Whites and Democracy in South Africa

$26.99

Key book in Whiteness Studies that engages with the different ways in which the last white minority in Africa to give way to majority rule has adjusted to the arrival of democracy and the different modes of transition from "settlers" to "citizens".

How have whites adjusted to, contributed to and detracted from democracy in South Africa since 1994? Engaging with the literature on 'whiteness' and the current trope that the democratic settlement has failed, this book provides a study of how whites in the last bastion of 'white minority rule' in Africa have adapted to the sweeping political changes they have encountered. It examines the historical context of white supremacy and minority rule, in the past, and the white withdrawal from elsewhere on the African continent. Drawing on focus groups held across the country, Southall explores the difficult issue of 'memory', how whites seek to grapple with the history of apartheid, and how this shapes their reactions to political equality. He argues that whites cannot be regarded as a homogeneous political grouping concluding that while the overwhelming majority of white South Africans feared the coming of democracy during the years of late apartheid, they recognised its inevitability. Many of their fears were, in effect, to be recognised by the Constitution, which embedded individual rights, including those to property and private schooling, alongside the important principle of proportionality of political representation. While a small minority of whites chose to emigrate, the large majority had little choice but to adjust to the democratic settlement which, on the whole, they have done - and in different ways. It was only a small right wing which sought to actively resist; others have sought to withdraw from democracy into social enclaves; but others have embraced democracy actively, either enthusiastically welcoming its freedoms or engaging with its realities in defence of 'minority rights'. Whites may have been reluctant to accept democracy, but democrats - of a sort - they have become, and notwithstanding a significant racialisation of politics in post-apartheid South Africa, they remain an important segment of the "rainbow", although dangers lurk in the future unless present inequalities of both race and class are challenged head on.

African Sun Media: South Africa

Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture

$29.99

Winner of the Best First Monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) 2021.

An examination of the Old English medical collections, arguing that these texts are products of a learned intellectual culture.

Four complete medical collections survive from Anglo-Saxon England. These were first edited by Oswald Cockayne in the nineteenth century and came to be known by the names Bald's Leechbook, Leechbook III, the Lacnunga, and the Old English Pharmacopeia. Together these works represent the earliest complete collections of medical material in a western vernacular language.
This book examines these texts as products of a learned literary culture. While earlier scholarship tended to emphasise the relationship of these works to folk belief or popular culture, this study suggests that all four extant collections were probably produced in major ecclesiastical centres. It examines the collections individually, emphasising their differences of content and purpose, while arguing that each consistently displays connections with an elite intellectual culture. The final chapter considers the fundamentally positive depiction of doctors and medicine found within literary and ecclesiastical works from the period and suggests that the high esteem for medicine in literate circles may have favoured the study and translation of medical texts.

Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture

Lancelot-Grail: 9. The Post-Vulgate Cycle. The Quest for the Holy Grail and The Death of Arthur

$36.95

The revised version of The Quest of the Holy Grail gives a greater role to Perceval, and introduces a number of knights not found in the Vulgate; but the largest change is that much of the story of Tristan (and of his rivalPalamedes) is incorporated into the story. The achievement of the Grail quest centres on Galahad's healing of Pellehan, which has to be accomplished before the knights can reach the Grail itself. The Death of Arthur is little more than a relatively brief postscript, bringing the story of the adventures of the kingdom of Logres to an end; Lancelot and Guenevere are revealed as lovers, and Arthur fights both Lancelot and then the Romans. Despite thisvictory, he is betrayed and killed by Mordred, as has been foreshadowed from the outset of the new material. The romance ends with king Mark of Cornwall's death when he attempts to kill Lancelot and Bors at the hermitage to whichthey have retreated. For a full description of the Post-Vulgate Cycle see the blurb for the complete set.

Lancelot-Grail: 9. The Post-Vulgate Cycle. The Quest for the Holy Grail and The Death of Arthur

A Companion to Latin American Literature

$36.95

The evolution of Latin American literature.

A Companion to Latin American Literature offers a lively and informative introduction to the most significant literary works produced in Latin America from the fifteenth century until the present day. It shows how the press, and its product the printed word, functioned as the common denominator binding together, in different ways over time, the complex and variable relationship between the writer, the reader and the state. The meandering story of the evolution of Latin American literature - from the letters of discovery written by Christopher Columbus and Vaz de Caminha, via the Republican era at the end of the nineteenth century when writers in Rio de Janeiro as much as inBuenos Aires were beginning to live off their pens as journalists and serial novelists, until the 1960s when writers of the quality of Clarice Lispector in Brazil and García Márquez in Colombia suddenly burst onto the world stage- is traced chronologically in six chapters which introduce the main writers in the main genres of poetry, prose, the novel, drama, and the essay. A final chapter evaluates the post-boom novel, testimonio, Latino and Brazuca literature, gay, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Brazilian literature, along with the Novel of the New Millennium. This study also offers suggestions for further reading.

STEPHEN M. HART is Professor of Hispanic Studies, UniversityCollege London, and Profesor Honorario, Universidad de San Marcos, Lima

The Catalan Expedition to the East

$22.95

Ramon Muntaner's account of the bloody adventures of the Almogaver army under Roger of Flor in the eastern Mediterranean in the early fourteenth century, one of the most spellbinding narratives of medieval European literature.

Before its definitive fall into Turkish hands, the Byzantine Empire was the target of adventurers of many nations. Outstanding among these groups was the Almogaver army led by Roger of Flor, composed of mercenaries hardened in thewar between the Catalan and Angevin dynasties for domination of Sicily. The Catalan presence in Constantinople aroused suspicion among the Greek nobility who assassinated Roger of Flor and tried to exterminate his men. The devastating reaction of those who escaped the slaughter led to Catalan control of broad swathes of the Empire, including Athens. Ramon Muntaner, one of the ringleaders of the expedition, recounted the adventures of the Almogaver army inthe eastern Mediterranean in the fascinating section of his Chronicle translated here. The preface is by N. D. Hillgarth.

Dr. Robert D. Hughes is a translator and researcher with particular expertise in the fields of fine art, the history of ideas and Catalan culture.

Published in association with Editorial Barcino

'Charms', Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England

$36.95

A re-evaluation of the mysterious "charms" found in Anglo-Saxon literature, arguing for their place in mainstream Christian rites.

Since its inception in the nineteenth century, the genre of Anglo-Saxon charms has drawn the attention of many scholars and appealed to enthusiasts of magic, paganism, and popular religion. Their Christian nature has been widely acknowledged in recent years, but their position within mainstream liturgical traditions has not yet been fully recognised. In this book, Ciaran Arthur undertakes a wide-ranging investigation of the genre to better understand how early English ecclesiastics perceived these rituals and why they included them in manuscripts were written in high-status minsters. Evidence from the entire corpus of Old English, various surviving manuscript sources, and rich Christian theological traditions suggests that contemporary scribes and compilers did not perceive "charms" as anything other than Christian rituals that belonged to diverse, mainstream liturgical practices. The book thus challenges the notion that there was any such thing as an Anglo-Saxon "charm", and offers alternative interpretations of these texts as creative para-liturgical rituals or liturgical rites, which testify to the diversity of early medieval English Christianity. When considered in their contemporary ecclesiastical and philosophical contexts, even the most enigmatic rituals, previously dismissed as mere "gibberish", begin to emerge as secret, deliberately obscured texts with hidden spiritual meaning.

'Charms', Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England

Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England

$36.95

A fresh approach to the implications of obtaining, preparing, and consuming food, concentrating on the little-investigated routines of everyday life.

Food in the Middle Ages usually evokes images of feasting, speeches, and special occasions, even though most evidence of food culture consists of fragments of ordinary things such as knives, cooking pots, and grinding stones, which are rarely mentioned by contemporary writers. This book puts daily life and its objects at the centre of the food world. It brings together archaeological and textual evidence to show how words and implements associated with food contributed to social identity at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society. It also looks at the networks which connected fields to kitchens and linked rural centres to trading sites. Fasting, redesigned field systems, and the place offish in the diet are examined in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary inquiry into the power of food to reveal social complexity.

Allen J. Frantzen is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago.

Cover image for Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England, isbn: 9781783272457

The Reflector

$29.95

Incorporates etymology, history, art, drawing, and reflective writing to support medical students in the integration of the science and humanity of anatomy.

A comprehensive and holistic understanding of human anatomy is foundational to the care of patients. The Reflector is an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the learning of human anatomy; it incorporates etymology, history, art, drawing, and reflective writing to integrate the learning of anatomical structures with the nonanatomical curriculum of the anatomy lab, thus establishing the foundation for a biopsychosocial approach to medicine. To develop visual skills, this work features drawings that illustrate the original inspirations for anatomical terminology while also providing the space to artistically reimagine these structures. Together, these activities enhance the comprehension and retention of anatomical information for application in medical sciences. The Reflector employs thought-provoking questions that emphasize humanity in anatomy, in order to prompt consideration of the anatomical structures beyond basic science. Reflecting on the experiences of anatomical dissections, specifically in relation to development of habits of mind necessary for patient- and family-centered care, continually connects students to the purpose of their studies - to become a knowledgeable, compassionate, self-aware, reflective, and skilled member of a healing profession.
Edited by a medical student with a Master's of Science degree in Medical Humanities; an anatomical science faculty member dedicated to the holistically educated medical provider; an expert in visual learning and self-reflection; and a bioethicist, The Reflector is a valuable resource for all who want to understand the human in human anatomy.

The Lobotomy Letters

$29.99

Drawing from original correspondence penned by lobotomy patients and their families as well as from the professional papers of lobotomy pioneer and neurologist Walter Freeman, The Lobotomy Letters gives an account of the widespread acceptance of this controversial procedure.

The rise and widespread acceptance of psychosurgery constitutes one of the most troubling chapters in the history of modern medicine. By the late 1950s, tens of thousands of Americans had been lobotomized as treatment for a host of psychiatric disorders. Though the procedure would later be decried as devastating and grossly unscientific, many patients, families, and physicians reported veritable improvement from the surgery; some patients were even considered cured.
The Lobotomy Letters gives an account of why this controversial procedure was sanctioned by psychiatrists and doctors of modern medicine. Drawing from original correspondence penned by lobotomy patients andtheir families as well as from the professional papers of lobotomy pioneer and neurologist Walter Freeman, the volume reconstructs how physicians, patients, and their families viewed lobotomy and analyzes the reasons for its overwhelming use.

Mical Raz, MD/PhD, is a physician and historian of medicine.

Myths and Legends of the British Isles

$39.95

Tales from the dawn of Christianity to the age of the Plantagenets reveal a mythology in its time as potent as that of the classical world.

The British Isles have a long tradition of tales of gods, heroes and marvels, hinting at a mythology once as relevant to the races which settled the islands as the Greek and Roman gods were to the classical world. The tales drawntogether in this book, from a wide range of medieval sources, span the centuries from the dawn of Christianity to the age of the Plantagenets. The Norse gods which peopled the Anglo-Saxon past survive in Beowulf; Cuchulainn, Taliesin and the magician Merlin take shape from Celtic mythology; and saints include Helena who brought a piece of the True Cross to Britain, and Joseph of Arimathea whose staff grew into the Glastonbury thorn. Tales of the British Arthur are followed by legends of later heroes, including Harold, Hereward and Godiva. These figures and many others were part of a familiar national mythology on which Shakespeare drew for Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet, creating the famous versions that are known today. Here the original stories are presented.

RICHARD BARBER's other books include and The Knight and Chivalry.

Knowledge of the Stasi in the East German Literary Sphere

$29.99

The first book to investigate what writers, publishers, and editors knew about the Stasi and how, rethinking the relationship between knowledge, secrecy, intuition, trust, and agency under an authoritarian regime.

While much scholarship has explored what the East German Ministry for State Security - the Stasi - knew about writers, publishers, editors, and others involved in the GDR's literary sphere, none has asked what these groups knew about the Stasi, how they acquired that knowledge, and how it circulated. The present book flips the approach of existing scholarship to ask those questions, thus offering an innovative approach to studying the production and circulation of literature in East Germany. It uncovers the myriad ways in which those who wrote, published, or supported literary production that was critical of the state negotiated, circumvented, and actively confronted the threat posed by surveillance and control. The study draws on original interviews, Stasi files, and writings by Uwe Kolbe, Ekkehard Maaß, Christa Moog, Gabriele Stötzer, Bernd Wagner, and Bettina Wegner, as well as works by Stefan Heym, Ralf-Günter Krolkiewicz, Günter Kunert, and Christa Wolf. The book shows that the Stasi was a kind of "public secret"-a known unknown that was positioned between revelation and concealment. It engages with theoretical frameworks drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, surveillance studies and cultural studies to reconceptualize the relationship between knowledge, secrecy, intuition, trust, and agency in an authoritarian context.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

SARA JONES is Professor of Languages, Cultures, and Societies at the University of Birmingham, UK.
TARA TALWAR WINDSOR is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Leeds, UK.
BETIEL WASIHUN is Lecturer in Cultural and Literary Theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.

Cover image for Knowledge of the Stasi in the East German Literary Sphere, isbn: 9781640141957

Elizabeth Sweeting: The Best and Happiest Days

$49.95

An essential volume for anyone interested in Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and the history of the Aldeburgh Festival.

Britten invited Elizabeth Sweeting (1914-1999) to be the General Manager of the Aldeburgh Festival after observing her organisational skills for the English Opera Group. She worked closely with Britten and Peter Pears, administering all aspects of the first eight Aldeburgh Festivals - from booking artists to tearing ticket stubs - beginning with the inaugural festival in 1948.

She was to become one of the most significant facilitators in the performing arts in the post-war era, and a pioneering figure in the new profession of arts administrator. Her tenure as Manager of the Oxford Playhouse in the 1960s and 1970s was followed by five years as Director of the Arts Council of South Australia. Her inspirational guide, Theatre Administration (1969), was a vital handbook for those following her.

Sweeting's honest and lively memoir of her Aldeburgh years, written in the mid-1980s and here published complete for the first time, offers an insider's account of what those early festivals were like - charting both their highs and their lows. Also included is most of the extant correspondence between Sweeting and Britten and Pears. Beginning in 1948, it extends from her time working at Aldeburgh through to her Oxford years and her period in Australia.

