This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is m...

What unleashed the forces of global capitalism which continue to shape the world that we live in? Economists and economic historians variously point to innovations in logistics and trade, the emergence of a new set of business-friendly values and the emergence of new forms of applied knowledge in early modernity to ...

The Dutch and English East India Companies were formidable organizations that were gifted with expansive powers that allowed them to conduct diplomacy, wage war and seize territorial possessions. But they did not move into an empty arena in which they were free to deploy these powers without resistance. Early modern...

This book presents the bold and original proposal to replace the general appellation of ‘world cinema’ with the more substantive concept of ‘realist cinema’. Veering away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, it locates instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. The volume is struct...

What did it mean to be a 'go-between' in the early modern world? How were such figures perceived in sixteenth and seventeenth century England? And what effect did their movement between languages, countries, religions and social spaces – whether enforced or voluntary – have on the ways in which people navigated ques...

The role played by women in the evolution of religious art and architecture has been largely neglected. This study of upper-class women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries corrects that oversight, uncovering the active role they undertook in choosing designs, materials, and locations for monuments, commissionin...

This book reconstructs the factional-ideological conflicts surrounding socialist transformation and political reform in China that were played out through ‘factional model-making’, a norm-bound mechanism for elites of the Chinese Communist Party to contest the party line publicly. Dazhai, Anhui, Nanjie, Shekou, Shen...

Integration politics in the Netherlands has changed dramatically between 1990 and 2005. Whereas ethnic and religious differences were hitherto pacified through accommodation, a new and increasingly powerful current in Dutch politics problematized the presence of minorities. This development represents a challenge to...

This collection embraces the increasing interest in the material world of the Renaissance and the early modern period, which has both fascinated contemporaries and initiated in recent years a distinguished historiography. The scholarship within is distinctive for engaging with the agentive qualities of matter, showi...

In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the ...

The twentieth century has been called, not inaccurately, a century of genocide. And the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen little change, with genocidal violence in Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria. Why is genocide so widespread, and so difficult to stop, across societies that differ so much culturall...

The Wadden Sea Region is comprised of the embanked coastal marshes and islands in the Wadden Sea near Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. This area retains an exceptional common history in all its aspects: archaeologically, economically, socially, and culturally. Its settlement history of more than two thousand y...

As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practic...

We live in an era of screens. No longer just the place where we view movies, or watch TV at night, screens are now ubiquitous, the source of the majority of information we consume daily, and a crucial component of our basic interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. This transformation has happened almost wi...

Thanks to modern technology, we are now living in an age of multiplatform fictional worlds, as television, film, the Internet, graphic novels, toys and more facilitate the creation of diverse yet compact imaginary universes, which are often recognisable as brands and exhibit well-defined identities. This volume, sit...

Algorithms have risen to become one, if not the central technology for producing, circulating, and evaluating knowledge in multiple societal arenas. In this book, scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and computer science argue that this shift has, and will continue to have, profound implications for how kn...