For sale in CIS only! The Danube is the longest river in western and central Europe. Rising amidst the beautiful wooded hills of Germany's Black Forest, it touches or winds its way through ten countries and four capital cities before emptying into t...

During the week before Labor Day every year, 35,000 people gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a 40-foot wooden effigy of a man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revo...

Whether it is used as an icebreaker in conversation or as the subject of serious inquiry, "the weather" is one of the few subjects that everyone talks about. And though we recognize the faces that bring us the weather on television, how government me...

In the late medieval era, pain could be a symbol of holiness, disease, sin, or truth. It could be encouragement to lead a moral life, a punishment for wrong doing, or a method of healing. Exploring the varied depictions and descriptions of pain – fro...

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...

For sale in CIS only! Before Russians crossed the Urals Mountains in the sixteenth century to settle their "colony" in North Asia, they heard rumours about bountiful fur, of bizarre people without eyes who ate by shrugging their shoulders and of a l...

It is easy to forget in our own day of cheap paperbacks and mega-bookstores that until very recently books were luxury items. Those who could not afford to buy had to borrow, share, obtain secondhand, inherit, or listen to others reading. This book e...

In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires and offers the first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. From the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized e...

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...