The editors provide a contextualising introduction and detailed annotations throughout.

Elizabeth Sweeting: The Best and Happiest Days is an essential volume for anyone interested in Britten, Pears and the Aldeburgh Festival.

Cover image for Elizabeth Sweeting: The Best and Happiest Days, isbn: 9780957167230

Rewriting the First Crusade

$29.99

An exploration of the letters from the First Crusade, yielding evidence for a number of reinterpretations of the movement.

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns.

This volume, grounded on extensive research into the original manuscripts, and presenting numerous new manuscript witnesses, argues that some of the letters are post hoc "inventions", composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary "reality", it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary "confections", they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition.

Cover image for Rewriting the First Crusade, isbn: 9781837653874

Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy

$36.95

A consideration of the allegory of Christ the Divine Physician in medical and religious writings.

Discourses of physical and spiritual health were intricately entwined in the Middle Ages, shaping intellectual concepts as well as actual treatment. The allegory of Christ as Divine Physician is an example of this intersection: it appears frequently in both medical and religious writings as a powerful figure of healing and salvation, and was invoked by dissidents and reformists in religious controversies.

Drawing on previously unexplored manuscript material, this book examines the use of the Christus Medicus tradition during a period of religious turbulence. Via an interdisciplinary analysis of literature, sermons, and medical texts, it shows that Wycliffites in England and Hussites in Bohemia used concepts developed in hospital settings to press for increased lay access to Scripture and the sacraments against the strictures of the Church hierarchy. Tracing a story of reform and controversy from localised institutional contexts to two of the most important pan-European councils of the fifteenth century, Constance and Basel, it argues that at a point when the body of the Church was strained by multiple popes, heretics and schismatics, the allegory came into increasing use to restore health and order.

Cover image for Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy, isbn: 9781914049354

The British Country House Revival

$29.99

British country houses have experienced a renaissance since the early 1970s. A new accord is needed today, recognising the increasingly contested contribution of country houses to British cultural life.

Fifty years ago, the future for country houses in Britain looked bleak. The Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition The Destruction of the Country House, which opened in October 1974, charted the loss of over a thousand country houses in the preceding century. The makers of the exhibition warned that history could be "about to repeat itself" because of the threats besetting mansion properties, principally from higher taxation. Houses faced the prospect of having to be stripped of their collections and sold for use as offices, hotels, or hospitals, with their parks and gardens turned into golf clubs. Government might afford to save just a handful of the most significant of these places, working in tandem with charities such as the National Trust. The rest would be consigned to history.

This book traces the history of country houses in Britain, from the Destruction exhibition to the present day. The wave of country house losses anticipated in 1974 never actually happened. Instead, over the next five decades Britain's country houses experienced a renaissance. Fiscal rules changed in the mid-1970s to make it easier for owners to hold on to their assets. Economic improvements in the 1980s and 1990s allowed many houses and estates to develop profitable commercial businesses. All of this was achieved only after dedicated campaigning from heritage organisations in support of the country house cause. The book argues that a new accord is needed today, to recognise and value the ongoing, if increasingly contested, contribution of country houses to British life and culture in the twenty-first century.

Cover image for The British Country House Revival, isbn: 9781837652020

The Crisis of Democratization in the Greater Horn of Africa

$29.00

Analyses the structural and institutional obstacles to democratization in transitional societies - fractured societies, fragmented economies and institutions of governance, weak or deformed state structures - and how to overcome these.

In the early 1990s, a wave of democratization swept through many African countries, but its prevailing election-centred liberal approach failed to result in sustainable democracies. Why should this be and what can be done about it? This multi-disciplinary work on the Greater Horn investigates the impact on the efforts to bring greater democratization of the characteristically complex socio-economic state structures of the countries of the Greater Horn of Africa and, importantly, suggests an alternative, more effective, approach.
Detailed studies of Ethiopia, Somaliland, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda reveal the difficulties posed by institutional structures that are often weak and lack accountability; fragmented economies - which range from modern capitalist to subsistence farming and pastoral systems; and governance marked by differing conceptions of property rights and conflict adjudication practices and varied resource allocation systems. Chronic violent ethnic-based civil wars and social conflicts and deep-rooted ethnic divisions only exacerbate the states' ability to foster democratic governance, or even to manage diversity properly. The contributors examine why the countries of the Horn have been unable to overcome these obstacles to democratization and explore how and why an alternative approach is more likely tobe compatible with the socioeconomic realities and cultural values in transitional societies.

Kidane Mengisteab is Professor of African Studies and Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. He is co-editor ofRegional Integration, Identity and Citizenship in the Greater Horn of Africa (James Currey, 2012) and, most recently, Traditional Institutions in Contemporary African Governance (2017).

Cover image for The Crisis of Democratization in the Greater Horn of Africa, isbn: 9781847012487

ALT 36: Queer Theory in Film & Fiction

$36.95

ALT 36 turns a "queer eye" on Africa, offering provocative (re-)readings of texts to position formerly erased sexualities and contemporary sexual expression among Africans on the continent, and abroad.

Debates on the future of the African continent and the role of gender identities in these visions are increasingly present in literary criticism forums as African writers become bolder in exploring the challenges they face and celebrating gender diversity in the writing of short stories, novels, poetry, plays and films. Controversies over the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ) communities in Africa, as elsewhere, continue inthe context of criminalization and/or intimidation of these groups. Residual colonial moralizing and contemporary western identity norms and politics vie with longstanding polyvalent indigenous sexual expression. In addition to traditional media, the new social media have gained importance, both as sources of information exchange and as sites of virtual construction of gender identities. As with many such contentious issues, the variety of responses to the"state of the question" is strikingly visible across the continent. In this issue of ALT, guest editor John Hawley has sampled the ongoing conversations, in both African writing and in the analysis of contemporary African cinema,to show how queer studies can break with old concepts and theories and point the way to new gender perspectives on literary and cinematic output.

This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles anda Literary Supplement.

Guest Editor: John C. Hawley is Professor in the Department of English, Santa Clara University
Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA.
Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

Cover image for ALT 36: Queer Theory in Film & Fiction, isbn: 9781847011855

Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy

$29.99

The medieval in the modern world is here explored in a variety of media, from film and book to gaming.

Medievalism - the ways in which post-medieval societies perceive, interpret, reimagine, or appropriate the Middle Ages - permeates popular culture. From Disney princesses to Game of Thrones, medieval fairs to World of Warcraft, contemporary culture keeps finding new ways to reinvent and repackage the period. Medievalism itself, then, continues to evolve while it is also subject to technological advances, prominent invocations in political discourse,and the changing priorities of the academy. This has led some scholars to adopt the term "neomedievalism", a concept originating in part from the work of the late Umberto Eco, which calls for new avenues of inquiry into the wayswe think about the medieval.
This book examines recent evolutions of (neo)medievalism across multiple media, from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to the film Beowulf and medieval gaming. These evolutions can take the form of what one might consider to be pop culture objects of critique (art, commodity, amusement park, video game) or academic tools of critique (monographs, articles, lectures, university seminars). It is by reconciling theseseemingly disparate forms that we can better understand the continual, interconnected, and often politicized reinvention of the Middle Ages in both popular and academic culture.

Cover image for Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy, isbn: 9781843847786

The Importance of Elgar

$36.95

A landmark celebration of Edward Elgar's life, music and enduring influence, bringing together leading voices from across the musical world.

Of the many biographies and other books published about Edward Elgar few have brought together as many composers, performers, and writers as this anthology, in celebration of his art and life. Published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Society which bears his name, The Importance of Elgar brings together both executant musicians and others who share their love and appreciation of his music and what it means to them and, more widely, his place in the canon of western music.
With a foreword by the Society's President, Sir Mark Elder, the more than 60 contributors include Dame Janet Baker, Sir Stephen Hough, Sir James MacMillan and Christian Tetzlaf. The choice of the word 'importance' ensured that those who contributed to this volume would write something personal. The Elgar Society's first President, Sir Adrian Boult, was one of the great interpreters of Elgar's music and his commitment remains an inspiration to many today. It was Sir Adrian who suggested the formation of The Elgar Society during a series of concerts in Malvern in 1950. Four months later, in January 1951, what became the largest composer society in Britain was formed.
Edited by David Morris, The Elgar Society's Secretary, and Andrew Neill a former Society Chairman, this book offers the practising musician and music lover alike some fresh insights into Elgar's music and his importance beyond the shores of Britain.

Cover image for The Importance of Elgar, isbn: 9781837653522

Janácek’s Sinfonietta

$29.99

A definitive study of Janáček's Sinfonietta, tracing its creation, reception, and rise to international prominence.

This book provides a musical 'biography' of Leoš Janáček's (1854-1928) most famous orchestral piece - his Sinfonietta - by analysing its sources, composition, reception history, recordings and musical component parts. The most up-to-date research on the genesis and performance history of the work, it considers in detail Janáček's orchestral writing, the inspiration and genesis of the Sinfonietta, a documentation of all the surviving sources for the work, the work's performance history during Janáček's lifetime and following his death until the end of the Second World War, including press reviews and relevant correspondence.

The book also examines the growth in the worldwide popularity of the Sinfonietta. This evolved from cautious and hostile critical responses to the premiere recording in 1946 to its gradual acceptance as one of the key works of the 1920s, largely thanks to the advocacy of conductors whose work is considered in detail, alongside other significant recordings. Questions of performance, rehearsal, interpretation and the musical text are considered in a wide-ranging interview with the conductor Jakub Hrůša, and a concluding chapter provides a detailed commentary on the music itself. The book includes a valuable appendix describing the annotated scores used by conductors such as Otto Klemperer, František Neumann and Henry Wood, as well as a comprehensive discography.

Cover image for Janácek’s <I>Sinfonietta</I>, isbn: 9781837654413

Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume III: 1450-1500

$41.95

Authoritative reference guide, using the documents in which arms and armour first appeared to explain and define them.

Medieval arms and armour are intrinsically fascinating. From the smoke and noise of the armourer's forge to the bloody violence of the battlefield or the silken panoply of the tournament, weapons and armour - and those who made and bore them - are woven into the fabric of medieval society. This sourcebook will aid anyone who seeks to develop a deeper understanding by introducing and presenting the primary sources in which these artefacts are first mentioned. Over seventy original documents are transcribed and translated, including wills, inventories, letters and chronicle accounts, from a period which saw rapid advances in military technology. The book also includes an extensive glossary, and is lavishly illustrated with images of both extant armour and weapons from the period, and contemporary artistic depictions from illuminated manuscripts and other sources. This book will therefore be of interest to a wide audience, from the living history practitioner, crafter, and martial artist, to students of literature, military history, art, and material culture.

Cover image for Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume III: 1450-1500, isbn: 9781837653898

The Tithe War in England and Wales, 1881-1936

$39.95

Brings to life a fascinating page of history in a scholarly but highly readable account of the "tithe war".

Co-WINNER: 2025 Thirsk Prize (British Agricultural History Society)

During the 1930s, farming communities waged a campaign of "passive resistance" against Tithe Rentcharge, the modern version of medieval tithe. Led by the National Tithepayers' Association, farmers refused to pay the charge, disrupted auctions of seized stock and joined demonstrations to prevent action by bailiffs. The National Government condemned their "unconstitutional action", ruled out changes in the law and mobilised police to support the titheowners. Meanwhile, the Church of England and lay titheowners - including Oxford and Cambridge colleges, public schools and major landowners - sought to vindicate their right to tithe; in a particularly shameful episode, the Church established a secret company to buy taken produce and remove it from farms.

This "tithe war" was fought outside farms, in the courts, in the press and in the wider arena of public opinion. It posed problems for the Church, legal system, and every political party; split the National Farmers' Union; and provided opportunities for the British Union of Fascists and other sections of the extreme right to cause disturbance.

Drawing on extensive archival research, accounts in local newspapers, and private papers, John Bulaitis traces the evolution of what has been described as this "curious rural revolt", from the late nineteenth century to its climax in 1936, when the Tithe Act brought an end to this form of tax.

Cover image for The Tithe War in England and Wales, 1881-1936, isbn: 9781837653584

Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic

$36.95

An examination of the uses, meanings, and social impact of Viking Age textiles.

This volume offers the first full study of archaeological fabrics and their decoration found in the North Atlantic region and dating broadly from the Viking or Norse period. With contributions from both academic scholars and practitioners, it shows how approaching early medieval textiles from archaeological, historical and literary contexts, and through the processes of learning and employing the traditional skills of making them, brings about a more nuanced understanding of early medieval cloths: their creation, use and meanings within their respective societies.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Textiles and their Interpretation", takes the reader on a journey from how wool was processed in the Viking Age, and the conservator's role in preserving and interpreting archaeological textiles, to different types of analyses that researchers use to understand and explain textiles from across the wide area of the Viking-influenced North Atlantic region. The second, "Understanding through Replicating", investigates the results of practical experiments in the reconstruction of surviving medieval fabrics and the resulting empirical conclusions that can be made about their manufacture and wider cultural implications.

Cover image for Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic, isbn: 9781837653850

Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume II: 1400–1450

$41.95

Authoritative reference guide, using the documents in which arms and armour first appeared to explain and define them.

Medieval arms and armour are intrinsically fascinating. From the smoke and noise of the armourer's forge to the bloody violence of the battlefield or the silken panoply of the tournament, weapons and armour - and those who made and bore them - are woven into the fabric of medieval society. This sourcebook will aid anyone who seeks to develop a deeper understanding by introducing and presenting the primary sources in which these artefacts are first mentioned. Over a hundred original documents are transcribed and translated, including wills and inventories, craft statutes, chronicle accounts, and challenges to single combat. The book also includes an extensive glossary, lavishly illustrated with forty-six images of extant armour and weapons from the period, and contemporary artistic depictions from illuminated manuscripts and other sources. This book will therefore be of interest to a wide audience, from the living history practitioner, crafter, and martial artist, to students of literature, military history, art, and material culture.

Cover image for Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume II: 1400–1450, isbn: 9781837653881

The Thun-Hohenstein Album

$49.95

The first extensive study of the depiction of the armour in the Thun-Hohenstein Album against the vibrant artistic and cultural contexts that created it.

