Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Publications
  3. Books
  4. Content listing

Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1355898 results in Books

Page 1335 of 67795

The reputation of philanthropy since 1750
  • Britain and beyond
  • Hugh Cunningham
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • Most people now associate philanthropy with donations of money by the rich to good causes. It has not always been so. The reputation of philanthropy since 1750 explores how our modern definition came about and asks why philanthropy and philanthropists have always been as likely to be criticised as praised. Based on original research in newspapers, periodicals, novels and letters, the book provides a compelling account of a shift from philanthropy being a feeling of love of humankind to one where it became heavily engaged in opposing slavery and reforming prisons, both of them political and contentious issues. On the positive side Britain was praised as the most philanthropic country in the world and something the nation was proud of. But the ‘telescopic philanthropy’ that Charles Dickens lambasted, a philanthropy that focused on those far away to the neglect of the poor at home, was under the spotlight. Equally contentious was the relationship between philanthropy and political economy: to the critics philanthropy led to the creation of a dependency class, it did more harm than good. After almost sinking out of sight in the mid-twentieth century, dismissed critically as ‘Victorian’, philanthropy in the twenty-first century has regained a high profile.

Disability and the Victorians
  • Attitudes, interventions, legacies
  • Edited by Iain Hutchison, Martin Atherton, Jaipreet Virdi
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • The Victorian era, encompassing the latter six decades of the nineteenth century, was a period by which significant areas of the British Isles had become industrialised and urbanised. Both processes exacerbated the extent of impairing conditions, ranging from industrial injury through the prevalence of debilitating physiological illnesses. Disability and the Victorians: attitudes, interventions, legacies brings together the work of eleven scholars and focuses on the history of disability and, while showcasing the work of a diverse gathering of historians, also gives a flavour of how disability history engages the work of scholars from other disciplines and how they, in turn, enhance historical thought and understanding. Equally, while the focus is on the Victorian era, a time during which society changed significantly, both at the bottom and from the top, it was also a time in which patterns developed that were to have an enduring influence. Therefore, a taste of that enduring influence is presented in chapters that suggest the resilience of Victorian thought and practices in the modern era. Consequently, an underlying aim is to encourage readers to take a broad view, both of ‘disability’ and of Victorian influences and values.

The Female Avenger, Women's Anger and Rape-Revenge Film and Television
  • Margrethe Bruun Vaage
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2024
  • The Female Avenger, Women's Anger and Rape-Revenge Film and Television examines the contentious nature of the female rape survivor turned avenger in rape-revenge stories. The focus is on a trend of contemporary rape-revenge film made by women directors. Vaage asks what it might mean for women in particular to watch female avengers, and suggests that the reason some women filmmakers explore the rape-revenge convention is because it is all about an emotion that is difficult for women, and used to label women as difficult, namely anger.

    The central premise in this book is that understanding the emotions stirred up by this type of story is crucial in order to understand its recurring, controversial presence in popular culture, and also its potential value. Vaage offers a cultural and political analysis of contemporary rape-revenge film made by women grounded in the psychological and philosophical study of the emotions.

Peasants and historians
  • Debating the medieval English peasantry
  • Phillipp R. Schofield
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • The study of the medieval English peasantry began in the nineteenth century as an adjunct to the study of other themes. Medievalists have tended to assume that modern working definitions of peasant, as proposed by Thorner et al., are sufficiently accommodating as to make room for a medieval English peasantry and conceive of a peasant society operating in medieval England. The book describes the ways in which historians have discussed change within the village community, notably in the pre- and post-Black Death village communities. It examines the ways in which debates or particular avenues of research have emerged from three main strands of research: population movement and its determining; the demands and constraints of the seigneurial economy and of resistance to the same; and the development of commerce and the market. The book analyzes the peasant family and household in demographic terms and by looking at household formation, age at marriage and the size and structure of the peasant household, as well as the evolution of the peasant household in the high and late middle ages. It suggests that the study of the medieval peasantry is not a plaything of historical fashion, subject only to the whims and musings of historians the views of whom are rooted only in the present; it reflects a nuancing and refining of questions that will lead to a fuller understanding of a topic and period of great and enduring interest.

