The Middle Dutch term schaec referred to abduction with marital intent. This book explores this phenomenon to understand wider attitudes towards marriage-making in the fifteenth-century Low Countries. Whilst exchanging words of consent was all that was required legally, making marriage was a social process that evok...

The evolution of the game industry and changes in the advertising landscape in recent years have led to a keen interest of marketers in using digital games for advertising purposes. However, despite the increasing interest in this marketing strategy, the potential of digital games as a medium to convey advertising m...

In this edited volume, eighteen scholars examine the increasing role of digital media technologies in identity construction through play. Going beyond computer games, this interdisciplinary collection argues that present-day play and games are not only appropriate metaphors for capturing postmodern human identities,...

This timely book takes an original transnational approach to the theme of Nazism and neo-Nazism in film, media, and popular culture, with examples drawn from mainland Europe, the UK, North and Latin America, Asia, and beyond. This approach fits with the established dominance of global multimedia formats, and will be...

In an effort to fight climate change, many cities try to boost their cycling levels. They often look towards the Dutch for guidance. However, historians have only begun to uncover how and why the Netherlands became the premier cycling country of the world. Why were Dutch cyclists so successful in their fight for a p...

This rich study provides a comprehensive introduction to media philosophy while offering a new perspective on the concept and function of transmission media in all systems of exchange. Krämer uses the figure of the messenger as a key metaphor, examining a diverse range of transmission events, including the circulati...

Increasingly, young people live online, with the vast majority of their social and cultural interactions conducted through means other than face-to-face conversation. How does this transition impact the ways in which young migrants understand, negotiate, and perform identity? That's the question taken up by Digital ...

The historical experiences of workers organizing in Europe and the United States figure among the many forms of workers' resistance resulting from the variety of labour relations in the global past. They cannot and will not be uniformly duplicated or copied from their present form in the global transformations of la...

With the birth of the cult of the saints, their relics became valuables whose possession would guarantee prestige, protection, and spiritual benefits to a town, church, or monastery. For this reasonーat first with the aim of preserving the bodies of newly-executed martyrs from destruction and later of increasing the...

Human trafficking has become a global concern over the last twenty years, but its violence has terrorized and traumatized its victims and survivors for millennia. This study examines the deep history of human trafficking from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. It traces the evolution of trafficking patterns:...

In the mid nineteenth century, as Japan rapidly modernized, garden building declined in popularity. Only in the late nineteenth century did a new class of political and business leaders revive interest in horticulture, seeking garden designs that broke away from established patterns. As a result, these innovative ga...

The seven articles in this edited volume address the complex meanings that visual representations of plants and animals gained in early modern China and Japan. They aim to understand animals and plants in the new contexts of empirical and epistemological concerns, political and social agendas, and cultural interests...

One of the main challenges in labour relations in Europe is the ongoing decentralisation of collective bargaining from national and sectoral levels to company levels. Decentralisation might be an answer to business needs in competitiveness and organisational flexibility. However, it risks erosion of collective barga...

This book, full of quantitative evidence and limited-circulation archives, details manufacturing and the beginnings of industrialisation in China from 1644 to 1911. It thoroughly examines the interior organisation of public craft production and the complementary activities of the private sector. It offers detailed k...

There is a tension between the requirements of theoretical abstraction and the capacities of the film medium, where everything that we see on screen is concrete: A train arriving at a station, a tree, bodies, faces. Since the complex theories of montage in Soviet cinema, however, there have continuously been attempt...

New online technologies have brought with them a great promise of freedom. The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. Furthermore, lay people and amateurs have been enthusiastically greeted as heroes of the digital...