Using case-studies and biographies, the author examines women's mysticism in 16th- and 17th-century Spain and investigates the spiritual forces that provided women with a way to transcend the control of the male-dominated Catholic Church.

Wilhelm Halbfass, philosopher and Indologist, is a committed participant in the dialogue between India and Europe, whose reflections on the Indian tradition and its Western perception are accompanied by reflection on and critical examination of the Western tradition. In this innovative combination of Indological research and philosophical-hermeneutical research in the history of ideas, he demonstrates a purpose more ambitious and a scope wider than Edward Said's who constructed the Western study of the so-called Orient as an attempt to deprive it of its identity and sovereignty, and who perceived the pursuit of Oriental Studies in Western universities to be an extension of a fundamentally political will to power and domination. Without denying the domination of the dialogue between India and Europe by the West, Halbfass goes beyond that to show a different way of approaching Indian thought; he strives to establish the presuppositions and prerequisites that would make a true dialogue and mutual understanding between Indian and Western intellectual cultures possible. The papers in the present volume originate from twenty-three scholars of Indology, philosophy, religious studies, comparative theology, classics, folkloristics and political theory, working in eleven countries spread over three continents. They address central issues of Halbfass' work; his critical responses to them commence with an extensive essay in which he assesses in a masterly manner the state of Indian studies almost twenty years after the publication of Said's Orientalismz.

The volume contributes a postcolonial perspective to such topics as textual production, commentarial writings and translations in colonial times, and then moves on to inspect Eurocentric notions embedded in current western biblical interpretation especially in projects such as "Jesus Research." It also contains an overview of and introduction to one of the most challenging and controversial theories of our time, postcolonialism--a theory that gives mediation and representation to Third World people. Though long established in cultural studies, postcolonial theory has not previously been seriously applied to Asian biblical interpretation.

This book explores the process of knowledge production in and about South Asia during the late medieval and early modern periods. Disseminated through the global networks of the early modern Portuguese empire (16th-18th centuries), this process was inextricably connected to the expansion of Catholicism and was geared to perpetuate political ambitions and cultural imaginary of the early modern Catholic protagonists and their communities in South Asia and beyond. As an integral part of the Portuguese imperial 'information order' established in Asia, Catholic Orientalism was responsible for creating an epistemic tool box, in which several significant concepts were first tested and developed: such as "caste," "Brahmanism," "paganism," "the torrid zone," "oriental despotism," and many others. However, from the mid-18th century, the British empire changed the map of knowledge about South Asia and in the process Catholic Orientalism was both assimilated and discarded as tainted by unreasonable Catholicism and too close to equally unreasonable "native" Indian point of view. Through a series of case studies, this book chronicles the rise and the decline of the Catholic knowledge of South Asia which had not been, at any point, only and simply "Portuguese." Multiple sources, polyglot archives and actors moving ever more swiftly through space and time, with divided loyalties, often disregarding "national" divisions and wearing many different hats are at the heart of the narrative which starts at the turn of the 16th century and ends by the end of the 18th.

With the entrance of the European Union into the field of International Investment Law and Arbitration, a new specialist field of law, namely ‘European Investment Law and Arbitration’ is in the making. This new field of law draws on EU Law, Public International Law, International Investment Law, International Arbitration Law and Practice and International Economic Law, while others fields of law such as Energy Law are also relevant. The European Investment Law and Arbitration Review is the first law periodical specifically dedicated to the field of ‘European Investment Law and Arbitration’. The timing could not be better. The first EU integrated investment treaties with Canada (CETA), US (TTIP) and Singapore (EU-SING) are either negotiated or about to be signed and ratified by the EU and its Member States. These are “integrated” investment treaties in that they combine free trade agreement provisions with international investment agreement norms. Moreover, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) is about to deliver its first judgments and Opinions directly relating to intra-EU BITs and the EU-SING FTA. More generally, the public debate and discussions within academic and practitioner circles about the pros and cons of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) and investment treaties in general is intensifying almost on a daily basis. The Review will cover all these issues, but also goes beyond that by offering space for more innovative approaches and themes.