Reading Modernism's Readers
  • Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller
  • Helen Tyson
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2024
  • Reading Modernism's Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller examines the scene of reading in modernist, psychoanalytic and popular writing from the early twentieth century. Focusing on the writing of Virginia Woolf, and reading her novels alongside writing by Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Ethel M. Dell, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, and others, this book challenges our prevailing critical assumptions about modernist reading. Reading Modernism's Readers argues that the modernist scene of reading reveals some of our culture's most powerful and enduring fantasies about the role of literature in psychic, social and political life. Reading modernism alongside psychoanalysis and the bestseller, this book aims not only to intervene in debates about modernism, but also to address its legacies in contemporary literature, and in the context of increasingly urgent questions about how - and why - we read today.

The Roman Law of Inheritance
  • The Evolution of the Roman Law of Inheritance during the Principate
  • Ulrike Babusiaux
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2024
  • Fritz Schulz once famously described the Roman law of inheritance as 'labyrinthine' and it is deemed to be the most complex part of the Roman legal system. As Rome evolved from a city-state to an imperial power, the rules of inheritance often changed because of the economic importance of acquisition at death. These changes are reflected in the Corpus iuris civilis, despite the best efforts of the compilers of the Corpus to eliminate variations in the text in order to standardise the existing material for the purposes of their compilation.

    The Roman Law of Inheritance gives the reader an insight into the content, structure and evolution of Roman inheritance law and provides an understanding of a fundamental part of Roman legal thought. In addition, it tackles the most difficult features of Roman law of inheritance, including the fideicommissa and the interpretation of wills which are explained against the background of historical stratification.

Ethnic Cleansing in Western Anatolia, 1912-1923
  • Ottoman Officials and the Local Christian Population
  • Umit Eser
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2024
  • The Greek landing in Smyrna in May 1919 is widely seen as the catalyst of the Turkish national struggle but even during the chaos of between 1919-1923, the diverse peoples of Asia Minor coexisted and created astonishing but fragile infra-national solutions. In sharp contrast to popular history, this book tells the often-overlooked story of cooperation and resistance in a province renowned for its rich and prosperous ethnic and religious diversity in the face of a larger geopolitical struggle. As such, this research demonstrates that even the most contested national conflicts can display a remarkable degree of capacity for coexistence at the local level, a capacity that is all too easily forgotten amid global conflicts today.

The unimagined community
  • Imperialism and culture in South Vietnam
  • Duy Lap Nguyen
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • The unimagined community proposes a reexamination of the Vietnam War from a perspective that has been largely excluded from historical accounts of the conflict, that of the South Vietnamese. Challenging the conventional view that the war was a struggle between the Vietnamese people and US imperialism, the study presents a wide-ranging investigation of South Vietnamese culture, from political philosophy and psychological warfare to popular culture and film. Beginning with a genealogy of the concept of a Vietnamese “culture,” as the latter emerged during the colonial period, the book concludes with a reflection on the rise of popular culture during the American intervention. Reexamining the war from the South Vietnamese perspective, The unimagined community pursues the provocative thesis that the conflict, in this early stage, was not an anti-communist crusade, but a struggle between two competing versions of anticolonial communism.

A knight’s legacy
  • Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England
  • Edited by Ladan Niayesh
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • It is surprising, at this point in the story of the rich and strange rediscovery of a text so important to French and English literary and social history, that no collection of scholarly essays related to Mandeville's Travels yet exists in English or French. This book is a collection of essays by scholars in England and France, who produce a complex and sometimes contradictory view of Mandeville's book as an important object of early modern attention, as well as a feature of early modern literary context. The chapters range in emphasis from textual and bibliographic studies of Mandeville's late medieval and early modern Nachleben to studies of 'Mandevillian ideologies', to readings of romances and especially theatrical productions, illuminated by understandings of the new life in print of the Travels and its excerpted account of the Levant. Part I of the book makes clear that there were profound changes in motives for publication, anthologisation and readerly reception of the text(s) from the time of the incunabula, through its use by explorers Columbus, Frobisher and Ralegh, to its appearance as a children's book in the Enlightenment. These changes underscore alterations of economies and geographical experience in the mostly post-medieval 'Age of Discovery'. Part II is on Mandevillian ideologies and examines the Nachleben of the Travels through a historical discourse on the Turks and Islam in early modern England, development and geography of scripture. Part III is on Mandevillian and focuses on the drama of the newly invented medium of the commercial theatre.

