A full-color travel guide to Northern France, with comprehensive descriptions of all sights and attractions, and practical information. This guide covers the whole of this fascinating region in detail - from Calais and Lille in the north to Paris, Normandy, Brittany, the Loire Valley and Burgundy - with full-color photographs and maps throughout. The Features section focuses on the region's history, including its recent role in two World Wars.

This story is significant for all who are fascinated by the capacity of human groups to respond and adapt creatively to a hostile and limiting environment.

This guide provides full details of what to see in an area that stretches from the Belgian border to the river Somme. It suggests entertaining outings for all ages and provides a selection of hotels, B&Bs and restaurants.

"The different ways in which a language may be pronounced is not only a constant source of fascination for speakers and learners, but also a powerful symbol of regional identity. Using recordings of spontaneous speech by working-class speakers from an urban, industrial environment in northern France, Tim Pooley traces the development of the urban vernacular of the Lille area - often referred to as Chtimi - from a traditional patois to a variety of Regional French against the background of the social changes that have occurred in the speakers' lifetimes." "The result is, firstly, a study in sociolinguistic variation (both from the structural and sociolinguistic viewpoints); secondly, an analysis of language shift in a context where the obsolescent language is closely related to the dominant variety; and thirdly, a detailed analysis of the key features of the phonology and grammar of northern Regional French." "It is also one of the first studies concerned with France to show how network factors may influence speakers' use of French."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The grain trade, a crucial sector of the French economy, caused enormous concern throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls triggered unrest. The royal government had only the most scattershot and ineffective means to draw foodstuffs into restless cities. Successive regimes developed strategies to dominate the baking trades, influence prices along vital supply lines, and amass emergency stocks of grain that could meet months-long demand. As free trade ideologies developed, French administrators at both the national and local levels sought to reconcile these ideologies with the perceived need to control the market. They created increasingly hidden, and effective, means to shape the grain trade. Thus, the French state played an instrumental role in establishing a viable form of free trade.

Ten years ago, Janine Marsh decided to leave her corporate life behind to fix up a run-down barn in northern France. This is the true story of her rollercoaster ride.

Medieval Violence provides a detailed analysis of the practice of medieval brutality, focusing on a thriving region of northern France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It examines how violence was conceptualised in this period, and uses this framework to investigate street violence, tavern brawls, urban rebellions, student misbehaviour, and domestic violence. The interactions between these various forms of violence are examined in order to demonstrate the complex and communicative nature of medieval brutality. What is often dismissed as dysfunctional behaviour is shown to have been highly strategic and socially integral. Violence was a performance, dependent upon the spaces in which it took place. Indeed, brutality was contingent upon social and cultural structures. At the same time, the common stereotype of the thoughtlessly brutal Middle Ages is challenged, as attitudes towards violence are revealed to have been complex, troubled, and ambivalent. Whether violence could function effectively as a form of communication which could order and harmonise society, or whether it inevitably degenerated into chaotic disorder where meaning was multivalent and incomprehensible, remained a matter of ongoing debate in a variety of contexts. Using a variety of source material, including legal records, popular literature, and sermons, Hannah Skoda explores experiences of, and attitudes towards, violence, and highlights profound contemporary ambiguity concerning its nature and legitimacy.