaeological, historical, literary and linguistic evidence to provide a comprehensive and colourful overview from origins to the present.

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William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) is generally considered to be among the most important pioneers of Biblical Criticism, Social Anthropology and Comparative Religious Studies. This volume contains ca. 400 letters to his family, friends, and colleagues, spanning the period from his early student days in 1863 to his final illness in 1894 and covering a wide range of topics. Among the recipients of the letters are his parents, his siblings, his close friends and confidants John Sutherland Black and Thomas Martin Lindsay, his teacher in Arabic, Paul de Lagarde, and such notable men of learning as the Old Testament scholars Julius Wellhausen and Abraham Kuenen, the Arabists Jan de Goeje and Theodor Nöldeke, the politician James Bryce, the social anthropologist James George Frazer, the artist George Reid, the physicist Peter Guthrie Tait, and the mathematicians Felix Klein and Max Noether.

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