In late medieval and early modern Europe, armour was more than a defensive technology for war or knightly sport. Its diverse types formed a complex visual language. Luxury armour was fitted precisely to a wearer's body, and its memorable details declared his status. Empty armour could evoke an owner's physical presence, prompting recollection of knightly personae, glittering pageantry, and impressive feats of arms. Its mnemonic power persisted long after the battle had ended, the trumpets had gone silent, and the dust had settled in the tournament arena.

Previously believed to contain preliminary designs sketched by master armourers, the Thun-Hohenstein album is a bound collection of drawings by professional book painters depicting some of the most artistically and technologically innovative armours of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Like a paper version of the princely armories that first formed during the 1500s, the album's images offered rich sites of meaning and memory. Their organization within the codex suggests the images' significance to their compiler. At the same time, the composition and details allow the reader to trace the transmission of recognizable armours, and the memories they embodied, from the anvil to the page.

This book is the first to examine the album, and the armor it depicts, in their vibrant artistic and cultural context. In five thematic chapters, it moves from case studies of these drawings to explore the album's complex intersections with the genres of martial history, material culture, and literature. It also reveals the album's participation in cultures of remembrance that carried mythic, knightly personae constructed around powerful Habsburg princes forward in time from the Middle Ages into the early modern era, from the courts of the Holy Roman Empire to emerging urban audiences.

Cover image for The Thun-Hohenstein Album, isbn: 9781837653843

Religious Plurality in Africa

$36.95

Grounded in ethnographic and historiographic research and taking a cross-regional approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of similarity and difference, rapprochement and detachment, and divergence and competition between practitioners of Christianity, Islam, and African religious traditions.

Across Africa, Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions live in shared settings, demarcating themselves in opposition to one another and at times engaging in violent conflicts, but also being entangled in complex ways and showing unexpected similarities and mutual cross-overs. However, while encounters and entanglements of African religious traditions with either Islam or Christianity have long been a central research issue, the configuration as a whole has barely been taken into account, even though Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions have long co-existed - and still co-exist - more or less peacefully in many settings in Africa. Building on recent interventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).

Cover image for Religious Plurality in Africa, isbn: 9781847014108

Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020

$29.99

Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens.

Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence.
Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.

Cover image for Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020, isbn: 9781847013958

The Telemann Compendium

$36.95

The first guide to research on Telemann in any language.

The 'Telemann Renaissance' is now more than half-century old. The veritable explosion of performances, both live and recorded, of the composer's music in recent decades has won him an ever-increasing following among musicians and concert-goers worldwide. This book presents a much-needed gateway for further study. As with other books in the Composer Compendia series, the book includes a brief biography, dictionary, works-list, and selective bibliography.

Cover image for The Telemann Compendium, isbn: 9781837653218

Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Duke of Ireland (1362-1392)

$36.95

The first full-length study of one of the most controversial figures of later fourteenth century England.

Robert de Vere was a close friend of the young King Richard II. He was accused of a wide range of political crimes and private vices by his opponents, the Lords Appellant. Defeated by them at the battle of Radcot Bridge in 1387, he died abroad in exile aged only 30. He was, in the eyes of many contemporaries - most notably the hostile chroniclers Walsingham and Froissart - and modern historians, a typical royal favourite: unmartial, immoral, self-seeking, and promoted and enriched far beyond what he deserved.

But what was a royal favourite, and what were the accusations made against them? This book investigates these questions across late medieval England, and assesses de Vere against contemporary criteria. Based on extensive archival research, this book shows there was more to de Vere than a grasping courtier. He had been Earl of Oxford since the age of nine, heir to a large landed estate, and had twice served in foreign wars. He also made a serious attempt to govern the English lordship in Ireland given to him by Richard. The findings here show him to be a far more rounded and complex figure than previously assumed.

Cover image for Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Duke of Ireland (1362-1392), isbn: 9781837653782

The Janácek Compendium

$36.95

Leos Janácek (1854-1928) occupied a pre-eminent position in Moravian (and wider Czech) culture, not only as a composer but also as a folksong collector, journalist, educator and nationalist.

One of the greatest and most original composers of the early twentieth century, Leos Janácek (1854-1928) occupied a pre-eminent position in Moravian culture, not only as a composer but also as a folksong collector, journalist, educator and nationalist. His friends and associates included artists, writers, ethnographers and politicians, as well as conductors, singers and instrumentalists. Janácek's many pupils included the conductor Bretislav Bakala and thecomposer Pavel Haas. He had important associations with publishers in Vienna and Prague and with the earliest years of Czech Radio. Janácek was strongly attached to particular places - Hukvaldy, Brno, Luhacovice - and had professional links with Prague, Berlin, London and beyond. The Janácek Compendium includes nearly 300 entries on every aspect of Janácek's life and works, with detailed notes on all his significant compositions - above all the operas - providing the latest information to emerge about some of his most famous pieces. An extensive bibliography supports the entries, which are cross-referenced to enable wider exploration of particular topics.

Cover image for The Janácek Compendium, isbn: 9781837653225

A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre

$45.95

A comprehensive guide to a crucial aspect of Old Norse literature.

We cannot read literary works without making use of the concept of genre. In Old Norse studies, genre has been central to the categorisation, evaluation and understanding of medieval prose and poetry alike; yet its definition has been elusive and its implications often left unexplored.
This volume opens up fundamental questions about Old Norse genre in theory and in practice. It offers an extensive range of theoretical approaches, investigating and critiquing current terms and situating its arguments within early Scandinavian and Icelandic oral-literary and manuscript contexts. It maps the ways in which genre and form engage with key thematic areas within the literary corpus,noting the different kinds of impact upon the genre system brought about by conversion to Christianity, the gradual adoption of European literary models, and social and cultural changes occurring in Scandinavian society. A case-study section probes both prototypical and hard-to-define cases, demonstrating the challenges that actual texts pose to genre theory in terms of hybridity, evolution and innovation. With an annotated taxonomy of Old Norse genres and an extensive bibliography, it is an indispensable resource for contemporary Old Norse-Icelandic literary studies.

Cover image for A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre, isbn: 9781843847656

The Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities

$54.95

Offers the first comprehensive account of a centuries-old tradition of encrypting covert messages into music, from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Question: What do J. S. Bach, beef cabbage, coffee, the SATOR Square, and Marlene Dietrich have in common?

Answer: Composers have enciphered these and many other words into music.

Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, these puzzling pursuits form the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain, edify, and enthral, but also bewitch and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.

Cover image for The Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities, isbn: 9781837653041

The Experimental Sutton Hoo Ship

$29.95

Unearthed from its burial mound, the Sutton Hoo ship offers a profound window into the political, cultural and technological world of seventh-century East Anglia.

On the eve of war in 1939 the remains of a wooden ship nearly 90 feet long were excavated beneath a mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Only the lines of iron rivets that secured the planking were still in place. This is the largest ship so far recovered from north-eastern Europe in the pre-Viking period. Now this great vessel is being reconstructed by the Sutton Hoo Ship's Company on the Woodbridge waterfront.

In this book - the first of three - Martin Carver pictures the people that created the ship in the seventh century, and explores their world of beliefs, burial, ornamental metalwork, clothes, and carpentry. The treasure found in the ship marks the high point of the kingdom of East Anglia, a realm linked with continental Europe, the Mediterranean and the Byzantine empire. This coincided with the creation of great timber halls and great clinker-built wooden ships. In order to see what influenced the design and construction of the Sutton Hoo ships, we have to look at the surviving evidence for seventh century boats from a wide variety of countries.

This roll-call of broadly contemporary boats is followed by a description of how our ship came to be reconstructed today, through the initiatives of Sutton Hoo's researchers and custodians and the people of Woodbridge, how it was designed and made a reality, concluding with an overview of what we can learn from this kind of recreation of a major archaeological discovery.

Cover image for The Experimental Sutton Hoo Ship, isbn: 9781837653676

ALT 38 Environmental Transformations

$24.99

Investigates what literary strategies African writers adopt to convey the impact of climate transformation and environmental change.

This special issue examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism addresses the implications of global environmental transformations. Does environmentalist literature offer new possibilities for critical thinking about the future? What constitutes environmentalist fiction and poetry? What kind of texts, themes and topics does climate writing include? Does any text in which the environment features become available to environmentalist criticism? In their engagement with the diverse genres, themes and frameworks through which contemporary African writers address topics including urbanisation, cross-species communication, nature and climate change, contributors to this special issue help to define African environmental writing. They look at the literary strategies adopted by creative writers to convey the impact of environmental transformationin narratives that are historically informed by a century of colonialism, nationalist political activism, urbanisation and postcolonial migration. How does environmental literature intervene in these histories? Can creative writers, with their powerfully post-human and cross-species imaginations, carry out the ethical work demanded by contemporary climate science? From Tanure Ojaide's and Helon Habila's attention to environmental decimation in the Niger Delta through to Nnedi Okorafor's and Kofi Anyidoho's imaginative cross-species encounters, the special issue asks how literature mediates the specificities of climate change in an era of global capitalism and technological transformation, and what the limits of creative writing and literary criticism are as tools for discussing environmental issues.

Guest Editors: Cajetan Iheka (Associate Professor of English, Yale University) and Stephanie Newell (Professor of English, Yale University)
Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu (Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint)
Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma (Fellow, Department of English University of Central Florida)

Cover image for ALT 38 Environmental Transformations, isbn: 9781847012609

Local Place and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400-1700

$36.95

The first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales.

Winner of the 2024 Dhira B. Mahoney Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Arthurian Studies

Places have the power to suspend disbelief, even concerning unbelievable subjects. The many locations associated with King Arthur show this to be true, from Tintagel in Cornwall to Caerleon in Wales. But how and why did Arthurian sites come to proliferate across the English and Welsh landscape? What role did the medieval custodians of Arthurian abbeys, churches, cathedrals, and castles play in "placing" Arthur? How did visitors experience Arthur in situ, and how did their experiences permeate into wider Arthurian tradition? And why, in history and even today, have particular places proven so powerful in defending the impression of Arthur's reality?

This book, the first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales, provides an answer to these questions. Beginning with an examination of on-site experiences of Arthur, at locations including Glastonbury, York, Dover, and Cirencester, it traces the impact that they had on visitors, among them John Hardyng, John Leland, William Camden, who subsequently used them as justification for the existence of Arthur in their writings. It shows how the local Arthur was manifested through textual and material culture: in chronicles, notebooks, and antiquarian works; in stained glass windows, earthworks, and display tablets. Via a careful piecing together of the evidence, the volume argues that a new history of Arthur begins to emerge: a local history.

Cover image for Local Place and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400-1700, isbn: 9781843847700

A Political Ecology of Kenya’s Mau Forest

$45.95

A timely and important examination of the forest's environmental crises, investigating their biophysical, political, economic, and socio-cultural aspects, that reveals why previous conservation efforts failed.

The eastern part of the Mau Forest, the most important closed-canopy forest in East Africa, has come under severe threat since the 1990s. In this political ecology Lisa Fuchs exploring the failure of the government-led forest restoration and rehabilitation initiative to 'Save the Mau', launched in 2009, the author examines two of the most contentious issues in Kenya since colonial times: land and the environment. She sheds light on the structural factors and the role of individuals in the forest's destruction and of non-protection and traces the colonial legacy of post-independent environmental conservation policies and practices. In doing so, Fuchs demonstrates that the Mau crisis is more than an environmental crisis: it is also a political, an economic, and a socio-cultural crisis.
Though a detailed empirical analysis, the author shows that the 'Mau crisis' led to the near collapse of landscapes and livelihoods in the Mau Forest ecosystem. She traces the implementation of insufficient conservation programmes, which resulted from historical path-dependency and the adoption of global environmental governance blueprints, forest allocation and benefits, and exposes a forest management system that prioritises commercial forest production over biodiversity conservation. Access and entitlements to the highly fertile forest land, and the amalgamation of forest rehabilitation with the reclamation of grabbed public forest are emphasised as a further core contributor to the crisis. The socio-cultural dynamics within and among various forest-dwelling communities, including the indigenous hunting and gathering Ogiek and 'in-migrant' groups, are also analysed. The book highlights that local types of environmentalism are caught between the 'invention of traditions' and 'perverse modernisation' and shows the contradictory effects of the celebrated, highly anticipated but poorly executed 'Save the Mau' initiative, and how the presence of political will to maintain the crisis conditioned its perseverance. Finally, the book proposes realistic alternatives to sustainable forest management in politicised environments, whose relevance and applicability are considerable in this age of anthropogenic 'environmental' crises and conflicts.

Published in association with IFRA/AFRICAE

Cover image for A Political Ecology of Kenya’s Mau Forest, isbn: 9781847013552

The Growth of Law in Medieval Wales, c.1100-c.1500

$36.95

2022 Hywel Dda Award (University of Wales Literary Awards)

A ground-breaking study of the lawbooks which were created in the changing social and political climate of post-conquest Wales.

The Middle Ages in Wales were turbulent, with society and culture in constant flux. Edward I of England's 1282 conquest brought with it major changes to society, governance, power and identity, and thereby to the traditional system of the law. Despite this, in the post-conquest period the development of law in Wales and the March flourished, and many manuscripts and lawbooks were created to meet the needs of those who practised law.
This study, the first to fully reappraise the entire corpus of law manuscripts since Aneurin Owen's seminal 1841 edition, begins by considering the background to the creation of the law from the earliest period, particularly from c.1100 onwards, before turning to the "golden age" of lawmaking in thirteenth-century Gwynedd. The nature of the law in south Wales is also examined in full, with a particular focus on later developments, including the different use of legal texts in that region and its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. The author approaches medieval Welsh law, its practice, texts and redactions, in their own contexts, rather than through the lens of later historiography. In particular, she shows that much manuscript material previously considered "additional" or "anomalous" in fact incorporates new legal material and texts written for a particular purpose: thanks to their flexible accommodation of change, adjustment and addition, Welsh lawbooks were not just shaped by, but indeed shaped, medieval Welsh law.

Cover image for The Growth of Law in Medieval Wales, c.1100-c.1500, isbn: 9781837653591

Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement

$29.99

Key study on writer and activist Kgositsile that presents a new approach to studying the radicalism of Africa and its diaspora and makes a major contribution to the histories of Black lives, gender studies, jazz studies, politics, and creativity.

