Selected writings illuminate a century of international dance.

The cradle of ballet, tracing the origin of ballet as a theatre art back to its foundation by Louis XIV in 1669.

In contrast to the role traditionally fulfilled by secular rulers, the pope has been perceived as an individual person existing in a body subject to decay and death, yet at the same time a corporeal representation of Christ and the Church, eternity and salvation. Using an array of evidence from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, Agostino Paravicini- Bagliani addresses this paradox. He studies the rituals, metaphors, and images of the pope's body as they developed over time and shows how they resulted in the expectation that the pope's body be simultaneously physical and metaphorical. Also included is a particular emphasis on the thirteenth century when, during the pontificate of Boniface VIII (1294-1303), the papal court became the focus of medicine and the natural sciences as physicians devised ways to protect the pope's health and prolong his life. Masterfully translated from the Italian, this engaging history of the pope's body provides a new perspective for readers to understand the papacy, both historically and in our own time.

This is the first book-length study of the rich operatic repertory written and performed in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Steven Huebner gives an accessible and colorful account of such operatic favorites as Manon and Werther by Massenet, Louise by Charpentier, and lesser-known gems such as Chabrier's Le Roi malgré lui and Chausson's Le Roi Arthus.

An examination of the female opera singer during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The area of research on printed word recognition has been one of the most active in the field of experimental psychology for well over a decade. However, notwithstanding the energetic research effort and despite the fact that there are many points of consensus, major controversies still exist.This volume is particularly concerned with the putative relationship between language and reading. It explores the ways by which orthography, phonology, morphology and meaning are interrelated in the reading process. Included are theoretical discussions as well as reviews of experimental evidence by leading researchers in the area of experimental reading studies. The book takes as its primary issue the question of the degree to which basic processes in reading reflect the structural characteristics of language such as phonology and morphology. It discusses how those characteristics can shape a language's orthography and affect the process of reading from word recognition to comprehension.Contributed by specialists, the broad-ranging mix of articles and papers not only gives a picture of current theory and data but a view of the directions in which this research area is vigorously moving.