ReFocus: The Films of Agnieszka Holland
  • Elzbieta Ostrowska
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2024
  • The Films of Agnieszka Holland is the first monograph devoted to the internationally most famous Polish filmmaker, a three times Oscar nominee and the recipient of numerous film festival prizes. It examines her rich, original oeuvre, which ranges from Holocaust dramas such as 'Europa', 'Europa (1990)' to episodes of the HBO series 'The Wire'. In examining the multifaceted nature of Holland's authorship, the study situates her work in the context of art, popular, national, European, Hollywood, transnational, women's, and queer cinema, as well as global television projects. Her colourful public persona oscillates among auteur, celebrity director, and political activist in an extraordinary professional trajectory, which started in the Eastern Bloc, continued in Western Europe and North America, then backtracked to a unified Europe. That zigzagged route conveys the unique nature of Holland's career while epitomising the transformations of post-Cold War cultural production.

Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History
  • Zheng Yangwen
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • Ten Lessons tells the story of modern China from the eve of the First Opium War to the Xi Jinping era. This was a most turbulent period of time as the Middle Kingdom was torn apart by opium, Christianity, modernisation, imperialists, nationalists, warlords and the Japanese, and as China reinvented and reasserted itself on the world stage in the post-Mao era. Unlike the handful of existing textbooks, which narrate without primary sources and without engaging with academic debate, Ten Lessons is devoted to students, from university to high school, as it uses extensive primary sources to tell the story of modern China and introduces them to scholarship and debates in the field of Chinese history and beyond. This will help students understand the real issues involved, navigate their way through the maze of existing literature and undertake independent research for essays and dissertations. The book also points out gaps and inadequacies in the existing scholarship, to encourage postgraduate studies. It is ‘mental furniture’ for the increasing army of journalists, NGO workers, diplomats, government officials, businesspeople and travellers of all kinds, who often need a good source of background information before they head to China.

The life–cycle in Western Europe, c.1300-c.1500
  • Deborah Youngs
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • One of the key aims of this book is to offer a synthesis of the main findings of current research on age. It is intended as an outline survey and consequently the scope of the book is deliberately broad: it covers two centuries, considers the large land mass of Western Europe with its diverse languages, customs and cultures, and ranges across the social spectrum. The book focuses solely on the Christian West, including consideration on the extent to which social rank influenced life expectancy, the methods and goals of upbringing, marriage patterns and funerary memorialisation. The book also demonstrates how extensive that range can be. Examples are drawn from manorial accounts, tax assessments, spiritual writings, didactic literature, romances, elegies, art and architecture. The main thrust is that age formed an essential part of a person's identity in late medieval Europe. During adolescence, men and women progressively took on their adult roles. Three chapters are devoted to educating girls. The book discusses young people's period of transition between childhood and adulthood. It draws attention to pious young women who fought against marriage and wanted a chaste life. Divergences between northern and southern Europe in terms of marriage patterns, family formation, opportunities for women and attitudes towards death and its rituals are discussed. The book shows that attitudes towards the undeveloped young meant that children had few legal responsibilities. Another aim of the book is to consider the changing opportunities and possibilities for people as they progressed through life.

