This book examines the active role of urban citizens in constructing alternative urban spaces as tangible resistance towards capitalist production of urban spaces that continue to encroach various neighborhoods, lanes, commons, public land and other spaces of community life and livelihoods. The collection of narratives presented here brings together research from ten different Asian cities and re-theorises the city from the perspective of ordinary people facing moments of crisis, contestations, and cooperative quests to create alternative spaces to those being produced under prevailing urban processes. The chapters accent the exercise of human agency through daily practices in the production of urban space and the intention is not one of creating a romantic or utopian vision of what a city "by and for the people" ought to be. Rather, it is to place people in the centre as mediators of city-making with discontents about current conditions and desires for a better life.

 

*Sacred Sisters* focuses on five saints: the four female Irish saints who have extant medieval biographies (Darerca, Brigid, Íte, and Samthann), and Patrick, whose writings -- fifth-century Ireland’s sole surviving texts -- attest to the centrality of women in Irish Christianity’s development. Women served as leaders and teachers, perhaps even as bishops and priests, and men and women worked together in a variety of arrangements as well as independently. Previous studies of gender in medieval Ireland have emphasized sexism and sex-segregated celibacy, dismissing abundant evidence of alternative approaches throughout the sources, including in the Lives of Ireland’s female saints. Sacred Sisters places these generally marginalized texts at its center, exploring their portraits of empowered, authoritative, compassionate women who exemplified an accepting and affirming ethics of gender and sexuality that would be unusual in many mainstream Christian movements in the present day, let alone in the Middle Ages.

Dante’s Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy explores how in his work medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) uses food to articulate, reinforce, criticize, and correct the social, political, and cultural values of his time. Combining medieval history, food studies, and literary criticism, Dante’s Gluttons historicizes food and eating in Dante, beginning in his earliest collected poetry and arriving at the end of his major work. For Dante, the consumption of food is not a frivolity, but a crux of life in the most profound sense of the term, and gluttony is the abdication of civic and spiritual responsibility and a danger to the individual body and soul as well as to the collective. This book establishes how one of the world’s preeminent authors uses the intimacy and universality of food as a touchstone, communicating through a gastronomic language rooted in the deeply human relationship with material sustenance.

This study of ludic literary society in sixteenth-century France addresses Italianate practices of philosophical and literary sociability as they took root there. It asserts that entertainment activities of women-led circles illustrate the richly complex precursors of the seventeenth-century salons. Notions from the philosophy of play, such as those developed by Johan Huizinga, Eugen Fink, and Roger Caillois, who argue that play is critically intertwined with the development of society, provide a theoretical path across these periods of women’s engagement in literary culture. The barrister Estienne Pasquier, whose voluminous network of literary and legal connections permitted him entry into the society of such women, acts as an eyewitness to sixteenth-century circles. Ultimately, we see that the ludic activities in such society produced powerful influences that extended beyond the confines of the groups in question to shape ideas, attitudes, and activities—such as those of the salon cultural norms to come.

Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position by influencing people’s conception of what justice was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These “scripts of justice” took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it. Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts, it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to socio-legal authority.

Fans of cult films don't just watch the movies they love-they frequently engage with them in other, more creative ways as well. Making European Cult Cinema explores the ways in which that fandom could be understood as an alternative economy of fan enterprise, through a close look at how fans produce and distribute artifacts and commodities related to cult films. Built around interviews and ethnographic observations-and even the author's own fan enterprise-the book creates an innovative theoretical framework that draws in ideas from cultural studies and political economy to introduce the concept of an 'alternative economy' as a way to understand fan productions.

Despite the historical and political similarities between Portugal and Spain, the contentious responses to austerity diverged in terms of number, rhythm and players. This book compares the contentious responses to austerity in Portugal and Spain during the Eurozone crisis and the Great Recession between 2008 and 2015. While in Spain a sustained wave of mobilisation lasted for three years, involving various players and leading to a transformation of the party system, in Portugal social movements were only able to mobilise in specific instances, trade unions dominated protest and, by the end of the cycle, institutional change was limited. Contesting Austerity shows that the different trajectories and outcomes in these two countries are connected to the nature and configurations of the players in the mobilisation process. While in Spain actors’ relative autonomy from one another led to deeper political transformation, in Portugal the dominance of the institutional actors limited the extent of that change.

This collection is the first to bring together scholars to explore the ways in which various people and groups in Italian society reacted to the advent of cinema. Looking at the responses of writers, scholars, clergymen, psychologists, philosophers, members of parliament, and more, the pieces collected here from that period show how Italians developed a common language to describe and discuss this invention that quickly exceeded all expectations and transcended existing categories of thought and artistic forms. The result is a close-up picture of a culture in transition, dealing with a 'scandalous' new technology that appeared poised to thoroughly change everyday life.

The replacement of the Roman Empire in the West with emerging kingdoms like Visigothic Spain and Merovingian Gaul resulted in new societies, but without major population displacement. Societies changed because identities shifted and new points of cohesion formed under different leaders and leadership structures. This volume examines two kingdoms in the post-Roman west to understand how this process took shape. Though exhibiting striking continuities with the Roman past, Gaul and Spain emerged as distinctive, but not isolated, political entities that forged different strategies and drew upon different resources to strengthen their unity, shape social ties, and consolidate their political status.

Futurism and early cinema shared a fascination with dynamic movement and speed, presenting both as harbingers of an emerging new way of life and new aesthetic criteria. And the Futurists quickly latched on to cinema as a device with great potential to manipulate our perceptions in order to create a new world. In the edited collection Futurist Cinema, Rossella Catanese explores that conjunction, bringing in avant-garde artists and their manifestos to show how painters and other artists turned to cinema as a model for overcoming the inherently static nature of painting in order to rethink it for a new era.

In the past decade, the Chinese-North Korean border region has undergone a gradual transformation into a site of intensified cooperation, competition, and intrigue. These changes have prompted a significant volume of critical scholarship and media commentary across multiple languages and disciplines. Drawing on existing studies and new data, this volume brings much of this literature into concert by pulling together a wide range of insight on the region's economics, security, social cohesion, and information flows. Drawing from multilingual sources and transnational scholarship, the volume is enhanced by the extensive fieldwork undertaken by the editors and contributors in their quest to decode the borderland. In doing so, the volume emphasizes the link between theory, methodology, and practice in the field of Area Studies and social science more broadly.

