William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) is generally considered to be among the most important pioneers of Biblical Criticism, Social Anthropology and Comparative Religious Studies. This volume contains ca. 400 letters to his family, friends, and colleagues, spanning the period from his early student days in 1863 to his final illness in 1894 and covering a wide range of topics. Among the recipients of the letters are his parents, his siblings, his close friends and confidants John Sutherland Black and Thomas Martin Lindsay, his teacher in Arabic, Paul de Lagarde, and such notable men of learning as the Old Testament scholars Julius Wellhausen and Abraham Kuenen, the Arabists Jan de Goeje and Theodor Nöldeke, the politician James Bryce, the social anthropologist James George Frazer, the artist George Reid, the physicist Peter Guthrie Tait, and the mathematicians Felix Klein and Max Noether.

Born 1963; 1989 PhD in Religious Studies; 1998 Habilitation Religious Studies; 2004-06 Reader and Professor at the University of Aberdeen; since 2006 Professor for Religious Studies and the European History of Religions at the University of Tübingen.