Arguing on recent cognitive evidence that reading a Bible is much more difficult for human brains than seeing images, this book exposes the depth and breadth of Protestant theologians' misunderstandings about how people could reform their spiritual lives - how they could literally change their minds.

The first in-depth interdisciplinary study of word and image in the Old French chanson degeste, Image and Imagination: Picturing the Old French Epic examines the fascinating relationship between illumination and epic narrative constructed by the medieval understanding of the imagination. The study focuses on the epic cycle known as "the geste of Saint Gille," including Aiol and Elie de Saint Gille. The poems in manuscript were produced in the context of the opulent francophone Flemish courts of the mid-to-late thirteenth century. The manuscript (known as BNF fr 25516) is richly illuminated, and the study includes the popular Beuves de Hanstone, forerunner of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the poem Robert le Diable, later becoming meyerbeer's celebrated opera. Concluding with the comparative study of BNF fr 24403's epic treatment of the only illuminated version of Chretien de Troyes' first Arthurian work, Erec et Enide, and the Sancti Bertini version of La Chevalerie Vivien, the first dated collection of epics made for a prominent northern Bishop, this study introduces the hitherto little-explored world of medieval illumination and epic narrative poetics. Book jacket.

In this unprecedented book, a gifted animal scientist who is also autistic, delivers a report on autism, written from her unique perspective. What emerges is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who bridges the gulf between her condition and our own, shedding light on the riddle of our common identity.

Written for and read on a computer screen, digital fiction pursues its verbal, discursive and conceptual complexity through the digital medium. It is fiction whose structure, form and meaning are dictated by the digital context in which it is produced and requires analytical approaches that are sensitive to its status as a digital artifact. Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

One of the most persistent slogans of Reformed theology is that it is "reformed and always being reformed." But what does this slogan mean? This volume gathers thirteen essays written by a younger generation of Reformed theologians who teach and write on five different continents, who together offer this work in Christian systematic theology. Unlike many other works of Reformed theology, however, this book is framed by pressing contextual issues and questions (instead of traditional loci). Each chapter engages classical doctrine, but does so through the lens of contemporary, lived experience in particular contexts. The result is not a theology where doctrines are "applied" to contexts, but an approach where doctrine and context mutually shape one another. The contributors take seriously the notion that theology is "always being reformed" and is always partial, ever on the way--hence it requires conversation partners beyond the Reformed family of faith. The result is a study in Reformed theology that is thoroughly ecumenical.

This book disseminates current information pertaining to the modulatory effects of foods and other food substances on behavior and neurological pathways and, importantly, vice versa. This ranges from the neuroendocrine control of eating to the effects of life-threatening disease on eating behavior. The importance of this contribution to the scientific literature lies in the fact that food and eating are an essential component of cultural heritage but the effects of perturbations in the food/cognitive axis can be profound. The complex interrelationship between neuropsychological processing, diet, and behavioral outcome is explored within the context of the most contemporary psychobiological research in the area. This comprehensive psychobiology- and pathology-themed text examines the broad spectrum of diet, behavioral, and neuropsychological interactions from normative function to occurrences of severe and enduring psychopathological processes.

"The essays in this collection expand the boundaries of inter-art studies, claiming that human beings have evolved to draw nourishment from pictures. Ellen Spolsky argues in a polemical introduction that the recognition of our embodied need for pictures, that is, our human iconotropism, provides a fresh way of understanding the relationship of works of art to their historical contexts."--Jacket.