While current scholarly interest has assured McLuhan's foundational status as media theorist, it has by no means exhausted the import of his writings, which take on additional layers in the current digital moment. This collection of essays argues that it was McLuhan's confrontation of the bios that was the distinguishing feature of his media theory and the source of its most consistent problematic. Holding that media were extensions of the human, McLuhan also posited that the human was a product of technology. Remediating McLuhan ranges over media theory, art history, bio-technology and deep history in addressing this problematic, and discusses McLuhan in the context of Flusser and Turing, Carl Woese and Daniel Lord Smail.

Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces traces movements and connections in a region known for its formidable obstacles to mobility. Eight original essays and a conceptual introduction engage with questions of networks and interconnection between people across a bordered landscape. Mobility among the extremely varied ecologies of south-western China, Myanmar and north-eastern India, with their rugged terrain, high mountains, monsoon-fed rivers and marshy lowlands, is certainly subject to friction. But today, harsh political realities have created hard borders and fractured this trans-Himalayan terrain. However, the closely researched chapters in this book demonstrate that these borders have not prevented an abundance of movements, connections and flows. Mobility has always coexisted with friction here, but this coexistence has been unsettled, giving this space its historical shape and its contemporary dynamism. Introducing the concept of the ‘corridor’ as an analytical framework, this collection investigates mobility and flows in this unique socio-political landscape.

This book focuses on the referendums against water privatization in Italy and explores how activists took to social media, ultimately convincing twenty-seven million citizens to vote. Investigating the relationship between social movements and internet-related activism during complex campaigns, this book examines how a technological evolution — the increased relevance of social media platforms — affected in very different ways organizations with divergent characteristics, promoting at the same time decentralized communication practices, and new ways of coordinating dispersed communities of people.Matteo Cernison combines and adapts a wide set of methods, from social network analysis to digital ethnography, in order to explore in detail how digital activism and face-to-face initiatives interact and overlap. He argues that the geographical scale of actions, the role played by external media professionals, and the activists’ perceptions of digital technologies are key elements that contribute in a significant way to shape the very different communication practices often described as online activism.

Diaspora transformed the urban terrain of colonial societies, creating polyglot worlds out of neighborhoods, workplaces, recreational clubs, and public spheres. It was within these spaces that communities reimagined and reshaped their public identities vis-à-vis emerging government policies and perceptions from other communities. Through a century of Macanese activities in British Hong Kong, The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting explores how mixed-race diasporic communities survived within unequal, racialized, and biased systems beyond the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. Originating from Portuguese Macau yet living outside the control of the empire, the Macanese freely associated with more than one identity and pledged allegiance to multiple communal, political, and civic affiliations. They drew on colorful imaginations of the Portuguese and British empires in responding to a spectrum of changes encompassing Macau’s woes, Hong Kong’s injustice, Portugal’s political transitions, global developments in print culture, and the rise of new nationalisms during the inter-war period.

For more than three decades, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fought a gruesome war for independence against the majoritarian Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka. Even as the government fought LTTE on the battlefield, it also pursued a legal war through the enactment of counterterrorism laws that permitted indefinite detention and the use of confessions as sole evidence. This book applies theoretical insights from the work of philosophers such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault to the Sri Lankan context to examine the conflicting narratives relating to these laws produced by both sides in the conflict.

This book provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao's discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the "Chinese" idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary. This book is a must for anyone exploring the cultural history of Chinese tongzhi/queer through the lens of transcultural media.

This volume explores practices and experiences in Chinese popular religion. The research adds new materials and new approaches to well-known worships such as the cults of doomsday, underworld, and Lord Guan on the one hand, and draws attention to under-the-radar deities and holy figures hiding in the mountainous countryside or among the urban crowd. While this book centers on Chinese popular religion, it will be of use to non-China scholars in folklore, religious art, and ritual studies as well as China scholars in popular culture from late-medieval to contemporary times.

Sorge’s activities between 1930 and 1942 have tended to be lauded as those of a superlative human intelligence operator and the Soviet Union’s GRU (Soviet military intelligence unit) as the optimum of spy-masters. Although it was unusual for a great deal of inside knowledge to be obtained from the Japanese side, most attention has always been paid on the German side to the roles played by representatives of the German Army in Japan. This book, supported by extensive notes and a bibliography, by contrast, highlights the friendly relations between Sorge and Paul Wenneker, German naval attaché in Japan from 1932 to 1937 and 1940–45. Wenneker, from extensive and expanding contacts inside the Japanese Navy (and also concealed contacts with the Japanese Army) supplied Sorge with key information on the depth of rivalry between the Japanese armed services.

Sorge’s activities between 1930 and 1942 have tended to be lauded as those of a superlative human intelligence operator and the Soviet Union’s GRU (Soviet military intelligence unit) as the optimum of spy-masters. Although it was unusual for a great deal of inside knowledge to be obtained from the Japanese side, most attention has always been paid on the German side to the roles played by representatives of the German Army in Japan. This book, supported by extensive notes and a bibliography, by contrast, highlights the friendly relations between Sorge and Paul Wenneker, German naval attaché in Japan from 1932 to 1937 and 1940–45. Wenneker, from extensive and expanding contacts inside the Japanese Navy (and also concealed contacts with the Japanese Army) supplied Sorge with key information on the depth of rivalry between the Japanese armed services.

Subjectivity is a central concept in film theory, philosophy and cultural studies. It was also a key term in the reception of the Nouvelle Vague film movement in France and Italy from the start of 1945. This timely volume explores the ways in which the concept of subjectivity has made its way into film theory, history, practice and criticism, as well as the confrontations of the subject with this rapidly changing medium. Contributors to this timely study include Francesco Casetti, Gregory Currie, Marina Grzinic, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, Jacinto Lageira, José Moure, Pere Salabert, Céline Scemama, Karl Sierek, Vivian Sobchack, and Pierre Taminiaux. Their illuminating essays are a testimony to their profound involvement in the subjectivity debate, enriching our perception of film history and our understanding of the medium.