The cultural configurations of the Black Atlantic cannot be fully understood without recognising the significant presence of writers and artists from the African continent itself. Among the most influential was South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, or 'Bra Willie', as he was affectionately known. Yet, until now, there has been no full-length study of his work.

Uhuru Phalafala's wide-ranging book reveals the foundational influence of Kgositsile's mother and grandmother on his craft and unveils the importance of the oral/aural traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and cosmologies he carried with him into and after exile. It illuminates a southern African modernity that was strongly gendered and deployed in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and civil rights struggles. Using the original concept of 'elsewhere', the author maps the sources of Kgositsile's transformative verse, which in turn generated 'poetics of possibility' for his contemporaries in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and beyond - among them Maya Angelou, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tom Dent, members of The Last Poets, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and rapper Earl Sweatshirt - who all looked to his work to model their identities, cultural movements and radical traditions.

Cover image for Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement, isbn: 9781847014672

The Lands of a Medieval Devon Nunnery: the Extents of Canonsleigh Abbey

$39.95

Translates the medieval land records of Canonsleigh Abbey in East Devon, offering a window into agriculture and daily life in medieval England.

This book publishes the fourteenth-century survey of the lands of a medieval nunnery. The records describe the landscape, crops, tenants, and labour services performed by ordinary men and women that supported the abbey, across its lands in Devon, Essex (including the town of Manningtree) and Suffolk. With a substantial introduction by the editor, it offers a window into the abbey's finances, agriculture, and daily life in the late Middle Ages, showing how the abbey withstood a period of agricultural and climatic crisis.

The book makes these vivid Latin records accessible to readers interested in the history of medieval peasants, farming, and religious houses, as well as the local history and landscape of Devon and of the abbey's Essex and Suffolk manors.

Cover image for The Lands of a Medieval Devon Nunnery: the Extents of Canonsleigh Abbey, isbn: 9780901853653

British Choral Singing

$45.95

Charts choral traditions in Britain, evolution, sociological composition, engagement with and place within cathedrals and secular spaces.

Choirs are living organisms and ever changing. This book tells the story of British choral singing (not choral music) and deals with both sacred and secular choirs and institutions from the medieval era through to the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. A series of different choral traditions has emerged over the centuries. The oldest is that of the all-male cathedral choir, while the secular choral society evolved from the eighteenth century onwards. Although there are many histories of individual cathedrals and choral societies, this is the first general history of British choral traditions. While English matters predominate, those of Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also considered. Even though British choral traditions have penetrated many parts of the world, there has also been much cross-fertilization of late with the rich choral cultures of other nations in Europe and beyond. Choral singing inevitably involved matters of social class, and a much more nuanced story is told here than the current view of choirs as being a largely middle-class phenomenon might suggest.

Scholarly in method while highly readable, the book offers invaluable background to choral practitioners. When choral activity is reviving healthily after the Covid 19 pandemic, such a volume appears timely, reminding the reader of the essentially communal and social nature of the choral experience.

Cover image for British Choral Singing, isbn: 9781837653195

Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion

$34.99

Examines the career and message paintings of the feminist conceptual artist Jiny Lan, analyzing a cross-section of works that invite literary, historical, socio-political and transcultural interpretations.

Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective "Bald Girls," she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. "Subversion" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related "sub-versions" of her own paintings.

As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Cover image for Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion, isbn: 9781640142916

Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain

$36.95

Studies the development and impact of Hanns Eisler's music and Marxist activism in the tensions of 1930s Spain, revealing the interplay of varied influences, ideology and antifascist propaganda.

Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain is the first comprehensive study to explore the political, artistic, and intellectual engagements of Hanns Eisler and his circle of Marxist musicians - including the singer Ernst Busch and the musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra - in relation to Spain between 1931 and 1939. The book reconstructs Eisler's collaborations with a broad range of Spanish antifascist organisations, examines the reception of his compositional and theoretical work in Republican Spain, and assesses the deep impact of the Spanish civil war on his vocal and symphonic music. It highlights the influence of key local, national, and international communist structures - notably the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and the Comintern (Third International) - on the musical and political projects of Eisler and his circle.
Grounded in detailed analysis of an extensive corpus of textual, musical, and press materials - primarily preserved in archives in Spain, Germany, Russia, France, and the United States - this study offers new critical frameworks for understanding the role of Western modernist music in contexts of ideological conflict and war. It provides a fresh perspective on the complex entanglements between antifascist propaganda and musical modernism in the interwar period. Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain makes a vital contribution to scholarship at the intersection of music, exile, propaganda, communism, and antifascism, and more broadly, to the study of how political ideologies shaped music, aesthetics, and musical thought across national boundaries during a pivotal era in twentieth-century European history.

On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.

Cover image for Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain, isbn: 9781837653188

The War Within

$36.95

A fresh analysis of the post-colonial war in Mozambique that contributes to debates about conflict, peacebuilding, development and nationalism and offers insights into the nature of contemporary politics and the current conflict.

The 1976-1992 civil war which opposed the Government of Frelimo and the Renamo guerrillas (among other actors) is a central event in the history of Mozambique. Aiming to open up a new era of studies of the war, this book re-evaluates this period from a number of different local perspectives in an attempt to better understand the history, complexity and multiple dynamics of the armed conflict. Focusing at local level on either a province or a single village, the authors analyse the conflict as a "total social phenomena" involving all elements of society and impacting on every aspect of life across the country. The chapters examine Frelimo and Renamo as well as private, popular and state militias, the Catholic Church, NGOs and traders. Drawing on previously unexamined sources such as local and provincial state archives, religious archives, the guerrilla's own documentation and interviews, the authors uncoveralternative dimensions of the civil war. The book thus enables a deeper understanding of the conflict and its actors as well as offering an explanatory framework for understanding peacemaking, the nature of contemporary politics,and the current conflict in the country.

Eric Morier-Genoud is a Lecturer in African history at Queen's University Belfast; Domingos Manuel do Rosário is Lecturer in electoral sociology and electoral governance at Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique; Michel Cahen is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Bordeaux Political Studies Institute and at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid.

Cover image for The War Within, isbn: 9781847011817

Erik Satie

$29.95

Satie's music and ideas are inextricably linked with the City of Light. This book situates Satie's work within the context and sonic environment of contemporary Paris.

Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year

Erik Satie's (1866-1925) music appeals to wide audiences and has influenced both experimental artists and pop musicians. Little about Satie was conventional, and he resists classification under easy headings such as "classical music". Instead of pursuing the path of a professional composer, Satie initially earned a living as a café pianist and moved in bohemian circles which prized satire, popular culture and experiment. Small wonder that his music is fundamentally new in conception. It is music which is not always designed to be listened to attentively: music which can be machine-like but is to be played by humans. For Satie, music was part of a wider concept of artistic creation, as evidenced by his collaborations with leading avant-garde artists and in works which cross traditional genre boundaries such as his texted piano pieces. His music was created in some of the most exciting and creatively stimulating environments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Montmartre and Montparnasse. Paris was the artistic centre of Europe, and Satie was a notorious figure whose music and ideas are inextricably linked with the City of Light. This book situates Satie's work within the context and sonic environment of contemporary Paris. It shows that the influence of street music, musicians and poets interested in new technology, contemporary innovations and radical politics are all crucial to an understanding of Satie. Music from the ever-popular Gymnopédies to newly discovered works are discussed, and an online supplement features rare pieces recorded especially for the book.

Cover image for Erik Satie, isbn: 9781837653201

Charles Bridgeman (c.1685-1738)

$36.95

An examination of the garden plans of eighteenth-century landscape architect Charles Bridgeman, shedding light on his artistic vision and contributions to English garden history.

Charles Bridgeman was a popular and highly successful landscape architect in the first part of the eighteenth century. He was Royal Gardener to George I and George II, designing the gardens at Kensington Palace for them and working for many of the ruling Whig elite, including Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. His landscapes were audacious and monumental, but he is barely known outside the world of academic garden history; most of his gardens have disappeared, changed out of all recognition to chime with later tastes shaped by Lancelot Brown's vision of a more "natural" landscape, or buried under housing developments and golf courses; and there is little archaeological or written evidence of his work.

This book aims to redress this injustice and rescue his legacy. It draws on the only significant body of evidence which survived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.

Cover image for Charles Bridgeman (c.1685-1738), isbn: 9781837651337

The Philosopher’s Ring—Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist

$24.95

Presents Wagner as a serious philosopher and offers a fresh perspective on the Ring and its unique fusion of myth, human drama, and philosophical insight.

Few figures of the nineteenth century were more influential than Richard Wagner, and few works of art have the scope and historical significance of The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner himself said that it expressed his entire philosophy of life. Yet little attention has been paid to him as a philosopher, aesthetic theories aside. Instead, the Ring has been viewed in the light of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or even Hegel. Wagner's own ideas do not deserve this neglect, and this book addresses that omission. It starts with the more widely read philosophers of his day, such as Fichte; in their context Wagner's often fragmentary thoughts reveal a coherent "materialist idealism" that constitutes a late but significant contribution to Classical German philosophy. His acute social and psychological insights are still relevant, and so is the philosophical history that he saw prefigured in Greek tragedy.

Wagner's philosophy also illuminates the structure of the Ring and offers fresh insights into the characters and conflicts of that endlessly interpretable work. Approachable and engagingly written, balancing narrative, philosophical analysis, and a detailed consideration of the Ring's four music dramas, The Philosopher's Ring shows the cycle to be a work of unparalleled philosophical depth, one reason that it continues to challenge audiences even now, a century and a half after its premiere.

Cover image for The Philosopher’s Ring—Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist, isbn: 9781640142466

Old English Biblical Prose

$36.95

Provides the first in-depth study of the earliest attempts to make the sacred words of the Bible available to English readers, clerical and lay, in prose writing.

"This is a hugely valuable study - deeply informative about an important tradition of biblical translation from the early medieval period, bringing together material that has previously been considered in isolation, and drawing out a big-picture account of the ebb and flow of biblical translations into the vernacular. Will be a useful point of reference for any interested reader and includes surprises and delights for even the most specialist readers." Professor Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa

The story of the English Bible begins not with the King James Version or Wycliffe but in the Old English period. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, a remarkably diverse corpus of biblical translations, paraphrases, adaptations and summaries were produced in Old English. Yet while Old English biblical verse has been extensively studied, the much larger corpus of vernacular biblical prose remains neglected by historians of the Bible and medievalists.

This book provides the first in-depth study of the genre. Dispelling the notion that access to the Bible was restricted to the Latinate clergy in the early medieval period, it demonstrates how Old English biblical prose made key elements of Scripture available and meaningful to laypeople. Through case studies of the Prose Psalms, Mosaic Prologue to the Domboc, Wessex Gospels, Heptateuch and Treatise on the Old and New Testaments, as well as many other works, it highlights the crucial contributions of well-known figures such as King Alfred and Ælfric of Eynsham while also showcasing the work of anonymous authors who translated, adapted and interpreted the Bible, sometimes in creative and surprising ways. Cumulatively, these case studies show how vernacular biblical prose played a central role in the emergence of English national identity before the Norman Conquest.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.

Cover image for Old English Biblical Prose, isbn: 9781843847618

The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 50

$80.00

The Brecht Yearbook, published by Camden House on behalf of the International Brecht Society, is the central scholarly forum for the study of Brecht's life and work and of topics relevant to him.

Embracing a variety of perspectives and approaches, the yearbook is committed to the concept of the use-value of literature, art, performance, and theory in a global context. Volume 50 begins with a conversation about the first major collection of interviews with Brecht and a chronicle of the publication history of the 30-volume edition of Brecht's works. The contributions featuring new research cover a wide range of topics related to Brecht, including his use of "pastology," racialization in his early plays, the 1932 production of The Mother as a campaign against Nazi misogyny, the first English-language productions of Señora Carrar's Rifles in 1938, and an unrealized African-American production of The Threepenny Opera in the early 1940s. This section also includes articles about the Brecht circle involved in the French chanson of the 1930s, the first French translation of the Short Organon for the Theatre in 1955, Brechtian aspects of Navid Kermani's interreligious dialogues, Mark Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism," and the connection of Brecht's ideas to a pedagogy of revolution.

Edited by Elena Pnevmonidou and Markus Wessendorf. Book reviews edited by Noah Willumsen. Contributors: Martin Brady, Robert Cohen, Laura Ginters, Helen Hughes, Torben Ibs, Liam Johnston-McCondach, Sabrina Kanthak, Sabine Kebir, Jan Knopf, Sean Larson, Jakob Ribič, Hanife Schulte, Vera Stegmann, and Noah Willumsen.

Cover image for The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 50, isbn: 9781640141995

Vox Clamantis by John Gower: "The Voice of One Crying"

$36.95

The first English translation into verse of the full Vox Clamantis, with explanatory notes.

John Gower's Vox Clamantis is one of the major poetic achievements of the Middle Ages. Its subject matter ranges from his dream-vision account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to sharp critiques of the clergy, merchants, and lawyers, all with the intention of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides: history, Scripture and nature are replete with auguries sent by God to guide rulers if they but learn to read them. Ultimately for Gower, rulers - and we ourselves - are responsible for our own choices, for good or ill.

This line-by-line translation from the original Latin into Modern English is intended for a wide audience, and to be easily readable by scholars and non-scholars alike. It replicates Gower's Latin meter as closely as possible in English, uses straightforward language, and clarifies many difficult points of medieval legal theory, Classical allusion, and theological interpretation heretofore left unexplained in any previous attempts, full or partial, to translate the poem. Extensive notes trace Gower's sources, from Ovid to Peter Riga's Aurora to Alexander Nequam's De Naturis rerum to Nigel Wireker's Speculum Stultorum and the Bible, among many others. Classical and Biblical allusions are identified and fully but succinctly explained. This book also includes the "Letter to Arundel", translated in verse for the first time.

Cover image for <i>Vox Clamantis</i> by John Gower: "The Voice of One Crying", isbn: 9781843847557

Localizing Christopher Marlowe

$49.95

This study punctures the stereotyped portrayals of Marlowe, first created by his rival Robert Greene, and, yet, which still colour our view. In doing so, Ide reveals the social and cultural discourses out of which such myths emerged.

