Language institutions, such as the Accademia della Crusca or the Académie française, have promoted language-cultivating, language-standardizing and language-critical debate to varying degrees in individual languages. The fourth volume of the Handbook of Language Criticism offers a comparative presentation of how – in the cases of the national languages mentioned here – state legitimated institutions or institutions not commissioned by the state dedicate themselves to the task of language cultivation.

The Swiss humanist and lawyer Melchior Goldast of Haiminsfeld made the most important medieval poetry manuscript in German, the 'Codex Manesse', known to a wider public for the first time around 1600. Goldast made extensive notes on the manuscript. He quoted and edited them in his printed works. Michael Wolbring offers deep insights into the work of Goldast and his motivation.

The authors of "Testing the Margins of Leisure - Case Studies on China, Japan and Indonesia" address the design and role of leisure in Asian countries. Leisure time is becoming more and more important not only for the individual, but also from an economic point of view. This sixth volume of "Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality" complements the eurocentric view of leisure research that has prevailed so far.

The development and implementation of human rights is an amazing process. But even today, not all people can rely on their rights being respected. For this reason and in view of the worsening political situation worldwide, the Studium Generale has dedicated itself to the topic of human rights in its lecture series of the summer semester 2017.  The new volume summarises the papers of speakers from different disciplines.

In what way is the common European foreign and security policy affected by the Brexit referendum? How does Russia look at Europe? And isn’t it about time to found a new Europe altogether? The authors of the new volume to the lecture series Studium Generale of the University of Heidelberg shed light on major challenges and open up new perspectives.

Einstein's theory of general relativity is still the valid theory of gravity, built upon simple principles and relating the geometry of space-time to its matter-energy content. These lecture notes by Matthias Bartelmann firstly introduce the reader to the underlying physical principles and the necessary mathematical tools taken from differential geometry. The subsequent discussion of cosmological models and black holes is concluded by two applications of general relativity to astrophysics.