We live in an era of screens. No longer just the place where we view movies, or watch TV at night, screens are now ubiquitous, the source of the majority of information we consume daily, and a crucial component of our basic interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. This transformation has happened almost without us realizing it-and certainly without the full theoretical and intellectual analysis it deserves.Screens brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to analyse the growing presence and place of screens in our lives today. They tackle such topics as the archaeology of screens, film and media theories about our interactions with them, their use in contemporary art, and the new avenues they open up for showing films and other media in non-traditional venues.

This book is the first ever systematic attempt to study film sound in the Indian subcontinent by artistic research. The book aims to fill the scholarly void on the issues of sound and listening in the Global Souths’ cultures. It develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound world of Indian film and audiovisual media through the examination of historical developments of sound from early optical recordings to contemporary digital audio technologies. The book is enriched with a practice-based methodology informed by the author’s own practice and based on extensive conversations with leading sound practitioners in the Indian subcontinent. The book locates an emerging social and spatial awareness in Indian film and media production aided by a creative practice of sound, occurring alongside the traditionally transcendental, oral, and pluriversal approach to listening. By tracing this confluence of tradition and modernity, the book makes valuable contributions to the fields of film history, sound, and media studies.

How ‘green’ were people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages? Unlike today, the nature around them was approached with faith, trust and care. The population size was many times smaller than today and human impact on nature not as extreme as it is now. People did not have to worry about issues like deforestation and sustainability. This book is about the knowledge of plants and where that knowledge came from. How did people use earth and plants in ancient times, and what did they know about their nutritional or medicinal properties? From which plants one could make dyes, such as indigo, woad and dyer’s madder? Is it possible to determine that through technical research today? Which plants could be found in a ninth-century monastery garden, and what is the symbolic significance of plants in secular and religious literature? The Green Middle Ages addresses these and other issues, including the earliest herbarium collections, with a leading role for the palaeography and beautiful illuminations from numerous medieval manuscripts kept in Dutch and other Western libraries and museums.

Youngest Recruits is an unflinching examination of the complex motivations that drive Ivoirian children in and out of armed groups. Drawing on firsthand experience with child soldiers, Magali Chelpi-Den Hamer argues that the popular narrative about children’s limited agency is insufficient to explain their participation in violent conflicts. Rather she explores in detail the pre- to postwar trajectories of child and adolescent recruits in order to show that even the youngest exercise some degree of reflection and agency when enlisting into the armed forces. In addition to shedding light on an area of great cultural concern, the author invites readers to reflect on the mixed impact of humanitarian interventions that attempt to reintegrate these children into society.

The phenomenon of "cancer villages" has emerged in many parts of rural China, drawing media attention and becoming a fact of social life. However, the relationship between pollution and disease is often hard to discern. Through sociological analysis of several villages with different social and economic structures, the authors offer a comprehensive, historically grounded analysis of the coexistence between the incidence of cancer, environmental pollution and villagers’ lifestyles, as well as the perceptions, claims and responses of different actors. They situate the appearance of "cancer villages" in the context of social, economic and cultural change in China, tracing the evolution of the issue over two decades, and providing deep insights into the complex interactions and trade-offs between economic growth, environmental change and public health.

This book examines the art and ritual of flagellant confraternities in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Meeting regularly to beat themselves with whips, members of these confraternities concentrated on the suffering of Christ in the most extreme and committed way, and the images around them provided visual prompts of the Passion and the model suffering body. This study presents new findings related to a variety of artworks including altarpieces, banners, wall paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and paintings for the condemned, many from outside the Florence-Rome-Venice triangle.

Extensive in scope and drawing on newly available evidence from multinational archives, this book reconsiders Sino-Indian border issues during the middle Cold War using multiple established analytical frameworks. It demonstrates how key countries perceived and engaged with the border conflict by aiding the two main participants morally and materially. Before, during, and after the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, multinational political actors pursued their foreign policy goals (e.g., trade, security, and prestige) concerning the frontier, and often tried to destabilize spheres of influence and bolster alliances. Therefore, this contest signified a variation of the Anglo-Russian Great Game in Asia during the nineteenth century, and the theater of operations encompassed not only the border itself, but also the Himalayan kingdoms, Tibet, and Burma. A reevaluation of the border conflict between India and China is necessary given current, ongoing clashes at their still unresolved border as well as the fact that these two countries now possess enhanced technology and weapons.

Development Zones in Asian Borderlands maps the nexus between global capital flows, national economic policies, infrastructural connectivity, migration, and aspirations for modernity in the borderlands of South and South-East Asia. In doing so, it demonstrates how these are transforming borderlands from remote, peripheral backyards to front-yards of economic development and state-building. Development zones encapsulate the networks, institutions, politics and processes specific to enclave development, and offer a new analytical framework for thinking about borderlands; namely, as sites of capital accumulation, territorialisation and socio-spatial changes.

This book presents a close look at the growth, success, and proliferation of ethnic politics on the peripheries of modern South Asia, built around a case study of the Nepal ethnic group that lives in the borderlands of Sikkim, Darjeeling, and east Nepal. Grounded in historical and ethnographic research, it critically examines the relationship between culture and politics in a geographical space that is home to a diverse range of ethnic identities, showing how new modes of political representation, cultural activism, and everyday politics have emerged from the region.

This book reconstructs the factional-ideological conflicts surrounding socialist transformation and political reform in China that were played out through ‘factional model-making’, a norm-bound mechanism for elites of the Chinese Communist Party to contest the party line publicly. Dazhai, Anhui, Nanjie, Shekou, Shenzhen, Guangdong and Chongqing were cultivated into factional models by party elites before Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Although factional model-making undermined party discipline, it often did not threaten regime security and even contributed to regime resilience through strengthening collective leadership and other means. This follows that the suppression of factional model-making under Xi might undermine longer-term regime resilience. However, Xi believes that regime security rests on his strongman rule, not any benefits that factional model-making may contribute. It is in this spirit that he grooms Zhejiang into a party model for his policy programme of common prosperity, which is designed to legitimize his vision of socialism.

This volume focuses on the new and diversifying interactions between civil society and the state in contemporary East Asia by including cases of entanglement and contention in the three fully consolidated democracies in the area: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The book argues that all three countries have reached a new era of post high-growth and mature democracy, leading to new social anxieties and increasing normative diversity, which have direct repercussions on the relationship between the state and civil society. It introduces a comparative perspective in identifying and discussing similarities and differences in East Asia based on in-depth case studies in the fields of environmental issues, national identities as well as neoliberalism and social inclusion that go beyond the classic dichotomy of state vs "liberal" civil society.