We know next to nothing about the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe (b.1564 - d. 1593). Few documents survive other than his birth record in the parish register, a handful of legal cases in court records, Privy Council mandates and reports to the Council, the coroner's examination of his death, and a few hearsay accounts of his atheism. With such a limited collection of biographical documents available, it is impossible to retrieve from history a complete sense of Marlowe. However, this does not mean that biography cannot play a significant role in Marlowe studies.

By observing the details of the specific places and communities to which Marlowe belonged, this book highlights the collective experiences and concerns of the social groups and communities with which we know he was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.

Cover image for Localizing Christopher Marlowe, isbn: 9781843847533

The Karl Muck Scandal

$49.95

The demonization, internment, and deportation of celebrated Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Dr. Karl Muck, finally told, and placed in the context of World War I anti-German sentiment in the United States.

BEST CLASSICAL MUSIC BOOK RELEASE OF 2019 by Classical-music.com, the official website of BBC Music Magazine.

2019 SUMMER READS ABOUT CLASSICAL MUSIC by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

2019 BEST BOOK AWARD FINALIST in both the History and Performing Arts categories, sponsored by American Book Fest.

2019 SUBVENTION AWARD by the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

One of the cherished narratives of American history is that of the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to its shores. Accounts of the exclusion and exploitation of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century and Japanese internment during World War II tell a darker story of American immigration. Less well-known, however, is the treatment of German-Americans and Germannationals in the United States during World War I. Initially accepted and even welcomed into American society at the outbreak of war, this group would face rampant intolerance and anti-German hysteria.

Melissa D. Burrage's book illustrates this dramatic shift in attitude in her engrossing narrative of Dr. Karl Muck, the celebrated German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who was targeted and ultimately disgraced by a New York Philharmonic board member and by capitalists from that city who used his private sexual life as a basis for having him arrested, interned, and deported from the United States. While the campaign against Muck made national headlines, and is the main focus of this book, Burrage also illuminates broader national topics such as: Total War; State power; vigilante justice; internment and deportation; irresponsible journalism; sexual surveillance; attitudes toward immigration; anti-Semitism; and the development of America's musical institutions. The mistreatment of Karl Muck in the United States provides a narrative thread that connects these various wartime and postwar themes.

Cover image for The Karl Muck Scandal, isbn: 9781648251283

The Townscape of Darlington

$39.95

Darlington from Anglo-Saxon settlement to thriving town, via the middle ages and the coming of the railway.

It is exactly a thousand years since Darlington first appeared in written records. During the following millennium, the small Anglo-Saxon settlement grew into today's thriving town, its history now generally linked in the public mind with entrepreneurial Quakers and the birth of railways. But as this book shows, Darlington's history encompasses many more diverse aspects in the change from medieval village to modern town. Through a survey of its physical development, the book describes how the town flourished in the middle ages; was largely destroyed by fire in 1585; and grew again in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the coming of the railway in the mid-1800s reinforced its prosperity. Its story is taken up to the present day, showing how Darlington is characterised by residential suburbs, with a town centre where Victorian and eighteenth-century buildings populate the original medieval streets.
Dr GILL COOKSON is the County Editor for the Victoria County History of Durham.

Cover image for The Townscape of Darlington, isbn: 9781904356219

ALT 42: Oral and Written African Poetry and Poetics

$36.95

Examines the state of African poetry today, the continuing influence of Africa's pioneer poets, today's new generation and their work in written poetry and in spoken word, continuing oral indigenous traditions.

Almost half a century after ALT 6 and thirty-three years after ALT 16, what is the state of poetry and poetics in Africa? This volume of ALT highlights major developments and continuities in the practice of the art of poetry in the continent. Contributions analyse new frontiers in the traditional African epic and the Yoruba oríkì genre and innovations in form and theme, such as 'spoken word poetry' shared on digital media and pandemic poetry in the wake of COVID-19. They compare and contrast the work of Romeo Oriogun, Christopher Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara and of T.S. Eliot and Kofi Anyidoho. Other essays examine the complexities of translation from Ewe into English and the development of oral African poetry, underscoring its dynamism and the centrality of performance. The volume also includes interviews with poets Kofi Anyidoho, Kwame Dawes, and Kehinde Akano and tributes to Ama Ata Aidoo. Altogether, it highlights the richness and vibrancy of contemporary praxis and points to future directions in the field.

Cover image for ALT 42: Oral and Written African Poetry and Poetics, isbn: 9781847014153

Russian Faith, Honour, & Courage Displayed in a Faithfull Narrative of the Russian Expedition by Sea (1769 & 1770)

$75.00

Captain John Elphinstone's first-hand account of serving the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in the Russian navy during the Russian-Ottoman war and at the famous Battle of Çeşme.

Russian Faith, Honour & Courage Displayed in a Faithfull Narrative of the Russian Expedition by Sea in the Years 1769 & 1770 is British Captain John Elphinstone's four-volume account of his two years in the Russian navy, serving the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. The Faithfull Narrative contains descriptions of his voyage from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, movements through the Aegean Sea, and commentary on the activities of the Imperial Russian Navy during the Russian-Ottoman War of 1768-74. Elphinstone offers one of the few first-hand accounts of the expedition and the celebrated Battle of Chesme (1770), which gave the Russian empire its maritime credentials. The text covers the squadron's movements around the Aegean Sea, including the major events and incidents of 1770: the Battle of Chesme, the siege of Lemnos, the loss of Elphinstone's flagship, Sviatoslav. The final part of the text sees Elphinstone return to St Petersburg in 1771 and then to London at the end of that year, to deal with the repercussions of the voyage to the Mediterranean.

Cover image for Russian Faith, Honour, & Courage Displayed in a Faithfull Narrative of the Russian Expedition by Sea (1769 & 1770), isbn: 9781916931046

Masquerades in African Society

$39.95

Explores the dynamics of African masquerades and mask performances on the continent, linking performative expressions to societal characteristics.

What is the meaning of masks and masquerades in African traditions and how can we understand their role in rituals and performances? Why do we find masks in some African regions and not in others, and what does this 'mask habitat' say about the general dynamics of masquerades in Africa? Though masks are among the most famous art icons of Africa, exploration of their uses and the way in which they articulate social characteristics of African societies has been underexamined. This book takes an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of masquerades on the African continent to show how mask rituals are an integral part of African indigenous religions and societies, and are informed by and linked to specific types of social and ecological conditions. Having established the commonalities of mask rituals and a mask typology, the authors look at the varieties of mask performances and the types of rituals in which masks function in rites of passage and in rituals of gender, power, and identity. The following chapters focus on different types of rituals featuring masks, from initiation and death ceremonies to secrecy, kingship, law and war. With its broad examination of the use of masks on the continent, from Angola to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, DRC, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, this well illustrated book will stand as an authoritative study of the use of masks, of interest not only to those in African Studies but to anthropologists and ethnographers worldwide.

Cover image for Masquerades in African Society, isbn: 9781847013880

The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens

$29.99

First translation into English of key chronicle for events of the Albigensian Crusade and the attack on heresy, including the siege of the Cathar stronghold, Montsegur.

The Albigensian Crusade, which forms the main subject of William of Puylaurens' Chronicle, was a defining episode in the history of France. Launched in 1209 by Pope Innocent III, it was directed against the aristocracy of southern France (especially the Counts of Toulouse) who were accused of protecting heresy, and especially Catharism, a dualist heresy which represented a major threat to the Catholic Church. The Crusade ended in 1229 with the defeat of Count Raymond VII of Toulouse. It was followed in the 1230s by the establishment of the Papal Inquisition against heresy. The long-term outcome of the Crusade was the defeat of Catharism, and the establishment of French Royal power in the region.

William of Puylaurens' Chronicle, here translated into English for the first time, is one of the main contemporary accounts of these events. It describes heresy in the south of France in the early 13th century; provides a narrative of the Crusade; and then outlines the growth of the Inquisition and the sustained attack on heresy which followed, including the siege of the Cathar fortress of Montségur in 1243-44. This translation is accompanied by an introduction, full notes, appendices, and a bibliography.

Cover image for The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens, isbn: 9781837653157

The Piano in Beethoven’s Chamber Music

$59.95

Donat's vast expertise provides unique insight into the history and genesis of key works in the chamber music repertoire.

This is the first full-length study in English of an important area of Beethoven's output that has seldom been explored in detail. The principal compositions covered are the violin sonatas, cello sonatas and piano trios of the composer's maturity, ranging chronologically from the three piano trios op.1, to the two cello sonatas op.102 which stand on the threshold of his last period. The repertoire includes some of Beethoven's most famous chamber pieces, among them the 'Spring' and 'Kreutzer' violin sonatas, and the 'Ghost' and 'Archduke' piano trios.

The works are analysed in detail with the help of copious music examples, and are placed in their historical context through extracts from letters and contemporary reviews. The book provides performers, music students and music lovers with an insight into the history and genesis of some of the greatest works in the chamber music repertoire.

Cover image for The Piano in Beethoven’s Chamber Music, isbn: 9781837652198

Democracy and Nigeria’s Fourth Republic

$59.95

Examines Nigeria's challenges with consolidating democracy and the crisis of governance arising from structural errors of the state and the fundamental contradictions of society in Nigeria's Fourth Republic.

'Today we are taking a decisive step on the path of democracy,' the newly sworn-in President Olusegun Obasanjo told Nigerians on 27 May 1999. 'We will leave no stone unturned to ensure sustenance of democracy, because it is good for us, it is good for Africa, and it is good for the world.' Nigeria's Fourth Republic has survived longer than any of the previous three Republics, the most durable Republic in Nigeria's more than six decades of independence. At the same time, however, the country has witnessed sustained periods of violence, including violent clashes over the imposition of Sharia'h laws, insurgency in the Niger Delta, inter-ethnic clashes, and the Boko Haram insurgency. Despite these tensions of, and anxieties about, democratic viability and stability in Nigeria, has democratic rule come to stay in Africa's most populous country? Are the overall conditions of Nigerian politics, economy and socio-cultural dynamics now permanently amenable to uninterrupted democratic rule? Have all the social forces which, in the past, pressed Nigeria towards military intervention and autocratic rule resolved themselves in favour of unbroken representative government? If so, what are the factors and forces that produced this compromise and how can Nigeria's shallow democracy be sustained, deepened and strengthened? This book attempts to address these questions by exploring the various dimensions of Nigeria's Fourth Republic in a bid to understand the tensions and stresses of democratic rule in a deeply divided major African state. The contributors engage in comparative analysis of the political, economic, social challenges that Nigeria has faced in the more than two decades of the Fourth Republic and the ways in which these were resolved - or left unresolved - in a bid to ensure the survival of democratic rule. This key book that examines both the quality of Nigeria's democratic state and its international relations, and issues such as human rights and the peace infrastructure, will be invaluable in increasing our understanding of contemporary democratic experiences in the neo-liberal era in Africa.

Cover image for Democracy and Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, isbn: 9781847013798

Women and Monastic Reform in the Medieval West, c. 1000 – 1500

$38.95

New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed.

Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding the gendered nature of religious reform are ripe for further examination.

This book brings together innovative research from a range of disciplines to re-evaluate and enlarge our knowledge of women's involvement in spiritual and institutional change in female monastic communities over the period c. 1000 - c. 1500. Contributors revise conventional narratives about women and monastic reform, and earlier assumptions of reform as negative or irrelevant for women. Drawing on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources, it presents "snapshots" of reform from western Europe, stretching from Ireland to Iberia. Case-studies focussing on a number of different topics, from tenth-century female saints' lives to fifteenth-century liturgical books, from the tenth-century Leominster prayerbook to archaeological remains in Ireland, from embroideries and tapestries to the rebellious nuns of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, offer a critical reappraisal of how monastic women (and their male associates) reflected, individually and collectively, on their spiritual ideals and institutional forms.

Cover image for Women and Monastic Reform in the Medieval West, c. 1000 – 1500, isbn: 9781837652846

Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s – 1960s

$36.95

Groundbreaking examination of literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century.

WINNER: 2025 African Literature Association Book of the Year - Scholarship
WINNER: 2024 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize

From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in 'British West Africa' carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing - from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters - and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as 'Onitsha market literature', and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships. She shows how local print cultures permeated African literary production, charting changes in literary tastes and transformations to genres and styles, as they absorbed elements of globally circulating English texts into formats for local consumption. Offering fresh trajectories for thinking about local and transnational African literary networks while remaining attuned to local textual cultures in contexts of colonial power relations, anticolonial nationalism, the Cold War and global circuits of cultural exchange, this important book reveals new insights into ephemeral literature as significant sites of literary production, and contributes to filling a gap in scholarship on colonial West Africa.

Cover image for Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s – 1960s, isbn: 9781847013835

Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640

$37.95

A lively exploration of the medieval and early modern attitudes towards dance, as the perception of dancers changed from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil.

The devil's cows, impudent camels, or damsels animated by the devil: late medieval and early modern authors used these descriptors and more to talk about dancers, particularly women. Yet, dance was not always considered entirely sinful or connected primarily to women: in some early medieval texts, dancers were exhorted to dance to God, arm-in-arm with their neighbors, and parishes were filled with danced expressions of faith. What led to the transformation of dancers from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil?

Drawing on the evidence from medieval and early modern sermons, and in particular the narratives of the cursed carolers and the dance of Salome, this book explores these changing understandings of dance as they relate to religion, gender, sin, and community within the English parish. In parishes both before and during the English Reformations, dance played an integral role in creating, maintaining, uniting, or fracturing community. But as theological understandings of sacrilege, sin, and proper worship changed, the meanings of dance and gender shifted as well. Redefining dance had tangible ramifications for the men and women of the parish, as new definitions of what it meant to perform one's gender collided with discourses about holiness and transgression, leading to closer scrutiny and monitoring of the bodies of the faithful.

Cover image for Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640, isbn: 9781837652839

The Book of Sent Soví

$29.95

The oldest Catalan cookery book.