Law, laity and solidarities
  • Essays in honour of Susan Reynolds
  • Edited by Pauline Stafford, Janet L. Nelson, Jane Martindale
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • This book is dedicated to Susan Reynolds and celebrates the work of a scholar whose views have been central to reappraisals of the position of the laity in the Middle Ages. The themes and concerns include a medieval world in which the activity and attitudes of the laity are not obscured by ideas expressed more systematically in theoretical treatises by ecclesiastics; a world in which lay collective action and thought take centre stage. Reynolds has written her own Middle Ages, especially in her innovative book Kingdoms and Communities whose influence can be seen in so many of the essays. Collectivities, solidarities and collective action are everywhere in these essays, as Reynolds has shown us to expect them to be. Collective action was carried out often in pursuit of social peace, but it existed precisely because there was discord. Of the narratives and interpretative frameworks with which Reynolds's work has been concerned, the book has least to say directly on the debate over feudalism. The book engages many of the themes of Reynolds's work and pursues some of the issues which are prominent in re-examinations of the medieval world and in studies of the medieval laity. It discusses secular aristocratic attitudes towards judicial combat within the broader setting of fictional 'treason trials' of the later twelfth century. Although kinship did not start out as an explicit and overt theme of the book, it emerges as a leitmotiv, perhaps in part because when feudalism is removed, kinship is thrown into sharper relief.

The ecological eye
  • Assembling an ecocritical art history
  • Andrew Patrizio
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • The ecological eye aims to align the discipline of art history with ecology, climate change, the Anthropocene and the range of politics and theoretical positions that will help to ground such an approach. It looks both backwards and forwards in order to promote the capacities of close attention, vital materialism, nonhierarchy, care and political ecology. The book seeks to place the history of art alongside its ecocritical colleagues in other humanities disciplines. Three main directions are discussed: the diverse histories of art history itself, for evidence of exemplary work already available; the politics of social ecology, Marxist ecologies and anarchy, showing its largely untapped relevance for work in art history and visual culture; and finally, emerging work in posthumanism and new materialism, that challenges unhelpful hierarchies across the human, animal, botanical and geological spheres. The ecological eye concludes with an appeal to the discipline to respond positively to the environmental justice movement.

Debates on Stalinism
  • Mark Edele
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • Debates on Stalinism gives an up-to-date, concise overview of major debates in the history of Stalinism. It introduces readers to changing approaches since the 1950s, and more broadly to scholarly views on this society reaching back to the 1930s. It argues that writing the history of Stalinism is not only about the Soviet past. It is also centrally shaped by current anxieties and concerns of the scholars studying it. In short, there is a politics of writing the history of Stalinism. Combining biographical investigation of leading historians with thematic and chronological analysis of major topics of study, Debates on Stalinism uncovers the history of these politics. The book provides a snapshot of the state of the field and suggests possible future avenues of further research.

Jewish women in europe in the middle ages
  • A quiet revolution
  • Simha Goldin
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • The Jewish society that lived amongst the Christian population in medieval Europe presents a puzzle and a challenge to any historian. This book presents a study on the relationship between men and women within the Jewish society that lived among the Christian population for a period of some 350 years. The study concentrates on Germany, northern France and England from the middle of the tenth century until the middle of the second half of the fourteenth century - by which time the Christian population has had enough of the Jewish communities living among them and expels them from almost all the places they were living in. The picture portrayed by Mishnaic and talmudic literature was that basically women lived under the authority of someone else (their fathers or husbands), therefore, their status was different from that of men. Four paradigms were the outcome of research blending questions raised within the spheres of gender research and feminist theory with the research methodology of social history. These were Rashi and the 'family paradigm'; the negative male paradigm; the Hasidic paradigm; and the community paradigm. The highest level of Jewish religious expression is the performance of the mitzvot - the divine Commandments. Women were not required to perform all the Commandments, yet their desire to perform and fully experience the mitzvot extended to almost all areas of halakhah. The book also describes how the sages attempted to dictate to women the manner of their observance of mitzvot set aside for women alone.

Freedom of speech, 1500–1850
  • Edited by Robert G. Ingram, Jason Peacey, Alex W. Barber
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • This book offers historical reappraisals of freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the early modern anglophone world. Prompted by modern debates about whether or not limitations on free expression might be necessary given religious pluralism and concerns about hate speech, it brings together historians, political theorists and literary scholars, and offers a longue durée approach to the topic. It integrates religion into the history of free speech, and rethinks what is sometimes regarded as a coherent tradition of more or less absolutist justifications for free expression. Contributors examine the aims and effectiveness of government policies, the sometimes messy and contingent ways in which freedom of speech became a reality, and a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts in which contemporaries outlined their ideas and ideals. It is shown that – on this issue at least – the period from 1500 to 1850 is a coherent one, in terms of how successive governments reflected on the possibility of regulation, and in terms of claims that were and were not made for freedom of speech. While not denying that change can be detected across this period, in terms of both ideas and practices, it demonstrates that the issues, arguments and aims involved were more or less distinct from those that characterise modern debates. As a collection it will be of interest to religious and political historians, intellectual historians and literary scholars, and to anyone interested in the history of one of the most important and thorny issues in modern society.