In parts of Asia, citizens are increasingly involved in shaping their neighbourhoods and cities, representing a significant departure from earlier state-led or market-driven urban development. These emerging civic urbanisms are a result of an evolving relationship between the state and civil society. The contributions in this volume provide critical insights into how the changing state–civil society relationship affects the recent surge of civic urbanism in Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei, and the authors present eighteen cases of grassroots activism and resistance, collaboration and placemaking, neighbourhood community building, and self-organization and commoning in these cities. Exploring how citizen participation and state–civil society partnerships contribute to more resilient and participatory neighbourhoods and cities, the authors use the concept of civic urbanisms not only as a conceptual framework to understand the ongoing social and urban change but as an aspirational model of urban governance for cities in Asia and beyond.

South Korea is home to one of the most vibrant film industries in the world today, producing movies for a strong domestic market that are also drawing the attention of audiences worldwide. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of some of the most well-known and incendiary South Korean films of the millennial decade from nine major directors. Building his analysis on contemporary film theory and philosophy, as well as interviews and other primary sources, Steve Choe makes a case that these often violent films pose urgent ethical dilemmas central to life in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Analysis of political advertising tends to give music short shrift - which flies in the face of what we know about the power of music to set a mood, affect feelings, and influence our perceptions. This book is the first to offer a detailed exploration of the role of music in US presidential campaign advertising, from Eisenhower to the present, showing that in many cases music isn't simply one element in the presentation of an ad's message - it's the dominant factor, more important than images, words, or narration.

Film has long been defined as a temporal art, most famously by André Bazin and Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet more fundamentally it has always been a spatial art, transporting its audiences imaginatively to spaces and places other than those they literally inhabit. In the digital era, this spatial illusion and paradox has been greatly expanded – by the predominance of domestic film viewing, along with new extra-terrestrial perspectives, and the promise of novel kinesthetic experiences with Virtual Reality and “immersion”. The international authors in this collection address the history and aesthetics of screen media as spatial transposition, in a range of exemplary analyses that run from the landscapes of John Ford’s westerns to Chantal Akerman’s claustrophobic domestic spaces, from the conventions of the English country house film to Patrick Keiller’s Robinson roaming a changed country, and from the experiences of Covid pandemic confinement to those of un-homed van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao’s award-winning NOMADLAND.

Stories are perceived as central to modern life. Not only in narrative entertainment media, such as television, cinema, theater, but also in social media. Telling/having "a story" is widely deemed essential, in business as well as in social life. Does this mark an intensification of what has always been part of human cultures; or has the realm of "story" expanded to dominate twenty-first century discourse? Addressing stories is an obvious priority for the Key Debates series, and Volume 7, edited by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever, identifies new phenomena in this field — complex narration, puzzle films, transmedia storytelling — as well as new approaches to understanding these, within narratology and bio-cultural studies. Chapters on such extended television series as Twin Peaks, Game of Thrones and Dickensian explore distinctively new forms of screen storytelling in the digital age.With contributions by Vincent Amiel, Jan Baetens, Dominique Chateau, Ian Christie, John Ellis, Miklós Kiss, Eric de Kuyper, Sandra Laugier, Luke McKernan, José Moure, Roger Odin, Annie van den Oever, Melanie Schiller, Steven Willemsen, Robert Ziegler.

Christine Rosenørn Overgaard tells the story in English of how and why the Dutch fished for cod from 1818-1911. Cod fishing was a hook and line fishery. During the 1800s, new vessels and new gear was introduced, especially trawling along the coast in winter in late 1800s. By looking at sources not yet applied in Dutch fishing history she shows how several fishermen fishing for cod ignored these initiatives not because of lack of entrepreneurial spirit, but because of concern for the environment and the cod stock. She examines the business structure in fishing: family business with shared ownership and limited company, including sources showing the importance of social network among ship owners and fishermen. She places cod fishing business within an institutional analysis and development framework, which on the one hand emphasizes the rules the fishermen set for themselves on how, when and where to fish for cod, and on the other hand sees cod fishing as one of several businesses in Dutch (inter)national politics. She illustrates the consequential dilemma facing the ship owners and fishermen when deciding on a profitable or a sustainable business, providing an alternative theory on growth in business, indicating new approaches to current cod fishing.

On July 1, 1523, Johann van den Eschen and Hendrik Voes, two Augustinians friars from Antwerp, were burned on the Grand Plaza in Brussels, thereby becoming the first victims of the Reformation. Despite being well-known, the event barely registers in most Reformation histories. By tracing its origins and examining the impact of the executions on Martin Luther, on the Reformed Augustinian world, and on the early Reformation in the Low Countries and the German speaking lands, this study definitively demonstrates that the burnings were in fact the dénouement of broader trends within Late Medieval Reformed Augustinianism, as well as a watershed in the early Reformation. In doing so, it also reveals the central role played by the Augustinian friars of Lower Germany in shaping both the content and spread of the early Reformation, as well as Wittenberg's influence on the events leading up to these first executions.

This book deals with the 1980s – the “golden decade” of Hong Kong pop culture – in which a cosmopolitan lifestyle of pop and chic emerged in the city. Bookended by two major historical incidents, the 1980s will probably enter the annals of Hong Kong history as the decade that defined its future after reversion to Mainland China. Having witnessed and experienced the rise of Hong Kong pop culture to unprecedented heights in this decade, the author enhances its context through a story about his own personal belongings. Examining popular genres including television, film, music, fashion, disco and city magazine, this book teases out the distinctive aspects of Hong Kong pop culture that defined (his) Hong Kong. As Hong Kong has been undergoing drastic changes in recent years, it is necessary to point toward new imaginaries by re-examining its development. Toward this end, this book will shed light on an important research area of Hong Kong Studies as an academic discipline.

With Singapore serving as the subject of exploration, the volume explores the purview of imaginative representations of the city. Alongside the physical structures and associated practices that make up our lived environment, and the conceptualised space engineered into material form by bureaucrats, experts and commercial interests, a perceptual layer of space is conjured out of people's everyday life experiences. While such imaginative projections may not be as tangible as its functional designations, they are nonetheless equally vital and palpable. The richness of its inhabitants' memories, aspirations and meaningful interpretations challenges the reduction of Singapore as a Generic City. Taking the imaginative field as the point of departure, the forms and modes of intellectual and creative articulations of Singapore's urban condition probe the resilience of cities, and the people who reside in them, through the images they convey or evoke as a means for collective expressions of human agency in placemaking.

