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"René Descartes's Regulae ad directionem ingenii ('Rules for the Direction of the Understanding') is his earliest surviving philosophical treatise, and in many respects his most puzzling text. It is a profoundly original work with few intellectual precursors, and offers the fullest account anywhere in Descartes's work of his theory of method. Yet Descartes left it unfinished, and unpublished, at his death in 1650. The versions currently known to modern readers are all posthumous: a manuscript copied for Leibniz in the late seventeenth century, a Dutch translation of 1684, and the version printed in 1701 in Amsterdam. As a result, the details and date of its composition, its fragmentary, unfinished state, and its philosophical content have long puzzled scholars. The discovery by Richard Serjeantson in 2011 of a previously unknown, early manuscript draft of the Regulae in Cambridge University Library was a hugely significant event in Cartesian scholarship. This edition presents the Cambridge manuscript of the Regulae alongside the 1701 Amsterdam version of the text to allow comparison between the early manuscript draft and the version best-known to modern readers, together with a full English translations of both texts. It is also the first critical edition of the Regulae to take into account the full range of textual witnesses to the text, both manuscript and printed. The new Cambridge manuscript sheds important light on the composition, date, and philosophical content of the Regulae, and will provoke scholars to rethink key questions about Descartes's early philosophical development

"The author focuses on one of the most fascinating texts of the 17th and 18th century China mission - the Tianxue benyi (The Original Meaning of the Heavenly Teachings) and the more elaborate Gujin jingtian jian (Mirror on the Worship of Heaven in Ancient Times and Nowadays), both written and compiled by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730) with the assistance of Chinese converts. The two works were even translated into Latin in order to support the Jesuit position in the Chinese Rites Controversy in the Roman Curia. Through them, Bouvet presented the Jesuit missionary strategy of accommodation in a nutshell: He aimed at introducing Christianity in the terms of Chinese traditional culture. Thus, Bouvet's approach can be characterised as an early attempt at a contextualized theology which is meaningful even for contemporary discussions. The present study offers an introduction to Bouvet's thoughts and works and their respective historical and theological context, a transcription of the Latin texts - the Cœlestis Disciplinæ vera notitia and the De cultu cœlesti Sinarum veterum & modernorum - with an annotated German translation"--

This volume is the first in a new series of editions of Coptic-language "magical" manuscripts from Egypt, written on papyrus, ostraca, parchment, and paper, and dating to between the fourth and twelfth centuries CE. Their texts attest to non-institutional rituals intended to bring about changes in the lives of those who used them - heal disease, curse enemies, bring about love or hatred, or see into the future. These manuscripts represent rich sources of information on daily life and lived religion of Egypt in the last centuries of Roman rule and the first centuries after the Arab conquest, giving us glimpses of the hopes and fears of people of this time, their conflicts and problems, and their vision of the human and superhuman worlds. This volume presents 37 new editions and descriptions of manuscripts, focusing on formularies or "handbooks", those texts containing instructions for the performance of rituals. Each of these is accompanied by a history of its acquisition, a material description, and presented with facing text and translations, tracings of accompanying images, and explanatory notes to aid in understanding the text