In "Medicine Show", inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and...

Fireworks are synonymous with celebration in the twenty-first century. But pyrotechnics – in the form of rockets, crackers, wheels, and bombs – have exploded in sparks and noise to delight audiences in Europe ever since the Renaissance. Here, Simon W...

It is often assumed that natural philosophy was the forerunner of early modern natural sciences. But where did these sciences' systematic observation and experimentation get their starts? In "Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe", the labor...

In this lively work, Beatrice K. Otto takes us on a journey around the world in search of one of the most colorful characters in history – the court jester. Though not always clad in cap and bells, these witty, quirky characters crop up everywhere, f...

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or e...

Mieke Bal has had a significant impact on every field she has touched, from Old Testament scholarship and narratology to critical methods and visual culture. This brilliant and controversial intellectual invariably performs a high-wire act at the poi...

How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelso...

The first edition of this book, published in 1994, reshaped the direction of landscape studies by considering landscape not simply as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as an instrument of cultural force, a central tool in the creation of...

A profound visual meditation on the trauma that scars twentieth-century Europe, Alan Cohen's "On European Ground" considers the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps, and the Berlin Wall, and records the distance between what we remember...