Manneken Pis, a fountain featuring a bronze child urinating, has stood on the same Brussels street corner since at least the mid-fifteenth century. Since there is no consensus on its meaning, it has been used to express many different readings of social relations in a complex city and nation state. It has formed part of the festival culture of the city - from royal entries to gay pride - but has also been exploited in conflicts arising out of war and occupation, and the tensions inherent in modern Belgium. Drawing on archives, histories, police reports, devotional literature, ephemera and a wealth of other sources, Catherine Emerson examines how one smaller-than-lifesized water source has come to embody a certain sort of Brussels identity.

Manneken Pis, a fountain featuring a bronze child urinating, has stood on the same Brussels street corner since at least the mid-fifteenth century. Since there is no consensus on its meaning, it has been used to express many different readings of social relations in a complex city and nation state. It has formed part of the festival culture of the city - from royal entries to gay pride - but has also been exploited in conflicts arising out of war and occupation, and the tensions inherent in modern Belgium. Drawing on archives, histories, police reports, devotional literature, ephemera and a wealth of other sources, Catherine Emerson examines how one smaller-than-lifesized water source has come to embody a certain sort of Brussels identity.

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s history of the urinating figure in art, Pissing Figures 1280–2014, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an important visual motif, and a ribald statement on transgression and limits in works of art in general. Lebensztejn is one of France’s best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but dedicated group of cognoscenti. First introducing the Manneken Pis—the iconic little boy whose stream of urine supplies water to this famous fountain and is also the logo for a Belgian beer company—the author takes the reader through a semi-scatological maze of cultural history. The earliest example is a fresco scene located directly above Cimabue’s Crucifixion from around 1280 at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Lebensztejn’s careful eye locates an angel behind a pillar who looks like he is about to urinate through a hole in his garment. He continues to navigate expertly through cultural twists and turns, stopping to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema, for example, and Marlene Dumas’s 1996–1997 homage to Rembrandt’s pissing woman. At every moment, Lebensztejn’s prose is lively, his thinking dynamic, and his subject matter entertaining. In this short and poignant cultural history, readers not only find the care for detail that has made Lebensztejn into one of the greatest European art historians, but also the rebelliousness that makes him one of the most interesting intellectuals of our time. The first widely distributed book of Lebensztejn’s in English, Pissing Figures 1280–2014 is simultaneously published in France by Éditions Macula.

Most people think they have Flanders - the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium - figured out: beer, chocolate and the EU are the standard tag lines. However, dig beneath the surface and you will discover a region of quirk and style. Author Emma Thomson introduces travellers not only to the World Heritage Sites of Brussels' Grand Place or Bruges' romantic canals but also to snug spots, like the bewitched village of Laarne and Geraardsbergen, the real home of Manneken-Pis. Flanders provides something for everyone: the city-break or business tourist seeking restaurants and shopping; the wildlife and outdoor enthusiast after bird-watching and rural walks; the traveller wishing to seek out towns, villages and countryside off the beaten track; and the visitor in search of luxury and pampering. Dress up and join the merry madness of Aalst Carnival, spend the night in a traditional begijnhof, or simply people-watch over a bowl of mosselen-friet in Bruges' medieval town square. Entertaining and instructing in equal measure, Bradt's Flanders is the first guidebook to cover the entire region in depth. Join Emma Thomson on a journey along romantic canals, through bewitched villages and to bohemian cafés in this beguiling corner of Europe. Proost!

This selection of peer-reviewed essays is taken from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium Intercultural Spaces: Language, Culture, Identity, hosted by Dublin City University in November 2003. It brings together a fascinating range of scholarly interpretations of the 'intercultural space' with rich contributions coming from the fields of sociology, politics, language teaching and learning, translation, drama, literature, and history. Individually each essay draws the reader into its own particular 'intercultural space' shaped by the norms and parameters of the discipline within which it is being described. As a collection, however, the essays link these usually separate spaces together to forge new and exciting interdisciplinary connections. This collection offers readers from many different disciplines a comprehensive array of interpretations and insights into the phenomenon that is the 'intercultural space', and invites them to explore the richness of this concept as it is revealed in Intercultural Spaces: Language, Culture, Identity.