The Book of Sent Soví, composed around the middle of the fourteenth century, is the oldest surviving culinary text in Catalan. It is anonymous and, like the majority of medieval cookery books, is the product of a complex process of transmission, with multiple manuscript copies and readers who have left their mark on it. The contents are eminently practical. Successive cooks have recorded their own methods of preparing the dishes and recipes included, blending several culinary traditions in a single work. Sent Soví is also a reliable source of information on the cookery of the territories of the Crown of Aragon before the revolution caused by the arrival of products from the Americas.
This edition includes both an English translation, by Robin Vogelzang, and the original Catalan version. It has been the editor's aim to clarify the difficult passages in the book - sometimes corrupted because of the complex manuscript tradition - so that it can be understood as easily as possible by its twenty-first-century readers.

JOAN SANTANACH lectures on medieval literature at the University of Barcelona.

Published in association with Editorial Barcino.

Cover image for The Book of Sent Soví, isbn: 9781855661646

The Kenyan Cut Flower Industry & Global Market Dynamics

$29.99

Investigates the production, trade and consumption of the bouquets sold in European supermarkets and the consequences of this for the globalised economy.

From a macro-perspective, it appears that the cut flower industry has changed into a buyer-driven value chain with corporate retailers as the new lead firms. Yet, as this book shows, this is insufficient to explain how new trade relations come into being, and the consequences of this, not only for global economics, but for the producers, climate change and rural livelihoods. As the retailers and wholesalers of the flower industry in the West linked directly to producers in the Global South, trade relations changed fundamentally, and this critical new book explores the complexities of the power asymmetries and the way in which corporate retailers have shaped the market to promote their own interests, as well as the role non-economic actors played.
This book examines in detail the situation at Lake Naivasha, Kenya, which has played a central part within this new market order. Since the 1970s, the area has developed into one of the most important production areas for the ready-made bouquets that sell so cheaply in European supermarkets. For the flower growers themselves, however, coping with the new conditions of supply and demand, the new market order has brought financial precariousness. Farms needed to be flexible in the production and marketing of their flowers. Yet while they were able to expand their production and achieve more stable employment conditions, this has not resulted in significantly higher remuneration. The rapidly changing economic situation has also had a profound impact, not only on local stakeholders, but on the environment, where there is intensified competition for resources and new production technologies.

Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).

Cover image for The Kenyan Cut Flower Industry & Global Market Dynamics, isbn: 9781847014641

Classical Architecture

$60.00

Celebration of the classical architectural tradition, spanning 2500 years but widely practised today. Professionals, students and enthusiasts will benefit from the profuse illustrations, including detailed line drawings, demonstrating this rich tradition and its prevailing themes and motifs.

Classical architecture continues to be widely practised today, and this book describes and demonstrates the fundamental principles from its origins in Antiquity and continuous development during the Renaissance, the Baroque and Rococo phases, Neo-Classicism, and survival in various forms into the current century. Heavily illustrated with colour and black and white photography, a particular strength of the book is the many detailed and annotated line drawings for which the author is well-known and a glossary which serves as a dictionary of Classical architecture in itself.
The author celebrates the richness of Classical architectural vocabulary, grammar and language, and demonstrates the huge range of themes and motifs found in the subject. The book provides a basis for understanding this rich source of architectural design which has been at the core of Western culture for over 2500 years and continues to be widely studied and practised worldwide. For practicing architects, planners and students, this is the benchmark book for understanding the Classical tradition in architecture and landscape.

Cover image for Classical Architecture, isbn: 9781739822958

Machado de Assis

$37.95

A lively and accessible introduction to Machado de Assis and his work

Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is a world-class writer and arguably the greatest of Brazilian literature. Susan Sontag deemed him "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America," and Harold Bloom, "the supreme black literary artist to date." John Updike called him a "master," and Carlos Fuentes, a "miracle." This book guides the reader through Machado's biography, times, and critical reception and examines his various personas - the translator, poet, playwright, critic, cronista, short story writer, and novelist - paying particular attention to his fictional prose, which most clearly conveys his acerbic criticism of Brazilian society and his deft view of the human condition. The book closes with an updated list of Machado's works available in English translation and a selection of further critical studies.

Cover image for Machado de Assis, isbn: 9781855664210

María Félix

$36.95

María Félix (1914-2002) left her mark on Mexican and European film as well as fashion, art and jewellery design. Cartier created one-of-a-kind pieces; Leonora Carrington and Diego Rivera painted portraits; Carlos Fuentes wrote a play; Agustín Lara, a bestselling song. But she was nobody's muse.

Did Félix really bring baby crocodiles to the Cartier boutique to request lifelike copies in a necklace? The story may be apocryphal, but it perfectly encapsulates her powerful, independent and unconventional persona. This book first examines Félix's life and work, reviewing her films and acting style and considering what they say about gender norms and a woman's place on screen. It then turns to her role as curator and benefactor, exploring how art, literature and song sustained her image. It concludes by exploring the persistent interest in her life story and evaluating her significance for contemporary audiences.

Cover image for María Félix, isbn: 9781855664234

María de Zayas and her Tales of Desire, Death and Disillusion

$36.95

Who doubts, my reader, that you will be amazed that a woman has the audacity not only to write a book, but to send it for printing, which is the crucible in which the purity of genius is tested'?

A pioneer of early modern feminism, María de Zayas y Sotomayor wrote poetry, drama and prose but is best known for two page-turning collections of short stories: Exemplary Tales of Love (1637) and Tales of Disillusion (1647). This book provides an engaging introduction to Zayas and her work. It begins by relating what we know of her life, placing her in her socio-political and economic context and addressing the issue of women's literacy. Following chapters examine her use of sexual desire, violence and humour in her tales; her narrative structures; and her oral style. The book then turns to identity construction in her tales and in society, analysing questions of gender, class, family and 'race', and to her treatment of religion, magic and the supernatural. The final chapters explore Zayas's status as a proto-feminist; her early modern reception in Spain and elsewhere; and various critical readings of her work.

Cover image for María de Zayas and her Tales of Desire, Death and Disillusion, isbn: 9781855664227

Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century

$36.95

This collection offers students a practical guide to understanding the ways music and literature intersect and the influence of each on the other, as well as developing methods of study.

This is the first coursebook to help students explore the many types of relationship that exist between music and literature when studied in historical or aesthetic contexts. It fosters interdisciplinary study among students in these subject areas and helps to break down the barrier of music as seeming "impenetrable" to students outside musicology. Chapters each discuss music/text relationships via an important social, aesthetic or cultural theme that maps onto key preoccupations of the long nineteenth century.

Each chapter presents a case-study text first, followed by a short summary that sets out the challenges of approach and interpretation involved. A section on background then places the featured case-study in historical or aesthetic context, leading to a detailed discussion. The book offers a learning experience combining the methodological in music/text relationships with the substantive or thematic.

Contributors: Charlotte Bentley, Philip Burnett, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Elicia Clements, Jeremy Coleman, Sarah Collins, Katharine Ellis, Daniel M. Grimley, Elizabeth Helsinger, Fraser Riddell, Emma Sutton, Shafquat Towheed, Phyllis Weliver, Christopher Wiley

Cover image for Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, isbn: 9781837651849

Interpreting Court Song in Uganda

$37.95

A critical interpretation of essential Kiganda royal court songs that examines how the meanings of their lyrics enter into dynamic dialogue with contemporary national politics in Uganda.

Lyric interpretation, which Damascus Kafumbe defines as a process of creative renewal that infuses vitality into songs, enables interpreters and analysts to derive a multiplicity of meanings from songs instead of being limited to a single literal narrative. As he and his research collaborators demonstrate, the process extends the life of a song by allowing it to generate new versions, meanings, and relevance. Kafumbe examines how lyric interpretation serves to renew the lives of twenty-one songs from the repertoires of royal court musicians of the Kingdom of Buganda, arguing that the meanings of these songs are not singular, static, and monolithic but rather dynamic and multivalent.
Through extensive research within past and present contexts, Kafumbe presents a series of unique perspectives on the ways Kiganda court songs reflect varied kinds of power relations. These meanings, which surface via lyric interpretation, come from daily interactions among citizens and between leaders and subjects. This interpretive process helps illuminate truths and clarify myths about the power dynamics that shape political life in present-day Uganda, highlighting the relevance of court song lyrics to contemporary national contexts. By engaging with the book's wide range of voices, readers will learn to appreciate these songs, their historical and contemporary contexts, and their composer-performers' stories and interpretations more fully.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Cover image for Interpreting Court Song in Uganda, isbn: 9781648250484

Medieval English Theatre 46

$49.95

Newest research into drama and performance from the Middle Ages and the Tudor period.

Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic religious plays, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays.

This volume is testament to the lively range of current research across the field of medieval theatre. It investigates different traditions of performance, through a variety of theatrical, theological, and material approaches. It opens with an analysis of a fascinating Dutch rhetoricians play-text, revealing how its engagingly disruptive female character, "Everyday Chitchat", proves central to a serious discussion of censorship - in a play which was itself censored. Although no play-text survives from medieval Beverley, the next contribution shows how local records of its Corpus Christi plays offer rich details of a range of pageants and organisation not dissimilar from its more famous neighbour, York. The two following articles investigate theological issues. A nuanced re-reading of The Treatise of Miracles Playing considers how priestly involvement in performance raised anxieties about the role and authority of priests, including at the Mass. Attitudes to "dread", revealed through the taxonomies of fear developed by medieval theologians, then illuminate the didactic role of fear, engendered in the protagonists and audiences of the Macro morality plays. The volume closes with the second part of an investigation into "John Blanke's Hat". Following the first part's demonstration, in the previous volume of METh, that the Black trumpeter's headgear was not a marker of his faith, this uncovers the true identity of the hat, asking how far it can offer evidence for his history. The present volume thus throws new light on familiar texts and questions, offering important contributions to newly developing fields of study.

Cover image for Medieval English Theatre 46, isbn: 9781843847519

Performing Arts and Gender in Postcolonial Western Uganda

$38.95

Focusing on runyege, the main traditional performance genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, this book explores the entanglement of traditional music, dance, and theater with gender and postcolonialism in Western Uganda.

Drawing on archival research and extensive fieldwork in the regions of Bunyoro and Tooro, Linda Cimardi examines the connection between traditional performing arts and gender in western Uganda. The book focuses on runyege, the main genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, exploring its different components of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and acting and identifying their complex relationships to gender models and expressions. Today mainly performed at Ugandan school festivals and by semiprofessional ensembles, repertoires like runyege adhere to stage conventions that have developed over several decades. Some of these conventions are powerful devices allowing the actors involved (performers, teachers, students, adjudicators, and audiences) to collectively shape an image of local culture grounded in a gender binary that is perceived as traditional. At the same time, stage conventions are exploited by some performers to negotiate their gender identities and expressions in unconventional ways, thus challenging hegemonic gender models. Moving between analysis of historical recordings, oral accounts, and present-day fieldwork data and experiences, the book engages in a comprehensive analysis of the postcolonial entanglement of arts and gender.

Audio and video recordings presented in the book can be accessed on the book's companion website, http://hdl.handle.net/1802/37373.

Cover image for Performing Arts and Gender in Postcolonial Western Uganda, isbn: 9781648250729

Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper

$36.95

An interdisciplinary approach to medical history that shows the key role that drawings and photographs had in shaping the material, professional, emotional and aesthetic parameters of plastic surgery.

Plastic surgery in twentieth-century Britain was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper examines these archives, focusing in particular on the works on paper held within these collections by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. Plastic surgeons depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field and their surgical practice.

In addition to telling an art history of plastic surgery during this period, Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper engages with the affective parameters of archival objects, and with what working as a historian involves when done within potentially traumatic spaces. Paying particular attention to the emotional dimensions and effects of this visual culture and the ways in which it is archived and framed by the discipline of plastic surgery - then and now - Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper explores not only what it meant to make art in a surgical space but also what it means to study these affecting paper objects in the archive today.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Cover image for Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper, isbn: 9781648251207

A Reader's Guide to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

$24.95

Provides the English-speaking reader with the tools needed to appreciate Thomas Mann's most ambitious novel, one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, now timely once again.

In 1938, the great German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann emigrated to the United States. There, he became a figurehead for the intellectual opposition to Nazism, giving more than 150 public lectures and recording more than fifty anti-Nazi radio addresses that the BBC broadcast into Germany. His political activities also left a profound mark on his fiction, most importantly on the 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Ostensibly the biography of a fictional modern composer, Doctor Faustus also serves as a post-mortem of Nazism and a reckoning with five centuries of cultural history that led to dazzling heights but failed to prevent Germany's ultimate fall.

Doctor Faustus is an astonishingly complex novel, both because of the range of its intellectual references and because of its stylistic inventiveness, which has provoked comparisons with Joyce. And yet, at a time when democracy around the world once again seems in retreat and the forces of irrationalism are in advance, it is also an extremely timely book. This guide will equip English-speaking readers with all the tools necessary to appreciate one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.

On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe

$29.99

Draws on the rich surviving archives of the Tuscan port of Livorno to explore how General Average worked.

Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant's cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by the shipper and all the cargo-owners. A risk-sharing practice, different from the risk-shifting of marine insurance which became established relatively late, General Average is still in widespread use.

This book explores how General Average worked. It reveals the gap between General Average in law and how it worked on the ground. It shows how General Average partitioned a wide array of business costs, thereby performing a significant role in structuring maritime commerce, managing risk and promoting shipping and trade. In addition, the book discusses how far General Average was a feature of a supposedly ancient, universal, customary maritime law, and contributes to debates about the evolution of institutions in economic development.

Cover image for Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe, isbn: 9781837652822

Federico García Lorca

$36.95

Feted by his contemporaries, Federico García Lorca's status has only grown since his death in 1936. This book shows just why his fame has endured, through an exploration of his most popular works.

Feted by his contemporaries, Federico García Lorca's status has only grown since his death in 1936: poet, playwright, political martyr, gay icon, champion of women, defender of the oppressed. This book guides readers through the key themes and concerns in Lorca's work. It demonstrates how Lorca applied his poetic sensibilities and lyrical craft to what were, in essence, tangible, real-life issues: the plight of Andalusia's Romani people, the idea of modernity and the condition of women in Spain. What becomes evident is that, even though he was writing at a time when many writers and artists were less inclined to deal directly with the things of the world, Lorca maintained a profound interest in the human subject and in the world around him. It is this interest, the book argues, in tandem with his poetic vision and craft, that ensured his most popular works' enduring, universal appeal.

