Open Access Titles

Essays on a diverse range of topics, presenting the latest research on themes of gender, religion, warfare, the built environment and chronicle-writing of the period.


This collection brings into dialogue scholarship on social, religious, economic, military and political history, offering exciting new insights into a range of topics, based upon meticulous research into published and unpublished archival records. Two studies reveal the influence of gendered norms and expectations at different ends of the social spectrum, one focussing on peasant women charged with extramarital sex known as leyrwite, the other on the martial achievements and expectations of Edward III. Several essays examine patronage, property investment and the built environment, with actors ranging from the papacy to religious guilds and members of the gentry. Further contributions provide new perspectives on conflict and violence: a re-examination of how the Peasants' Revolt was recorded in the Anonimalle Chronicle, a consideration of how armies were recruited at the time of civil war in 1321-22, and an investigation of the life and career of Henry Crystede, an Englishman fighting in Ireland.

Based on private diaries, correspondence, and unpublished writings, George Rochberg, American Composer, reveals the impact of personal trauma on the creative and intellectual work of a leading postmodern composer.

George Rochberg, American Composer, is the first comprehensive study devoted to tracing and putting into a rich cultural context the career of George Rochberg, widely acknowledged as one of the most prominent musical postmodernists. Drawing from unpublished materials including diaries, letters, sketches, and personal papers, the book traces the impact of two specific personal traumas--Rochberg's service as an infantryman in World War II and the premature death of his son--on his work as a leading composer, college educator, and public intellectual.

The book significantly expands our understanding of Rochberg's creative work by reconstructing and examining the earliest seeds of his aesthetic thinking--which took root while he served in Patton's Third Army--and following their development through his mature compositional period into the final stages of his long career. It argues that Rochberg's military service was a transformative life experience for the young humanist, one that crucially shaped his worldview and influenced his artistic creativity for the next sixty years. As such it reveals personal trauma and aesthetic recovery to be the basis of Rochberg's postwar ideas about humanism, musical quotation, and neotonality.

Amy Lynn Wlodarski is associate professor of music at Dickinson College.

Support for this publication was provided by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Presenting a range of ethnographic case studies from around the globe, this edited collection offers new ways of thinking about the interconnectivity of gender, place, and emotion in musical performance.

While ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have long recognized the theoretical connections between gender, place, and emotion in musical performance, these concepts are seldom analyzed together. Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music is the first book-length study to examine the interweaving of these three concepts from a cross-cultural perspective. Contributors show how a theoretical focus one dimension implicates the others, creating anexus of performative engagement. This process is examined across different regions around the globe, through two key questions: How are aesthetic, emotional, and imagined relations between performers and places embodied musically? And in what ways is this performance of emotion gendered across quotidian, ritual, and staged events?
Through ethnographic case studies, the volume explores issues of emplacement, embodiment, and emotion in three parts: landscape and emotion; memory and attachment; and nationalism and indigeneity. Part I focuses on emplaced sentiments in Australasia through Vietnamese spirit possession, Balinese dance, and land rights in Aboriginal performance. Part II addresses memories of Aboriginal choral singing, belonging in Bavarian music-making, and gender-performativity in Polish song. Part III evaluates emotion and fandom around a Korean singer in Japan, and Sámi interconnectivities in traditional and modern musical practices. Beverley Diamond provides a thought-provoking commentary in the afterword.

Contributors: Beverley Diamond, Fiona Magowan, Jonathan McIntosh, Barley Norton, Tina K. Ramnarine, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Sara R. Walmsley-Pledl, Louise Wrazen, Christine Yano.

Fiona Magowan is Professor of Anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast.
Louise Wrazen is Associate Professor of Music at York University.

Chapter 9 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY. The open access version of this publication was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Globalized Peripheries examines the commodity flows and financial ties within Central and Eastern Europe in order to situate these regions as important contributors to Atlantic trade networks.

The early modern Atlantic world, with its flows of bullion, of free and unfree labourers, of colonial produce and of manufactures from Europe and Asia, with mercantile networks and rent-seeking capital, has to date been described almost entirely as the preserve of the Western sea powers. More recent scholarship has rediscovered the dense entanglements with Central and Eastern Europe. Globalized Peripheries goes further by looking beyond slavery and American plantations. Contributions look at the trading practices and networks of merchants established in Central and Eastern Europe, investigate commodity flows between these regions and the Atlantic world, and explore the production of export commodities, two-way migration as well as financial ties. The volume uncovers new economic and financial connections between Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, Russia, as well as northern and western Germany with the Atlantic world. Its period coverage connects the end of the early modern world with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Chapter 10 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. The open access version of this publication was funded by the European University Viadrina.