This book examines the environment and society of North Africa during the late Roman period (fourth and fifth centuries CE) through the writings of Helvius Vindicianus, Theodorus Priscianus, Caelius Aurelianus, and Cassius Felix.These four medical writers, whose translation into Latin of precious Greek texts has been hailed as ‘the achievement of the millennium’ by one modern scholar, provide a unique opportunity to understand North Africa, the most prosperous region of the Roman World during Late Antiquity. Although focusing on medical knowledge and hygiene, their writings provide fresh insights on the environment, economy, population, language, and health facilities of the region.Roman North Africa: Environment, Society and Medical Contribution includes the first full discussion of the exceptional career of the physician Helvius Vindicianus, as well as a valuable reassessment of other writers whose works were read throughout the Middle Ages. It will therefore prove invaluable not only for scholars of Late Antiquity and North Africa, but also for those working on later periods.

The Rushdie Affair, the Danish Cartoon Affair, the assault on Charlie Hebdo, and the earlier Carrell Affair, are examples of religious fanatics' extreme reactions to religious satire and criticism. Perpetrators of these actions consider themselves as true believers. This book aims to understand their motives by means of the concept of theoterrorism: terrorism grounded in religious zealotry.

The Dutch and English East India Companies were formidable organizations that were gifted with expansive powers that allowed them to conduct diplomacy, wage war and seize territorial possessions. But they did not move into an empty arena in which they were free to deploy these powers without resistance. Early modern Asia stood at the center of the global economy and was home to powerful states and sprawling commercial networks. The companies may have been global enterprises, but they operated in a globalized region in which they encountered a range of formidable competitors. This groundbreaking collection of essays explores the place of the Dutch and English East India Companies in Asia and the nature of their engagement with Asian rulers, officials, merchants, soldiers, and brokers. With contributions from some of the most innovative historians in the field, The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia presents new ways to understand these organizations by focusing on their diplomatic, commercial, and military interactions with Asia.

In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerbated existing and created new problems of piracy across the globe. This collection of original case studies addresses these early modern problems in three sections: first, states’ attempts to exercise jurisdiction over seafarers and their actions; second, the multiple predatory marine practices considered ‘piracy’; and finally, the many representations made about piracy by states or the seafarers themselves. Across nine chapters covering regions including southeast Asia, the Atlantic archipelago, the North African states, and the Caribbean Sea, the complexities of defining and criminalizing maritime predation is explored, raising questions surrounding subjecthood, interpolity law, and the impacts of colonization on the legal and social construction of ocean, port, and coastal spaces. Seeking the meanings and motivations behind piracy, this book reveals that while European states attempted to fashion piracy into a global and homogenous phenomenon, it was largely a local and often idiosyncratic issue.

Violent incidents that took place in 2004 and 2005 in the Netherlands and the UK respectively prompted people to claim that multiculturalism had failed. This claim requires an assessment of the effect of the policies that were drafted based on this political philosophy. In this study, the author analyses two sets of policies developed from multiculturalism: policies of anti-discrimination of minorities and their labour market participation. The effect of these policies is assessed by studying the policy objectives and their results.Based on this review, the author concludes that while there is still much to achieve in the fields of anti-discrimination and labour market participation, multiculturalism did not fail in the UK. On the contrary, it created a positive public perception of diversity and a high participation of minorities in the labour market. This contrasts with results achieved in the Netherlands where policies have fluctuated in such a way that the public attitude towards diversity is ambivalent and the participation of minorities in the labour market is much lower than that of their native counterpart.

Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume of original essays traces the origins of the concept of ‘grammar’. In doing so, it charts the social, moral and cultural factors that have shaped the development of grammar from Antiquity, via the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modern Europe, to current education systems and language learning pedagogy. The chapters examine key turning points in the history of language teaching epistemology, focusing on grammar for language teaching across different European cultural contexts. Bringing together leading scholars of classical and modern languages education, The History of Grammar in Foreign Language Teaching offers the first single-source reference on the evolving concept of grammar across cultural and linguistic borders in Western language education. It therefore represents a valuable resource for teachers, teacher-educators and course designers, as well as students and scholars of historical linguistics, and of second and foreign language education.

Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence explores the lived experience of Catholic women and men in the post-Reformation century. Set against the background of the gendered dynamics of English society, this book demonstrates that English Catholics were potent forces in the shaping of English culture, religious policy, and the emerging nation-state. Drawing on kinship and social relationships rooted in the medieval period, post-Reformation English Catholic women and men used kinship, social networks, gendered strategies, political actions, and cultural activities like architecture and gardening to remain connected to patrons and to ensure the survival of their families through a period of deep social and religious change. This book contributes to recent scholarship on religious persecution and coexistence in post-Reformation Europe by demonstrating how English Catholics shaped state policy and enforcement of religious minorities and helped to define the character of early models of citizenship formation.

Non-elite or marginalized early modern women—among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers—have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial records, administrative paperwork, letters, pamphlets, hagiography, and picaresque literature, this volume explores how, as social agents, these doubly invisible women built and used networks and informal alliances to supplement the usual structures of family and community that often let them down. Ten essays, ranging widely in geography from the eastern Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America and in time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, show how flexible, sometimes ad hoc relationships could provide crucial practical and emotional support for women who faced problems of livelihood, reputation, displacement, and violence.

Through fifteen essays that work from a rich array of primary sources, this collection makes the novel claim that early modern European women, like men, had a youth. European culture recognised that, between childhood and full adulthood, early modern women experienced distinctive physiological, social, and psychological transformations. Drawing on two mutually shaped layers of inquiry — cultural constructions of youth and lived experiences — these essays exploit a wide variety of sources, including literary and autobiographical works, conduct literature, judicial and asylum records, drawings, and material culture. The geographical and temporal ranges traverse England, Ireland, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, and Mexico from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. This volume brings fresh attention to representations of female youth, their own life writings, young women’s training for adulthood, courtship, and the emergent sexual lives of young unmarried women.

