History

The society of the Reformation and its traditional model of the three estates (education, defence, and those engaged in agriculture or trades; nobility, clergy, and peasantry) was set in motion from 1520/21 as lay people of both sexes, peasants, knights, clergy, townspeople, and the nobility saw themselves called upon to 'change' the existing order. The dynamics of the early Reformation ended in the Peasants' War.

Oscar Weller looks at the life of Norman Bentwich, the first Attorney General in the British League of Nations Mandate of Palestine. Bentwich was a committed Zionist and at the same time the highest legal official in the British Mandate administration. This conflict of interests renders Bentwich a fascinating figure in legal history.

Pliny the Younger, the author of a comprehensive epistolary collection and a panegyric speech for the emperor Trajan, enjoyed an extraordinary fortune in antiquity and subsequent periods. In recent years, Pliny has undergone a significant reappraisal - especially in literary studies. Apart from classical philology, he is of great interest for many other fields such as ancient history, epigraphy, archaeology, art history, visual studies, legal studies, sociology, comparative studies, gender studies as well as didactics and pedagogy. This volume, containing German and Italian contributions, offers new approaches to a 'classic' from a variety of different perspectives, taking into account a wide range of disciplines.

Karl Loewenstein (1891-1973) – eminent jurist and political scientist, creator of the idea of militant democracy, co-founder of political science in Germany – wrote an illuminating account of politics, public life, and the cultural background of constitutional thinking in the twentieth century. Fifty years after his death, Oliver Lepsius, Robert Chr. van Ooyen and Frank Schale have edited his simultaneously sharp-minded and entertaining autobiography, now available in an improved 2nd edition.