Peter Hanenberg – författare

This volume aims to advance the analysis about Amerigo Vespucci by considering and connecting several fields of study such as literary history, philology, the history of science and cartography, economic history, and the history of ideas. The multifaceted research frames guide the reader through the complex vicissitudes of Amerigo Vespucci's life. The receptions and implications explore the intense cultural and historical dynamics that shaped the decades between the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century.

This volume presents comprehensive research on how southern European Catholics and the Japanese confronted each other, interacted and mutually experienced religious otherness in early modern times.In their highly variable and asymmetric relations, during which the politi¬cal-military elites of Japan at times not only favoured, but also opposed and strictly controlled the European presence, missionaries – particularly the Jesuits – tried to negotiate this power balance with their interlocutors.This collection of essays analyses religious and cultural interactions between the Christian missions and the Buddhist sects through processes of coopera¬tion, acceptance, confrontation and rejection, dialogue and imposition, which led to the creation of new relational spaces and identities.

The aim of the volume is to show in which sense the study of culture, literature and the arts can contribute to a better understanding of human cognition. The collection of essays is questioning whether culture is exclusively human and discusses evolutionary substrates of narrative and the interfaces between culture, stories and cognition. The contributions examine the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of literary reading and analyse other techniques of sense-making in the arts through imagined dialogues and the experience of ambiguity. The final contributions are dealing with musical cognition, the relation between music, aesthetics and cognition.