Once upon a time ‘The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century’ was an innovative concept that inspired a stimulating narrative of how modern science came into the world. Half a century later, what we now know as ‘the master narrative’ serves rather as a strait-jacket — so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. No attempt has been made so far to replace the master narrative. H. Floris Cohen now comes up with precisely such a replacement.Key to his path-breaking analysis-cum-narrative is a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct yet narrowly interconnected, revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five to thirty years’ duration. This vision enables him to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in Greece, China, or the Islamic world. It also enables him to explain how half-way into the 17th century a vast crisis of legitimacy could arise and, in the end, be overcome.Building forth on his earlier The Scientific Revolution. A Historiographical Inquiry (1994), his new book takes the latest researches duly into account, while connecting these in highly innovative ways. It is meant throughout as a constructive effort to break up all-too-deeply frozen patterns of thinking about the history of science.Blurbs"In this provocative, comparative treatment of a classic moment in the history of science Floris Cohen brilliantly challenges current narratives."--Robert S. Westman, University of California, San DiegoFor the most part, historians spend their energy trying to explain military conquests, the succession of governments, religious or ideological movements, or social and economic change. What they miss (or avoid?), however, is surely more significant than any of these things for an understanding of world history. Historians have completely failed to explain why science, which largely characterizes modern world civilization, emerged in Western Europe in the Renaissance, after having failed to establish itself earlier and in other civilizations (most notably in Ancient Greece, China, Islam, and medieval Christendom). In this very important book, Floris Cohen finally and comprehensively provides an answer to this enduring historical mystery. In so doing, he also provides a definitive account of the so-called Scientific Revolution, and shows why it really was revolutionary."-"This supremely important book will become indispensable reading for anyone interested in how the modern world became the way it is. By comprehensively explaining the rise of science, and its why, where and when, Floris Cohen has solved, dazzlingly, one of the most pressing problems in world history."--John Henry, University of Edinburgh

The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media describes, historicizes, theorizes, and creatively deploys massive media -- a set of techno-social assemblages and practices that include large outdoor projections, programmable architectural façades, and urban screens -- in order to better understand their critical and creative potential. Massive media is named as such not only because of the size and subsequent visibility of this phenomenon but also for its characteristic networks and interactive screen and cinema-like qualities. Examples include the programmable lighting of the Empire State Building and the interactive projections of Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles, as well as a number of works created by the author himself. This book argues that massive media enables and necessitates the development of new practices of expanded cinema, public data visualization, and installation art and curation that blend the logics of urban space, monumentality, and the public sphere with the aesthetics and affordances of digital information and the moving image.

Though democratic government calls for well-designed and implemented policy, there is surprisingly little expert guidance available for policy makers and politicians. Working for Policy fills that gap, addressing the nature of policy work and offering necessary guidance. The contributors bring together academic and experiential knowledge in their analysis and evaluation of what modern policy makers do in given situations and of how such actions contribute to the policy process. This unique book demonstrates how scholars can help to ensure that policy makers can acquire the skills and knowledge required in governing complex modern societies. 

Justice is simultaneously a practical and an ideal concept: when we think of justice, we refer to its day-to-day administration, involving police, lawyers, judges, and politicians-but we also refer to a larger ideal, a set of basic values that guide our attempts to live together and balance competing interests, obligations, and freedoms. If we lose sight of the practical, the ideal will fail-but if we forget the ideal, the practical becomes pointless.On Rules is the culmination of decades of thinking about and working within the law as both ideal and realm of practical action. Gherardo Colombo brings to his rich philosophical analysis of the culture of justice thirty years of experience in the Italian judiciary, which saw him head up numerous important and sensitive commissions and inquiries. His exploration of the concept and application of rules of justice is powerful and clear: if we don't root our experience in a fundamental respect for rules, we cannot have a functioning, just society.

Jean-Louis Comolli’s six-part essay Technique and Ideologyhad a revolutionary effect on film theory and history when it first appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1971. In 2009, Comolli revisited his earlier text, arguing that the present age, marked by the total dominance of media-filtered spectacle over image production, makes the need for an 'emancipated, critical spectator' more pressing than ever. In this volume, Daniel Fairfax presents annotated translations of these two texts to provide an overview of Comolli’s activity as both a theorist and a filmmaker.

Today, health insurance is a key component in the system of social security in most European Union countries. In many of these countries, modern health-insurance funds and healthcare insurers play an essential role in implementing the public health-insurance system. Many of these health-insurance funds have a long and fascinating history, of which clear traces can be seen today in the organisation and structure of health insurance, as well as health-insurance funds and insurers.In Two centuries of solidarity, the authors compare the systems of health insurance, health-insurance funds and healthcare insurers in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Given the similar political, economic and social development that these countries have undergone in the past 60 years and the availability of a qualitatively high level of health care, one might expect a high degree of similarity between these countries’ healthcare insurance systems. However, the dissimilarities are surprising. In fact, these differences are currently becoming ever more apparent between systems in general, and the structure and operation of the health insurance funds and health care insurers in particular. The differences include the compulsory nature of insurance, the extent of coverage, premiums, entrepreneurship, competition, and the degree of private insurance. Many of these national singularities can be understood and explained only by considering the historical background of the health insurance systems, the insurers, and their evolution over the past two centuries. This study adopts an institutional and political perspective towards a further understanding of the development of health insurance, and of how this ultimately determined the specific nature of the healthcare insurers and funds and the way they currently operate in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Although the name Caucasus has been around for some 2000 years, and may suggest unity and coherence, the region these days is best known for the ethnic and religious divides resulting in recurrent bloody conflicts between the various minorities and the post-Soviet independent states. Geographically, the Caucasus has traditionally been a buffer between Russia, Turkey and Iran. Part Russian Federation, part Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the area has a tradition of fast-shifting partnerships, of rich and varied cultural heritage, and fierce ethnic tensions going back centuries. This fascinating volume creates an illuminating perspective on the politics, history and culture of the Caucasus: it includes an account of how several 19th century Hungarian linguists fascinated by the region’s famously difficult languages conducted field research still used by politicians to prove or disprove ethnic links ; an analysis of the recurring forcible movements of the people; a study of the region’s Russian Imperial past; an exploration of the Muslim North/Christian South division in the context of the recent conflicts and their international ramifications; the elite-driven nature of the region’s politics; finally, the role of art as a medium of freedom in the war-torn zones of the region. Necessary reading for everyone with an interest in the history of one of the world’s tinderboxes.

The Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers offers a comprehensive overview of women writers in Japan, from the late 19th century to the early 21st. Featuring 24 newly written contributions from scholars in the field—representing expertise from North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia—the Handbook introduces and analyzes works by modern and contemporary women writers that coalesce loosely around common themes, tropes, and genres. Putting writers from different generations in conversation with one another reveals the diverse ways they have responded to similar subjects. Whereas women writers may have shared concerns—the pressure to conform to gendered expectation, the tension between family responsibility and individual interests, the quest for self-affirmation—each writer invents her own approach. As readers will see, we have writers who turn to memoir and autobiography, while others prefer to imagine fabulous fictional worlds. Some engage with the literary classics—whether Japanese, Chinese, or European—and invest their works with rich intertextual allusions. Other writers grapple with colonialism, militarism, nationalism, and industrialization. This Handbook builds a foundation which invites readers to launch their own investigations into women’s writing in Japan.

Baroque depictions of violence are often dismissed as ‘over the top’ and ‘excessive’. Their material richness and exciting visual complexity, together with the visceral engagement they demand from beholders, are usually explained in literature as reflecting the presumed violence of early modern society. This book explores the intersection between materiality, excess, and violence in seventeenth-century paintings through a close analysis of some of the most iconic works of the period. Baroque paintings expose or reference their materiality by insisting on various physical changes wrought through violence. This study approaches violence as the work of materiality, which has the potential to analogously stage pictorial surfaces as corporeal surfaces, where paint becomes flayed flesh, canvas threads ruptured skin, and red paint spilt blood.

This study traces the history of urbanization in Denmark from c. 500-1350 and explores how interconnected political, religious, economic factors were instrumental in bringing about the growth of towns. Prior to urban development, certain specialized sites such as elite residences and coastal landing places performed many of the functions that would later be taken over by medieval towns. Fundamental changes in political power, the coming of Christianity, and economic development over the course of the Viking and Middle Ages led to the abandonment of these sites in favour of new urban settlements that would come to form the political, religious, and economic centres of the medieval kingdom. Bringing together both archaeological and historical sources, this study illustrates not only how certain cultural and economic shifts were crucial to the development of towns, but also the important role urbanization had in the transition from Viking to medieval Denmark.

This tenth volume in the series, comprising some fifty essays, offers a further wide-ranging selection of essays on different themes and personalities, grouped thematically, from portraits of key figures such as Stamford Raffles and Lord Lytton to the history of Japanese trade and investment in the UK, such as NSK at Peterlee and Mitsubishi Electric in Scotland, from scholars such as Basil Hall Chamberlain, to international Japanese banker Ogata Shijuro.

Published in association with the Japan Society and containing 57 essays, this ninth volume in the series continues to celebrate the life and work of the men and women, both British and Japanese, who over time played an interesting and significant role in a wide variety of different spheres relating to the history of Anglo-Japanese relations and deserve to be recorded and remembered. Read together they give a picture, even if inevitably a partial one, of important facets of modern history and Anglo-Japanese institutions. They shed light on a number of controversial issues as well as illuminate past successes and failures. Structured thematically in four Parts – Japan in Britain, Britain in Japan, Scholars and Writers, Politicians and Officials – the highlights in this volume include: The Great Japan Exhibition, 1981-82; Japanese Gardens and the Japanese Garden Society in the UK; Cricket in Late Edo and Meiji Japan; Norman Macrae, pioneering journalist of The Economist; Arthur Balfour – managing the emergence of Japan as a Great Power; Michio Morishima, an economist ‘made in Japan’; Margaret Thatcher – a pragmatist who radically improved Britain’s image in Japan.

Carmen Blacker was an outstanding scholar of Japanese culture, known internationally for her writings on religion, myth and folklore – her most notable work being The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan. Importantly, a third of the volume comprises significant extracts from the author’s diaries covering a period of more than forty years, together with a plate section drawn from her extensive photographic archive, thus providing a rare opportunity to gain a personal insight into the author’s life and work. The volume includes a wide selection of writings from distinguished scholars such as Donald Keene and her former pupil Peter Kornicki in celebration of her work and legacy, together with various essays and papers by Carmen Blacker herself that have hitherto not been widely available. In addition to her scholarship, Carmen Blacker was also highly regarded for her work in promoting Japanese Studies at Cambridge and played a vital role in helping to re-establish The Japan Society, London, post-war.

John Pilcher’s appointment as HM Ambassador to Japan in 1967, three years after the widely acclaimed Tokyo Olympics, was both judicious and enlightened. His role was to be that of a bridge-builder between Japan and Britain following the early post-war years of disenchantment, distrust and detachment that had earlier marked the relationship between the two countries. He brought to his role a particular understanding of Japanese civilization and a critical analysis of Japanese attitudes and way of life. Before the war he had had the good fortune to spend time as a language student in Kyoto. There he came to appreciate Japanese culture at its best but as a junior consular official he also came to see other less attractive aspects of Japan. In this volume Sir Hugh Cortazzi who was to follow in John Pilcher’s footsteps, has compiled the defining reports to Whitehall from Pilcher’s time and as such they offer a valuable record of Japan’s progress at this important point in her post-war history, as well as providing unique insights into the activities, hopes and expectations of the British government in her dealings with Japan. The collection (including essays and writings from his private papers) which has hitherto remained largely unknown or inaccessible to most researchers, provides a platform for John Pilcher as a writer and distinguished scholar-diplomat.

This book takes an in-depth look at the study of Japan in contemporary Britain, highlighting the many strengths but also pointing out some weaknesses, while at the same time offering a valuable historical record of the origins and development of Japanese Studies in British universities and other institutions. It comprises essays written by scholars from universities all over Britain – from Edinburgh and Newcastle to Cardiff, SOAS and Oxbridge+, as well as contributions from various supporting foundations and organizations – from the British Association of Japanese Studies (BAJS) to the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC). It opens with an historical overview by Peter Kornicki, followed by chapters on the important role of missionaries in advancing Japanese language studies in pre-war Japan by Hamish Ion and the contribution of the British consular and military officers before 1941 by Jim Hoare. Japanese Studies in Britain gives a snapshot of the present state of Japanese Studies in Britain. It also provides an important new benchmark and point of reference regarding the present options for studying Japan at British universities. It offers in addition a wider perspective on the role, relevance and future direction of Japanese Studies for academia, business and government, students planning their future careers and more generally the world of education, as well as readers interested in the developing relationship between Britain and Japan.