Cover image for Federico García Lorca, isbn: 9781855664203

The Javanese Travels of Purwalelana

$85.00

The Javanese nobleman Radèn as Arya Candranegara V (1837-85), alias Purwalelana, journeyed across his homeland during the rapidly changing times of the nineteenth century between 1860 annd 1875. His eye-witness account gives an inside view of Java, at that time part of the Dutch East Indies. He explains the habits and traditions of both the Javanese and the Dutch, he describes the architecture of cities and temples. He marvels at the beautiful landscape and modern technological inventions, such as steam trains. The volume is illustrated with many original images of the period.

Cover image for The Javanese Travels of Purwalelana, isbn: 9781916931053

Gunpowder Technology in the Fifteenth Century

$39.95

The first full edition and English translation of the RA I.34 Firework Book.

Produced from the early fifteenth century onwards, Firework Books are, broadly speaking, manuals on how to use gunpowder, witnessing a major development in warfare. Surviving in a corpus of some 65, each text has different content and components, but core elements are present throughout. An important example is a manuscript in the collection of the Royal Armouries (RA I.34), written in Early New High German, and (unlike many other manuscripts) still in what appears to be its original format and binding; it also, unusually, contains a number of illustrations.

This volume provides the first full edition and English translation of the material, with a detailed analysis of its content and context. It positions the Firework Books at a crucial stage in the development of gunpowder artillery, offering an unparalleled insight into fifteenth-century gunpowder technology at a critical juncture of military and technological change at the end of the Middle Ages.

Cover image for Gunpowder Technology in the Fifteenth Century, isbn: 9781837652662

Why I Like This Story

$36.95

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read, or re-read, the stories selected.

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values.

Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger, Malamud and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected.

Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer and Mako Yoshikawa.

Cover image for Why I Like This Story, isbn: 9781640142145

Medieval Women Religious, c. 800-c. 1500

$37.95

A multi-disciplinary re-evaluation of the role of women religious in the Middle Ages, both inside and outside the cloister.

Medieval women found diverse ways of expressing their religious aspirations: within the cloister as members of monastic and religious orders, within the world as vowesses, or between the two as anchorites. Via a range of disciplinary approaches, from history, archaeology, literature, and the visual arts, the essays in this volume challenge received scholarly narratives and re-examine the roles of women religious: their authority and agency within their own communities and the wider world; their learning and literacy; place in the landscape; and visual culture. Overall, they highlight the impact of women on the world around them, the significance of their presence in communities, and the experiences and legacies they left behind.

Cover image for Medieval Women Religious, c. 800-c. 1500, isbn: 9781837652709

The Passion and Miracles of St. Thomas Becket by Benedict of Peterborough

$39.95

The first full English translation of one of the most important sources on Thomas Becket.

Benedict of Peterborough's Passion and Miracles of St Thomas Becket puts the reader in Canterbury on the day of one of the most famous murders of all time, when four of King Henry II's knights killed the archbishop inside his cathedral on 29 December 1170. It reveals how a monk thrust into the role of chronicler attempted to understand the earliest cures at Thomas Becket's tomb and the rapid growth of his reputation as a miracle-worker. With its description of Becket's murder and some 275 miracles, all dating to 1171-1173, Benedict's text, which went on to circulate across Europe, is by far our most important source for the beginnings of the cult that would draw hundreds of thousands of medieval pilgrims to Canterbury.

This book provides the first full English translation of Benedict's Passion and Miracles from the original Latin. It includes an introduction that assesses the relationship of the Canterbury monks to the archbishop, analyses the story of the murder as told in the Passion, and examines the ways in which Benedict gathered material and constructed the Miracles. The translation is also accompanied by full explanatory notes, while two appendices provide biographical information and a translation of the eighteen stories in the Miracles that are also recounted in a slightly later Canterbury collection. This translation will make Benedict's hugely significant text accessible to a wider audience for the first time.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Cover image for The Passion and Miracles of St. Thomas Becket by Benedict of Peterborough, isbn: 9781837652716

Cornish Churches in the Nineteenth Century

$39.95

These two sets of little-known notes, recorded first-hand by 19th-century antiquaries, underpin our understanding of how these structures developed into the buildings we see today.

These manuscript notes on Cornish churches contain much previously unknown material, and were compiled by three 19th century antiquaries. The brothers Daniel and Samuel Lysons toured the county from 1805-11, working towards the publication of the Cornish volume of their series Magna Britannia. Sir Stephen Glynne, 9th Bt of Hawarden, had a passion for recording church architecture, travelling widely around the UK and the continent.

Presented here for the first time, the two sets of notes neatly complement each other, the Lysons' focusing on notable features in the churches, while Glynne's form clear architectonic descriptions. An Introduction uncovers the working methods of these men, and their roles in understanding architectural descriptions and ecclesiology. The text is also supplemented by further archival research which shows how these structures have evolved between the nineteenth century and today. Parishes A-L are covered in this volume, with M-Z to be published subsequently.

Cover image for Cornish Churches in the Nineteenth Century, isbn: 9780901853646

Heinrich Schenker's Conception of Harmony

$59.95

The first detailed study of Schenker's pathbreaking 1906 treatise, showing how it reflected 2500 years of thinking about harmony and presented a vigorous reaction to Austro-Germanic music theory ca. 1900.

What makes the compositions of Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms stand out as great works of art? Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) set out to answer this question in a series of treatises, beginning with a strikingly original work with the deceptive title Harmonielehre (roughly: Treatise on Harmony, 1906).

Whereas other treatises of the period associated harmony with the abstract principles governing chords and chord progressions, Schenker's treated it as the conceptual glue that allowed the individual elements of a work (melodies, motives, chords, counterpoint, etc.) to work together locally and globally. Yet this book, though renowned and much cited, has never been studied systematically and in close detail.

Heinrich Schenker's Conception of Harmony approaches Schenker's 1906 treatise as a synthesis of ancient ideas and very new ones. It translates, for the first time, two preparatory essays for Harmonielehre and describes his later views of harmony and the ways in which they influenced and also were ignored by the 1954 edition and translation, entitled simply Harmony. Though problematic, Harmony was the first published translation of a major work by Schenker, inaugurating the study of his writings in postwar America and Britain, where they continue to be highly influential.

Cover image for Heinrich Schenker's Conception of Harmony, isbn: 9781648251153

Three Preludes to the Song of Roland

$38.95

The first complete English translation of three chansons de geste inspired by the Romance epic, the Song of Roland.

The success of the eleventh-century Song of Roland gave rise to a series of around twenty related chansons de geste, known collectively as the Cycle of the King. In addition to reworkings of the Song of Roland in Old French and other medieval languages, these poems are devoted to the numerous military campaigns of Charlemagne against the Muslims before and after the tragic Battle of Roncevaux. These texts provide valuable insights into the medieval reception of the Roland material, exemplifying the process of cycle formation and attesting to the diversity of the Romance epic. Far from presenting a simplistic view of the clash of civilizations, these chansons de geste display a web of contradictions, offering both a glorification and a critique of hatred and violence.

This volume offers English translations of the three epic poems whose action directly precedes the events of the Song of Roland. Gui of Burgundy extends the period of time spent in Spain by Charles and his army from seven to twenty-six years, which gives the sons of the Twelve Peers the opportunity to reach adulthood and come to the rescue of their fathers. Roland at Saragossa, composed in Occitan, takes place in the days immediately preceding the decisive defeat and relates in an heroi-comic manner how Roland sneaks into Saragossa at the request of the pagan Queen Braslimonda, who has been enraptured by his strength and beauty. Finally, Otinel tells of a Saracen envoy who comes to Paris to challenge Charlemagne on behalf of the Emir Garsile, who has his capital in Lombardy. The action takes place in France and northern Italy in a lull between the capture of Pamplona and the defeat at Roncevaux.

The translations are presented with notes, and the volume includes an introduction placing the poems in their wider historical and cultural contexts.

Cover image for Three Preludes to the <i> Song of Roland</i>, isbn: 9781843847373

Johann Joachim Winckelmann on Art, Architecture, and Archaeology

$37.95

Modern English translations of several of the most important essays of Winckelmann, one of the fathers of art history and archaeology and a strong influence on Goethe and Schiller and Weimar Classicism.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) has long been recognized as one of the founders of modern art history and a major force in the development of archaeology and the study of ancient Greek architecture. He also exerted an influence on the Weimar Classicism of Goethe and Schiller, for whom his description of Greek sculpture as evoking "edle Einfalt und stille Grösse" (noble simplicity and a calm greatness) became a watchword. He contributed to modern scientific archaeology through his application of empirically derived categories of style to the analysis of classical works of art and architecture, and was one of the first to undertake detailed empirical examinations of artifacts and describe them precisely in a way that enabled reasoned conclusions to be drawn about ancient societies and their cultures. Yet several of his important essays are not available in modern English translation. The present volume remedies this situation by collecting four of Winckelmann's most seminal essays on art along with several shorter pieces on the topic, two major if brief essays on architecture, and one longer essay on archaeology. Paired with thisis an introduction covering Winckelmann's life and work.

David Carter is retired as Professor of Communicative English at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, and is former Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. Among his recently published translations from German are Klaus Mann's novel Alexander (2008) and On Cocaine (2011), a collection of Sigmund Freud's writings on the topic.

Cover image for Johann Joachim Winckelmann on Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, isbn: 9781640142190

The Bear: Culture, Nature, Heritage

$37.95

Investigations into the cultural significance of that most familiar and charismatic group of animals, bears.

Bears are iconic animals, playing a variety of roles in human culture. They have been portrayed as gods, monsters, kings, fools, brothers, lovers, and dancers; they are seen as protectors of the forest; symbols of masculinity; a comfort for children; and act as symbols for conservation and environmental issues. They also symbolise wilderness, reinforcing and maintaining our connection to the natural world. And stories abound of cultures that gathered berries in the same fields as bears and fished on the same rivers; consequently a wealth of myths, legends and folklore has informed us of our place in the world and the deep connection we have with bears.
The essays collected here provide a rich selection of views on the human/bear relationships. They explore how bears are an influence in contemporary art, and how they are represented in the illustrations in children's literature and in museum exhibitions. The connection between bears and native peoples, and how contemporary society lives alongside these animals, provides an understanding of current attitudes and approaches to bear management and conservation. The history of captive bears is brought into contemporary relief by considering the fate of captive bears held in Asian countries for bile production. Other pieces look at how bears feature in gay culture, and are an intrinsic component to researchon the Yeti and Sasquatch. Together, these articles present an insight into the changing face of attitudes towards nature, species survival and the significance of conservation engagement in the twenty-first century. Biologists, historians, anthropologists, cultural theorists, conservationists and museologists will all find riches in the detail presented in this bear cornucopia.

OWEN NEVIN is Associate Vice-Chancellor, Gladstone Region, CQUniversity, Australia; IAN CONVERY is Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Cumbria; PETER DAVIS is Emeritus Professor of Museology in the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University.

Contributors: Philip Charles, Melanie Clapham, Ian Convery, Koen Cuyten, Elizabeth O Davis, Peter Davis, Sarah Elmeligi, Beatrice Frank, Barrie K. Gilbert, Jenny Anne Glikman, Tracy Ann Hayes, Mike Jeffries, Jón Jónsson, John Kitchin, Miha Krofel, Gareth Longstaff, Henry McGhie, Jeff Meldrum, Owen T. Nevin, Heather Prince, Lynn Rogers, Kristinn Schram, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir, Russ Van Horn, Mark Wilson, Samantha Young.

Cover image for The Bear: Culture, Nature, Heritage, isbn: 9781837652655

A Medieval Book of Beasts

$49.95

Text, translation, and critical study of one of the most important medieval bestiaries.

The bestiary - a book of animals, both real and mythical - is one of the most interesting and appealing medieval artefacts. The "Second-family" bestiary is the most important and frequently produced version (some 49 known manuscripts exist). Of English origin and predominantly English production, it boasts a spiritual text "modernized" to meet the needs of its time, and features exceptional illustrations. This study addresses the work's purpose and audience, challenging previous assumptions with direct evidence in the manuscripts themselves, linking their use to teachers at the elementary-school level, and exploring the art, the text, and the cultural context for the bestiary. It includes a critical edition and new English translation, and a catalogue raisonné of the manuscripts. Fully illustrated.

Cover image for A Medieval Book of Beasts, isbn: 9781837652679

Violence Elsewhere 2

$36.95

Examines ideas of violence in German culture after 9/11 through the lens of "violence elsewhere" - exploring works and discourses about violence in distant locations or times.

Following the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, in postwar Germany thinking or speaking about that extreme violence seemed distinctively difficult - even perhaps, at times, impossible. Yet we can learn about understandings of violence in this period in novel ways by exploring images and constructions in German culture of faraway violence, as shown in the recent volume Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany, 1945-2001.

As of September 11, 2001, violence came to appear transnationally, spectacularly mobile in new ways. Consequently, Violence Elsewhere 2 explores ideas about "violence elsewhere" in German-language culture since 2001. Here, "elsewhere" can mean not only distant places; it may also be violence perceived as foreign, or in the past. Simultaneously, this work suggests that the idea of 9/11 as a watershed in thinking about violence is more complex than meets the eye.

Here, nine essays consider classic literary forms like poetry and prose fiction, from the short story to the intergenerational German family novel to Black feminist speculative fiction. Contributors examine, too, philosophy, performance and multimedia art, political and other forms of public discourse, and film. Topics include, amongst others, the "war on terror," slow environmental violence, the Armenian genocide, portrayals of refugees and migrants, legacies of colonial violence, space travel, and the persistent resonance of the German past.

Cover image for Violence Elsewhere 2, isbn: 9781640142176

Liszt and Virtuosity

$49.95

CO-WINNER: The Triennial Alan Walker Book Award, sponsored by the American Liszt Society 2023

A new and wide-ranging collection of essays by leading international scholars, exploring the concept and practices of virtuosity in Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.

In the annals of music history, few figures have dominated the discussion of virtuosity as much as Franz Liszt. A flamboyant performer whose hair-raising technical feats at the piano created a sense of awe-inspiring excitement andan icon whose star power radiated far beyond the realm of music, Liszt was, along with his early model, Paganini, among the first major performer-composers to define himself principally by virtuosity.