Women of war
  • Gender, modernity and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
  • Juliette Pattinson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • Women of War is an examination of gender modernity using the world’s longest established women’s military organisation, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, as a case study. Formed in 1907 and still active today, the Corps was the first to adopt khaki uniform, prepare for war service, staff a regimental first aid post near the front line and drive officially for the British army in France. It was the only British unit whose members were sworn in as soldiers of the Belgian army, and it was the most decorated women’s corps of the First World War. Bringing both public and personal representations into dialogue through an analysis of newspaper articles, ephemera, memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews, photographs and poetry, this book sits at the crossroads of British, social, gender and women’s history, drawing upon the diverse fields of military history, animal studies, trans studies, dress history, sociology of the professions, nursing history and transport history. It reconstructs the organisation’s formation, its adoption of martial clothing, increased professionalisation, and wartime activities of first aid and driving, focusing specifically upon the significance of gender modernity. While the FANY embodied the New Woman, challenging the limits of convention and pushing back the boundaries of the behavour, dress and role considered appropriate for women, the book argues that the Corps was simultaneously deeply conservative, upholding imperial, unionist and antifeminist values. That it was a complex mix of progressive and conservative elements, both conformist and reformist, gets to the heart of the fascinating complexity surrounding the organisation.

The Shakespearean comic and tragicomic
  • French inflections
  • Richard Hillman
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • This book discusses Shakespeare’s deployment of French material within genres whose dominant Italian models and affinities might seem to leave little scope for French ones. It proposes specific, and unsuspected, points of contact but also a broad tendency to draw on French intertexts, both dramatic and non-dramatic, to inflect comic forms in potentially tragic directions. The resulting tensions within the genre are evident from the earliest comedies to the latest tragicomedies (or ‘romances’). An introduction establishes the French inflection of Italian modes and models, beginning with The Taming of the Shrew, as a compositional paradigm and the basis for an intertextual critical approach. Next, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is related to three French intertexts highlighting, respectively, its use of pastoral dramatic convention, its colouration by the histoire tragique and its parodic dramatisation of the Pyramus and Thisbe story. The third chapter interrogates the ‘French’ settings found in the romantic comedies, while the fourth applies French intertexts to three middle-to-late comedies as experiments in tragicomedy. Finally, the distinctive form given tragicomedy (or ‘romance’) in Shakespeare’s late production is set against the evolution of tragicomedy in France and related to French intertexts that shed new light on the generic synthesis achieved—and the degree of bricolage employed in achieving it.

Medieval law in context
  • The growth of legal consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt
  • Anthony Musson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
  • This book is intended as both a history of judicial developments in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and as a contribution to the intellectual history of the period. The dates 1215 and 1381 mark significant turning points in English history. The product of legal culture and experiences, 'legal consciousness' can be seen both as an active element shaping people's values, beliefs and aspirations and also as a passive agent providing a reserve of knowledge, memory and reflective thought, influencing not simply the development of the law and legal system, but also political attitudes. Focusing on the different contexts of law and legal relations, the book aims to shift the traditional conceptual boundaries of 'law', portraying both the law's inherent diversity and its multi-dimensional character. By offering a re-conceptualisation of the role of the law in medieval England, the book aims to engage the reader in new ways of thinking about the political events occurring during these centuries. It considers the long-term effects of civil lawyer, Master John Appleby's encounter with forces questioning royal government and provides a new explanation for the dangerous state of affairs faced by the boy-king during the Peasants' Revolt over a century and a half later. The book puts forward the view that the years subsequent to the signing of Magna Carta yielded a new (and shifting) perspective, both in terms of prevailing concepts of 'law' and 'justice' and with regard to political life in general.

Page 1335 of 67795