This study traces the evolution of early film societies in Germany and Austria, from the emergence of mass movie theaters in the 1910s to the turbulent years of the late Weimar Republic. Examining a diverse array of groups, it approaches film societies as formations designed to assimilate and influence a new medium: a project emerging from the world of amateur science before taking new directions into industry, art and politics. Through an interdisciplinary approach—in dialogue with social history, print history and media archaeology—it also transforms our theoretical understanding of what a film society was and how it operated. Far from representing a mere collection of pre-formed cinephiles, film societies were, according to the book’s central argument, productive social formations, which taught people how to nurture their passion for the movies, how to engage with cinema, and how to interact with each other. Ultimately, the study argues that examining film societies can help to reveal the diffuse agency by which generative ideas of cinema take shape.

A key figure in early avant-garde cinema, Walter Ruttmann was a pioneer of experimental animation and the creative force behind one of the silent era's most celebrated montage films, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Yet even as he was making experimental films, Ruttmann had a day job. He worked regularly in advertising -and he would go on to make industrial films, medical films, and even Nazi propaganda films. Michael Cowan offers here the first study of Ruttmann in English, not only shedding light on his commercial, industrial, and propaganda work, but also rethinking his significance in light of recent transformations in film studies. Cowan brilliantly teases out the linkages between the avant-garde and industrial society in the early twentieth century, showing how Ruttmann's films incorporated and enacted strategies for managing the multiplicities of mass society.This book has won the Willy Haas Award 2014 for its outstanding contribution to the study of German cinema.

This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna’s influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women’s place in Italian literature; no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

Meaning versus Grammar investigates the complicated relationship between grammar, computation, and meaning in natural languages. It details conditions under which meaning-driven processing of natural language is feasible, discusses an operational and accessible implementation of the grammatical cycle for Dutch, and offers analyses of a number of further conjectures about constituency and entailment in natural language.

When people attend classical music concerts today, they sit and listen in silence, offering no audible reactions to what they're hearing. We think of that as normal-but, as Darryl Cressman shows in this book, it's the product of a long history of interrelationships between music, social norms, and technology. Using the example of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw in the nineteenth century, Cressman shows how its design was in part intended to help discipline and educate concert audiences to listen attentively - and analysis of its creation and use offers rich insights into sound studies, media history, science and technology studies, classical music, and much more.

The new parameters of a global world in the early modern period gave rise to an expansion of movement that facilitated spatial and social mobility for women of different social ranks. Through their reexamination of archival documents and travel narratives, these essays investigate the opportunities for female mobility across the Spanish Empire, narrating the journeys of women who assumed new and unpredictable roles in distant environments. Some risked transoceanic journeys to hold positions of colonial power, while nuns traveled to found convents. Portuguese and Genoese women financiers and merchants traversed the Mediterranean to command enterprises in different cities. Breaking with tradition, the noblewomen considered in these essays exercised political agency as ambassadresses and diplomatic spies at various European courts. Still other women fled across borders from oppressive marriages or cross-dressed as soldiers to perform adventurous feats in support of imperial causes. Their frequently distorted histories, authored by men, have been revised and rectified by the authors of this volume.

Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon, was given a limited run on its debut in 1927, but soon afterwards distributors in France and America, unwilling to deal with its nine-hour running time, subjected it to savage cuts - with devastating results for the movie and for film history. The struggle across ensuing decades to restore and reintegrate Gance's film has formed a backdrop to an array of formal, contextual, and ideological battles. In this book, Paul Cuff takes account of those battles and challenges received opinion on Gance's view of both his film and its subject.

Throughout his academic career Louis Cullen’s main research interest has been foreign trade - originally that of England, Ireland and France, but from the mid-1990s, his focus turned to Japanese history resulting in his critically acclaimed A history of Japan 1582–1941: Internal and External Worlds. Subsequently, he concentrated on the analysis of archival sources and of the problems they pose for the interpretation of Japanese history: papers on some of these themes and their associated statistical dimensions have appeared in Nichibunken’s Japan Review and are republished here together with a collection of other papers including interpreting Tokugawa history and the knowledge and the use of Japanese by the Dutch on Dejima island.

When Paul III was elected in 1534, hopes arose across Christendom that this pope would at last reform and reunite the Church. During his fifteen-year reign, though, Paul's engagement with reform was complex and contentious. A work of cultural history, this book explores how cultural narratives of honour and tradition, including how honour played out in politics, significantly constrained Pope Paul and his chosen reformers in framing strategies for change. Indeed, the reformers' programme would have undermined the culture of honour and weakened Rome's capacity to ward off current threats of invasion. The study makes a provocative case that Paul called the Council of Trent to contain reform rather than promote it. Nevertheless, Paul and the Council did sow seeds of reform that eventually became central to the Counter-Reformation. This book thus sheds new light on a pope whose relationship to reform has long been regarded as an enigma.

Border deaths are a result of dynamics involving diverse actors, and can be interpreted and represented in various ways. Critical voices from civil society (including academia) hold states responsible for making safe journeys impossible for large parts of the world population. Meanwhile, policy-makers argue that border deaths demonstrate the need for restrictive border policies. Statistics are widely (mis)used to support different readings of border deaths. However, the way data is collected, analysed, and disseminated remains largely unquestioned. Similarly, little is known about how bodies are treated, and about the different ways in which the dead - also including the missing and the unidentified - are mourned by familiars and strangers. New concepts and perspectives contribute to highlighting the political nature of border deaths and finding ways to move forward. The chapters of this collection, co-authored by researchers and practitioners, provide the first interdisciplinary overview of this contested field.

This multidisciplinary book analyses the contradictory coexistence of consumerism and environmentalism in contemporary Japan. It focuses on the dilemma that the diffusion of the concepts of sustainability and recycling has posed for everyday consumption practices, and on how these concepts have affected, and were affected by, the production and consumption of art. Special attention is paid to the changes in consumption practices and environmental consciousness among the Japanese public that have occurred since the 1990s and in the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters of March 2011.