An exploration of the major conflicts and historic events that shaped the current Israeli health care system. In this follow-up to her 2002 book, The Workers' Health Fund in Eretz, Israel: Kupat Holim, 1911-1937, historian Shifra Shvarts investigates the political and social forces that influenced Israel's health care system and policy during the early years of state building. Among the struggles Shvarts explores in this penetrating study are the debate over immigration health policy and the Law of Return, enacted in 1950; the battles over universal healthcare between the Workers' Health Fund and the Israeli government led by prime minister Ben Gurion; the urgent organization of military medical services during wartime; and the contested establishment of renown civilian medical facilities.
These early conflicts have had far-reaching implications that continue to be felt throughout Israeli society. While many European countries successfully established unified, state-run health care systems, Israel's political rivalries and social turbulence gave rise to a mélange of "sick funds," large and small, public and private, that influence and complicate the delivery of health care to this day. Health and Zionism: The Israeli HealthCare System, 1948-1960, sheds light on the major conflicts, leaders, and historic events that shaped the current Israeli health care system, and has relevance to developing health care systems worldwide.

Shifra Shvarts is Associate Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University, Israel, and is author of The Workers' Health Fund in Eretz Israel Kupat Holim, 1911-1937 (University of Rochester Press, 2002).

A groundbreaking analysis of 21st century labour practices in the mining industry and the new scramble for industrial power on the African continent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, African countries with mineral resources have witnessed an unprecedented rise in foreign direct investments and the development of new flexible workforce management practices in the mining industry. But what does this mean for those who actually work in this industry? Based on research in the Congo and Zambia, where a mining boom has led to more than thirty new mining projects in recent years, this book explores the processes of improvisation and adaptation behind the emergence of this neoliberal labour regime. The contributors show how mining projects' labour practices have been mediated, negotiated, or resisted by mine workers, unionists, and human resource managers. They discuss variations in labour practices put in place by new mining projects depending on the type of capital involved, the type of mine being developed, and their location. Finally, the book examines the implications of power dynamics surrounding companies' labour strategies from the broader perspective of the responsibility of trade unions, gender equality, and identity politics.

Kyiv as Regime City charts the resettlement of the Ukrainian capital after Nazi occupation, focusing on the efforts of returning Soviet rulers to regain legitimacy within a Moscow-centered regime still attending to the warfront. Beginning with the Ukrainian Communists' inability to both purge their capital city of "socially dangerous" people and prevent the arrival of "unorganized" evacuees from the rear, this book chronicles how a socially and ethnically diverse milieu of Kyivans reassembled after many years of violence and terror.

While the Ukrainian Communists successfully guarded entry into their privileged, elite ranks and monitored the masses' mood toward their superiors in Moscow, the party failed to conscript a labor force and rebuild housing, leading the Stalin regime to adopt new tactics to legitimize itself among the large Ukrainian and Jewish populations who once again called the city home. Drawing on sources from the once-closed central, regional, and local archives of the former Soviet Union, this study is essential reading for those seeking to understand how the Kremlin reestablished its power in Kyiv, consolidating its regime as the Cold War with the United States began.

Martin J. Blackwell is Visiting Professor of History at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.

Explores the variety of legal and regulatory regimes that existed in Western Europe to control labour and how workers experienced those controls.

Many economic historians have assumed that labour in Western Europe was 'free' after the end of serfdom in the fifteenth century. These assumptions are increasingly being questioned and labour laws have been identified as creating significant restrictions on workers' freedom. This collection is the first book to look at labour laws across Western Europe from a longer-term perspective. It is interdisciplinary in nature bringing together studies in social, political, economic and legal history.

Elements of labour legislation appeared before the Black Death, but were strengthened afterwards particularly in places and periods where labour became scarce. The collection focuses on the rural economy in the late medieval and early modern period. It provides a series of studies which introduce a range of approaches to labour regulation and the very idea of labour across Europe. Uniquely, the collection offers observations on the impact of labour laws on everyday social relations. Attempts to regulate work and labour varied widely: in places they amounted to wishful thinking on the part of the regional authorities, whereas elsewhere they could impose severe limitations on individual freedoms.

Contributors: Davide Cristoferi, Theresa Johnsson, Thijs Lambrecht, Charmian Mansell, Francine Michaud, Hanne Østhus, Raffaella Sarti, Carolina Uppenberg and Jane Whittle.

Examines the new challenges facing Africa's pastoral drylands from large-scale investments and how this might affect the economic and political landscape for the regions affected and their peoples.