Featuring new essays by an international group of preeminent scholars, Liszt and Virtuosity offers a reevaluation of the concept and practices of virtuosity as shaped and defined in Liszt's multifaceted oeuvre, as well as a reconsiderationof Liszt's relation to other major and lesser-known musical figures, including Czerny, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and Marie Jaëll.

Set in the context of larger trends within the fields of music history, musicanalysis, intellectual history, and performance studies, these capacious explorations demonstrate that Liszt's uniqueness and significance resided in his ability to transform virtuosity into a revolutionary musical force, pushingthe piano aesthetic to the limits of sound and poetic meaning.

The Register of John Salmon, bishop of Norwich, 1299-1325

$49.96

John Salmon's fourteenth-century register brings to life the day-to-day world of a medieval bishop.

John Salmon's register is the earliest to survive for the diocese of Norwich: a complete record of institutions to ecclesiastical benefices during the quarter-century of his episcopate, from 1299 to 1325. Although his diocese was not the wealthiest in England, the early fourteenth century saw the region at the height of its ecclesiastical powers, with an abundance of churches and chapels and numerous religious houses.
Institutions to benefices and offices were at the heart of the work of the medieval bishop. This edition, which takes the form of a calendar supplemented with transcriptions and translations of entries of special interest, enables a detailed and thorough examination of the character and qualifications of the clergy who served local communities at the beginning of the fourteenth century, of the motives of the patrons who presented them to their livings and of the concerns of the bishop himself.

The Register of John Salmon, bishop of Norwich, 1299-1325

Violence Elsewhere 1

$29.99

Explores the significance of postwar German representations of violence in other places and times.

Germany's twentieth-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture challenging, meaning that it can be difficult to locate and explore critically the significance of violence in and for the postwar German states. This volume approaches that challenge through critical analysis of "violence elsewhere," that is, constructions of violence in distant, imagined, or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of "violence elsewhere" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged meanings and functions of violence in German culture.

The essays in this volume explore selected, emblematic works from East, West, and, later, unified Germany, which imagine violence in, for example, Latin America, Vietnam, Cambodia, the USA, and the Middle East, as well as in the respective "other" German state and in the German past. Drawing on fields including cultural, literary, film, visual, and gender studies, it introduces multidisciplinary theoretical approaches to the topic of violence elsewhere that may be transferable beyond German studies too. As such, the volume allows us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities, and to look beyond binary notions of "here" and "elsewhere," "self" and "other." It thus expands our understanding of what German culture is and could be.

intimate entanglements in the ethnography of performance

$37.95

Honourable Mention for Society for Ethnomusicology - Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize

Offers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings.

Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political.

Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.

intimate entanglements in the ethnography of performance

The New German Jewish Literature

$29.99

Posits a New German Jewish Literature that has surprising implications for today's German Jewish - and Jewish - identity, including solidarity with others, even after October 7, 2023.

Eighty years after the Holocaust, it is now possible to speak of a New German Jewish Literature. Emerging out of a community that, following the arrival of more than 200,000 people of Jewish ancestry from the former Soviet Union, is now vastly larger, increasingly diverse, and culturally vibrant, German Jewish writers are re-articulating what it means to be Jewish in the "land of the perpetrators." More generally, they are also rethinking Jewish values and Jewish solidarity against the backdrop of global events and trends such as the resurgence of antisemitism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and growing intolerance toward ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.

Stuart Taberner's book provides the first comprehensive account of the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism that characterizes this New German Jewish Literature. To what extent should Jewish identity be focused on the "Jewishness" of the Jewish experience, including the Holocaust? Or does "Jewish purpose" reside in expressing solidarity with persecuted minorities everywhere? Taberner argues that this new literature presents an aesthetically engaging and politically nuanced deliberation on Holocaust memory, on worldliness, and on solidarity - with sometimes surprising and radical implications for modern-day German Jewish and Jewish identity. He also examines authors' responses to the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, and speculates about the future of German Jewish writing.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Medieval Arms and Armour: a Sourcebook. Volume I

$60.00

Authoritative reference guide, using the documents in which arms and armour first appeared to explain and define them.

"A substantial and impressive piece of scholarship, one that will serve scholars and enthusiasts of medieval arms and armour very well indeed". Dr Robert W. Jones, Franklin and Marshall College

Medieval arms and armour are intrinsically fascinating. From the smoke and noise of the armourer's forge to the bloody violence of the battlefield or the silken panoply of the tournament, weapons and armour - and those who made and bore them - are woven into the fabric of medieval society. This sourcebook will aid anyone who seeks to develop a deeper understanding by introducing and presenting the primary sources in which these artefacts are first mentioned. Over a hundred original documents are transcribed and translated, including wills and inventories, craft statutes, chronicle accounts and challenges to single combat. The book also includes an extensive glossary, lavishly illustrated with fifty-two images of extant armour and weapons from the period and contemporary artistic depictions from illuminated manuscripts and other sources. This book will therefore be of interest to a wide audience, from the living history practitioner, crafter and martial artist, to students of literature, military history, art and material culture.

Medieval Arms and Armour: a Sourcebook. Volume I

Late Medieval Ipswich

$36.95

A detailed study of Ipswich at a time of great growth and prosperity, highlighting the activities of its industries, merchants and craftsmen.

Ipswich in the late Middle Ages was a flourishing town. A wide range of commodities passed through its port, to and from far-flung markets, bought and sold by merchants from diverse backgrounds, and carried in ships whose design evolved during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its trading partners, both domestic and overseas, changed in response to developments in the international, national and local economy, as did the occupations of its craftsmen, with textile, leather and metal industries of particular importance.

However, despite its importance, and the richness of its medieval archives, the story of Ipswich at the time has been sadly neglected. This is a gap which the author here aims to remedy. His careful study allows a detailed picture of urban life to emerge, shedding new light not only on the borough itself, but on towns more generally at a crucial point in their development and during a period of growing affluence when ordinary people enjoyed an unprecedented rise in standards of living and the benefits of what might be termed our first consumer revolution.

The Principality of Antioch and its Frontiers in the Twelfth Century

$36.95

An investigation into how Antioch maintained itself as an independent principality during a period of considerable challenges.

Situated in northern Syria, on the eastern-most frontier of Latin Christendom, the principality of Antioch was a medieval polity bordered by a host of rival powers, including the Byzantine Empire, the Armenian Christians of Cilicia, the rulers of the neighbouring Islamic world and even the other crusader states, the kingdom of Jerusalem and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli. Coupled with the numerous Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities who populated the region, Antioch's Frankish settlers - initially installed into power by the military successes of the First Crusade - thus faced numerous challenges to their survival.

This book examines how the ruling elites of the principality sought to manage these competing interests in order to maintain Antioch's existence during the troubled twelfth century, particularly following the death of Prince Bohemond II in 1130. His demise helped to spark renewed interest from Byzantium and the kingdom of Jerusalem, and came at a time of both Islamic resurgence under the Zengids of Aleppo and Mosul, as well as Armenian power growth under the Rupenids. An examination of Antioch's diplomatic and military endeavours, its internal power structures and its interaction with indigenous peoples can therefore help to reveal a great deal about how medieval Latins adapted to the demands of their frontiers.

The Principality of Antioch and its Frontiers in the Twelfth Century

Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Late Medieval England

$54.95

A major new study piecing together the intriguing but fragmentary evidence surrounding the lives of minstrels to highlight how these seemingly peripheral figures were keenly involved with all aspects of late medieval communities.

Minstrels were a common sight and sound in the late Middle Ages. Aristocrats, knights and ladies heard them on great occasions (such as Edward I's wedding feast for his daughter Elizabeth in 1296) and in quieter moments in their chambers; town-dwellers heard and saw them in civic processions (when their sound drew attention to the spectacle); and even in the countryside people heard them at weddings, church-ales and other parish celebrations. But who were the minstrels, and what did they do? How did they live, and how easily did they make a living? How did they perform, and in what conditions? The evidence is intriguing but fragmentary, including literary and iconographic sources and, most importantly, the financial records of royal and aristocratic households and of towns. These offer many insights, although they are often hard to fit into any coherent picture of the minstrels' lives and their place in society. It is easy to see the minstrels as peripheral figures, entertainers who had no central place in the medieval world. Yet they were full members of it, interacting with the ordinary people around them, as well as with the ruling classes: carrying letters and important verbal messages, some lending huge sums of money to the king (to finance Henry V's Agincourt campaign in 1415, for instance), some regular and necessary civic servants, some committing crimes or suffering the crimes of others. In this book Rastall and Taylor bring to bear the available evidence to enlarge and enrich our view of the minstrel in late medieval society.

Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Late Medieval England

Erasmus Darwin's Gardens

$39.95

This first full study of Erasmus Darwin's gardening, horticulture and agriculture shows he was as keen a nature enthusiast as his grandson Charles.

Famous as the author of the Botanic Garden (1791) and grandfather of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a larger-than-life enlightenment natural philosopher (scientist) and writer who practised as a doctor across the English Midlands for nearly half a century. A practical gardener and horticulturist, Darwin created a botanic garden near Lichfield - which galvanised his poetry - and kept other gardens, an orchard and small "farm" in Derby. Informed by his medical practice and botanical studies, Darwin saw many parallels between animals, plants and humans which aroused hostility during the years of revolution, warfare and reaction, but helped him to write Zoonomia (1794/96) and Phytologia (1800) - his major studies of medicine, agriculture and gardening. Captivated by the changing landscapes and environments of town and country and supported by social networks such as those in Lichfield and Derby, Darwin avidly exchanged ideas about plants, animals and their diseases with family, patients, friends such as the poet Anna Seward (1742-1809), farmers, fellow doctors, huntsmen and even the local mole catcher.
The is the first full study of Erasmus Darwin's gardening, horticulture and agriculture. It shows him as keen a nature enthusiast as his contemporary Rev. Gilbert White of Selbourne (1720-1793) or his grandson Charles, fascinated with everything from swarming insects and warring bees to domestic birds and dogs, pigs and livestock on his farm to fungi growing from horse dung in Derby tan yards. Ranging over his observations of plant physiology and anatomy to the use of plant "bandages" in his orchard and electrical machines to hasten seed germination to explosive studies of vegetable "brains", nerves and sensations, the book demonstrates the ways in which Erasmus Darwin's landscape and garden experiences transformed his understanding of nature. They provided him with insights into medicine and the environmental causes of diseases, the classification of plants and animals, chemistry, evolution, potential new medicines and foodstuffs and the ecological interdependency of the natural economy. Like the amorous vegetables of the Loves of the Plants (1789) which fascinated, scandalised and titillated late Georgian society, the many living creatures of Darwin's gardens and farm encountered in this book were for him real, dynamic, interacting and evolving beings who helped inspire and re-affirm his progressive social and political outlook.

The Life and Music of Gérard Grisey

$38.95

The first biography of the composer Gérard Grisey shows how the artist's sensuality and rigor came together to form the musical genre known as spectralism.

The French composer Gérard Grisey (1946-98) changed the course of music history with his small but potent output. Labeled "spectral" music, his compositions looked to the physics of sound and the capacities of human perception for material and inspiration. Born in Belfort, Grisey was the son of a French Resistance veteran turned car mechanic and a homemaker. His first instrument was as humble as his background: the accordion. But Grisey rose from his provincial background to the heights of his profession.

This first biography of Grisey traces his journey from rigid Catholicism to broader mysticism; his studies in Olivier Messiaen's legendary composition class; the development of the first "spectral" works in the 1970s; Grisey's stint teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, during which he suffered severe depression; the development of his late, post-spectral style; and his untimely death at the age of 52, shortly after completing his masterpiece on death, the Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold. Drawing on original archival research, interviews with more than fifty of Grisey's colleagues, friends, and lovers, and the study of previously overlooked sketches, this biography shows the delirium and form at the heart of Grisey's life and art—the structured sensuality that allowed him to revolutionize the music of the twentieth century.

The Critical Life of Toni Morrison

$36.95

The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings.

Winner of the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for Best Single-Authored Book, 2019-2022

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is the most important American novelist since Faulkner, the most significant American woman writer since Dickinson, and the most widely read African American public intellectual of the last half century. Her influence as a writer, critic, editor, teacher, and scholar is profound: she changed the face of literature and literary criticism in the US, if not worldwide. Yet despite the ever-expanding field of Morrison scholarship, no book tracing her critical reception has existed, until now. The book is as much a cultural history of America as a reception history of an American writer.

Morrison worked brilliantly in many genres - fiction, of course (novels and short stories); drama/staged performance; poetry; non-fiction on historical, social, and political issues; and critical writings on the work of others and on her own work. She generated a literary-critical methodology that recognizes and embraces rather than ignores the African American presence in US literature, and thus transformed American academics' attitude toward American letters. The story of Morrison's achievement in making a home for herself - and for other women and people of color - in the stony bedrock of "white male" American literature is the subject of this book.

Ben Enwonwu

$49.95

Winner - African Studies Association's 2009 Melville J. Herskovits Award

An intellectual biography of a modern African artist and his immense contribution to twentieth-century art history.

The history of world art has long neglected the work of modern African artists and their search for forms of modernist expression as either irrelevant to the discourse of modern art or as fundamentally subservient to the established narrative of Western European modernist practice. With this engaging new volume, Sylvester Ogbechie refutes this approach by examining the life and work of Ben Enwonwu (1917-94), a premier African modernist and pioneer whose career opened the way for the postcolonial proliferation and increased visibility of African art.

In the decades between Enwonwu's birth and death, modernization produced new political structures and new forms of expression in African cultures, inspiring important developments in modern African art. Within this context, Ogbechie evaluates important issues such as the role of Anglo-Nigerian colonial culture in the development of modern Nigerian art, and Enwonwu's involvement with international discourses of modernism in Europe, Africa, and the United States over a period of five decades. The author also interrogates Enwonwu's use of the radical politics of Negritude ideology to define modern African art against canonical interpretations of Euro-modernism; and the artist's visual and critical contributions to Pan Africanism, Nigerian nationalism, and postcolonial interpretations of African modernity.

First and foremost an intellectual biography of Ben Enwonwu as a modern African artist, rather than an exhaustive critical exploration of the discourse of modernism in African art history or in modern art in general, Ben Enwonwu situates the artist historically and interprets his work in ways that surpass traditional discourse around the canon of modern art.