Tracks the history of concepts and practices associated with the physical crossroads in the early modern periodBreaks new ground in the area of literary geography and enhances the historical understanding of the place of the crossroads in literary and cultural discourseUnifies various discourses of early modern culture and subjectivity in terms of the experience and understanding of the crossroadsLocates issues around the ideology and experience of the road in one specific culturally significant placeFocusing on the crossroads in the early modern period, this book deals with the literature and history of the physical crossroads: it's magical and religious encounters, rituals of transformation, binding of undesirable spirits, siting of gallows, associations with music, and links to ancient cosmology. Physical crossroads have been culturally vital sites where forces human, demonic and divine were felt to converge. Crossroads have seemed to render the boundaries between these spheres negotiable, subject to certain artifice and timing. They gave access to gods and facilitated deals with devils, they were potent sites for rituals intended to influence lovers or harm enemies and provided both a dramatic stage for communal activities and a burial ground for the unwanted dead cast out in ceremonies of the night.

This book investigates the importance of printing in early-modern Central Europe, revealing a complicated web of connections linking printers and scholars, Jews and Christians, from the Baltic to the Adriatic.

Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.

In Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473-1640, twelve scholars assemble the latest interdisciplinary research in the fields of translation and print in Britain and appraise for the first time the connection between the two. The section Translation and Early Print discusses how translation shaped the beginnings of British book production. 'Translation, Fiction and Print' examines some Italian and Spanish literary translations and their paratexts. Instruction through Translation demonstrates how translators established an international fund of knowledge. Shaping Mind and Nation through Translation focusses on translations specifically disseminating knowledge of medicine, navigation, military matters, and news. The volume constitutes a timely contribution to the ever-expanding fields of translation studies and print history but is also relevant to cultural, social and intellectual history.

A “wide-ranging, vivid” narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean (The Observer). Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba and its rich, important history. After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. These fraught years gave way to a booming age of sugar, horrendous slavery, and extravagant wealth, as well as the Haitian Revolution and the long struggles for independence that ushered in the modern era. Gibson tells not only of imperial expansion—European and American—but also of life as it is lived in the islands, from before Columbus through the tumultuous twentieth century. Told “in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes,” Empire’s Crossroads provides an essential account of five centuries of history (Foreign Affairs). “Judicious, readable and extremely well-informed . . . Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; [Gibson] takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost

In this fully updated, second edition of Crossroads, Jim Baker adds two new chapters that bring Malaysia and Singapore into the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. The original text (which traces the complex currents of history and politics of Malaysia and Singapore—neighbours with a common past) is also revised to re-evaluate events in the context of an expanded history. “Jim Baker’s Crossroads is bound to raise more than a few eyebrows in more than a few quarters. His book presents a side of history not many may be aware of or even want to know … it is as thought-provoking as it is enlightening.” — The Sun (on the first edition). “Baker’s thrilling book profits from his refusal to separate Singapore’s history from Malaysia’s. What we get is a broad story filled with surprising details drawn from his own experiences and from other scholarly works, and told in an easy and captivating style.” — Dr Ooi Kee Beng, Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.