More than ever before, the gaze of global investment has been directed to the drylands of Africa, but what does this mean for these regions' pastoralists and other livestock-keepers and their livelihoods? Will those who have occupied drylands over generations benefit from the developments, as claimed, or is this a new type of territorialisation, exacerbating social inequality?
This book's detailed local studies of investments at various stages of development - from Kenya, Tanzania, Somaliland, Ethiopia - explore, for the first time, how large land, resource and infrastructure projects shape local politics and livelihoods. Land and resources use, based on ancestral precedenceand communal practices, and embedded regional systems of trade, are unique to these areas, yet these lands are now seen as the new frontier for development of national wealth. By examining the ways in which large-scale investmentsenmesh with local political and social relations, the chapters show how even the most elaborate plans of financiers, contractors and national governments come unstuck and are re-made in the guise of not only states' grand modernist visions, but also those of herders and small-town entrepreneurs in the pastoral drylands. The contributors also demonstrate how and why large-scale investments have advanced in a more piecemeal way as the challenges of implementation have mounted.

JEREMY LIND is Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex. DORIS OKENWA holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics. IAN SCOONES is a Professorial Fellow at the IDS, University of Sussex and co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre.

The Introduction and Chapter 14 are available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. The open access version of this publication was funded by IDS Sussex.

Sheds new light on European and regional book markets, the development of a public sphere and the impact of new media on intellectual, social, religious and political change.

How do you become a citizen? Ever since printing was introduced, being a member of society increasingly involved reading and writing: for sociability and belonging, instruction and entertainment, profit and charity, spiritual awakening and political debate. Literary practices shaped and changed identities and the organisation of society during the Long Eighteenth Century. In Scandinavia, this happened locally, as well as transnationally - reading, writing and producing texts involved entanglements within and beyond the borders of the Northern European periphery of Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

Focusing on 'literary citizenship', this volume uncovers the different ways in which engagements with print have mediated and established networks and communities, identities and agencies of multiple sorts in an interconnected media landscape. The result is a complex and intriguing history of the book in the Scandinavian region. This history is, on the one hand, influenced by a European market and tradition. On the other hand, it offers an important and different case of regional and local adaptation, marked by what has been termed a 'Northern Enlightenment'.

This book will be of interest to scholars of European enlightenment studies and to those who are interested in the continuing debates surrounding print culture and history.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC.

This book and the research upon which it is based was supported by funds from The Research Council of Norway and the National Library of Norway.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Jon Haarberg, Ruth Hemstad, Thor Inge Rørvik, Ellen Krefting, Karin Kukkonen, Ulrik Langen, Aina Nøding, Jonas Nordin, James Raven, Janicke S. Kaasa, Karen Skovgaard-Petersen, Frederik Stjernfelt, Iver Tangen Stensrud and Jonas Thorup Thomsen.

This OA eBook edition published in December 2023

The first collection of essays in the English language dedicated to the cultural achievements and politics of one of the most important ruling houses of late medieval Europe.

The house of Luxembourg between 1308 and 1437 is best known today for its principal royal and imperial representatives, Henry VII, John the Blind, Charles IV, and Charles's two sons, Wenceslas and Sigismund - a group of rulers who, for better or worse, shaped the political destiny of much of Europe during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. While some of the Luxembourg cultural legacy can still be experienced directly today in and around Prague and southern Germany, and through the literary and musical works of Machaut, Froissart, and Wolkenstein, it reached much further across Europe: from England to present-day Romania, and from the Baltic Sea to the Italian peninsula, alongside the dynasty's homelands in what is now Luxembourg, Belgium and France. However, this culture has not always attracted the scholarly attention it deserves.

This volume explores the pan-European impact and influence of the Luxembourgs in a variety of fields: art and architectural history, material culture, Czech, French, German and Latin text production, gender and intellectual history, and music. Embracing the subject matter from multi-disciplinary and transnational perspectives, the essays here offer new insights into the late medieval cultures of the Luxembourg court. Particular subjects treated include the making of the "Wenceslas Bible"; Machaut at the court of John of Luxembourg; and Charles IV's patronage of multilingual literature.

On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND.

Draws on the rich surviving archives of the Tuscan port of Livorno to explore how General Average worked.

Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant's cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by the shipper and all the cargo-owners. A risk-sharing practice, different from the risk-shifting of marine insurance which became established relatively late, General Average is still in widespread use.

This book explores how General Average worked. It reveals the gap between General Average in law and how it worked on the ground. It shows how General Average partitioned a wide array of business costs, thereby performing a significant role in structuring maritime commerce, managing risk and promoting shipping and trade. In addition, the book discusses how far General Average was a feature of a supposedly ancient, universal, customary maritime law, and contributes to debates about the evolution of institutions in economic development.