Piracy was one of the most gendered criminal activities during the early modern period. As a form of maritime enterprise and organized criminality, it attracted thousands of male recruits whose venturing acquired a global dimension as piratical activity spread across the oceans …
A history of the innovation and effects of the French Republican Calendar. The French Republican Calendar was perhaps the boldest of all the reforms undertaken in Revolutionary France. Introduced in 1793 and used until 1806, the Calendar not only reformed the weeks and months of…
Despite the enormous and accelerating worldwide interest in Wagner leading to the bicentenary of his birth in 2013, his prose writings have received scant scholarly attention. Wagner's book-length essay on Beethoven, written to celebrate the centenary of Beethoven's birth in 187…
Robert Schumann frequently expressed his deep admiration for the novels of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, the late-eighteenth-century German novelist, essayist, and satirist. Schumann imitated Jean Paul's prose style in his own fiction and music criticism, and said once that he le…
Bálint András Varga makes available here twenty-one extended interviews with some of the most notable figures in music from the past fifty years, as well as lively "snippets" from interviews Varga conducted with thirteen other equally renowned musicians. The interviewees include…
This study shows how modern (including postmodern) adaptations of the Grail legend correspond to trends in the scholarly community and how the legend has been appropriated by competing world-views. There are three parallel trends in Grail scholarship and modern adaptations of th…
'An important and powerful meditation on romance genre, reception and ethical/moral purpose - amongst many other aspects of romance.' Professor ROBERT ROUSE, University of British Columbia. Medieval readers, like modern ones, differed in whether they saw 'noble storie, and worth…
This book takes a fresh look at Victorian England's "love of Italy", traditionally constructed as the reserve of the established classes, by revealing a forgotten connection between the radical, Victorian "non-elites" and the Risorgimento democrats. The republican exile Giuseppe…
The mysterious and haunting Grail makes its first appearance in literature in ChreÌ#x81;tien de Troyes' Perceval at the end of the twelfth century. But ChreÌ#x81;tien never finished his poem, leaving an unresolved story and an incomplete picture of the Grail. It was, however, fa…
The idea of kingship forms a recurrent theme in the poems of the so-called 'Ricardians', John Gower, William Langland, the Gawain - poet and Chaucer - unsurprisingly, during a period of considerable turmoil. This book aims to widen understanding of these poets through an examina…
The formidable force of the Normans at sea has been frequently overlooked. This volume shows their dominance over the Mediterranean, and its far-reaching effects. The rise of Norman naval power in the central Mediterranean in the eleventh and twelfth centuries prompted a seminal…
Images of war, narratives of suffering and notions of ethnicity are intrinsically linked to Western perceptions of Africa. Filtered through a mostly international media the information of African wars is confined to narrow categories of explanation emerging from and adapted to a…
A fresh reading of Marvell's most important works, exploring the variety and complexity of his approaches to contemporary religious and political events. Andrew Marvell's celebrated poetic ambivalence to the philosophical, political and religious controversies of mid-seventeenth…
A close examination of religious texts illuminates the way in which parish priests dealt with their female parishioners in the middle ages. The question of how priests were taught to think about and care for female parishioners is the topic of this book. As neither misogynist vi…
The exploitations of medieval romance
As one of the most important, influential and capacious genres of the middle ages, the romance was exploited for a variety of social and cultural reasons: to celebrate and justify war and conflict, chivalric ideologies, and national, local and regional identities; to rationalize…
Last Features is the story of forgotten films made during the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and German unification. With leftover GDR funds and under chaotic conditions, a group of mainly younger East German filmmakers produced approximately thirty stylistically divers…
In this, the first extended study of Schoeck in English, Walton places the man and the artist squarely in the context of his time. The work of the late-Romantic Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) has in recent years enjoyed a surge of interest. His 300 songs with piano ac…
This is the first biography of Latin America's most important poet, the Peruvian César Vallejo, who was born in an Andean village, Santiago de Chuco, on 16 March 1892 and died in Paris on 15 April 1938. It traces the important events of his life - becoming a poet in Peru, fallin…
Society in an age of plague
Described as "a golden age of pathogens", the long fifteenth century was notable for a series of international, national and regional epidemics that had a profound effect upon the fabric of society. The impact of pestilence upon the literary, religious, social and political life…