What happens when two art forms – the literary and the visual arts – come together? For its bicentenary, the Mauritshuis asked 200 writers to draw inspiration from the museum’s collection. The crème de la crème of today's literary community, from at home and abroad, participated in this remarkable book. One writer; one work of art from the Mauritshuis; 200 words per contribution – never before have so many authors appeared together in a single publication. To name just a few of the ...

In the later Roman period the North Sea and Channel region was the scene of seaborne attacks, political crises, army reforms, Germanic invasions and changing imperial defence strategies. Literary evidence for this era is poor. On the other hand the Shore forts can yield highly significant information, but have been subject to little study in recent decades. At the Belgian coastal fort at Oudenburg large-scale excavations in the first decade of the 21st century revealed a strikingly well-prese...

This book discusses various aspects of city gates in the Western Roman Empire: Italy, Spain, Gaul, Germany and Britain. In these countries many Roman city gates are to be found, sometimes still in a good condition, like the Porta Nigra in Trier and the Porta Appia in Rome.

Similarly to medieval or early-modern city gates, Roman city gates did not all have the same design but show an evolution over time and depending on the circumstances: sometimes they appear as simple, narrow passages (which...

This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe: Doggerland. Few people know that the beaches along the North Sea lie on the edge of a vast lost world. A prehistoric landscape that documents almost a million years of human habitation and lay dry for most of that time.

Doggerland is where early hominids left the first footprints in northern Europe, more than 900,000 years ago. Later, for hundreds of thousands of year...

A History of Suriname presents the first comprehensive overview in English to cover the distant past as well as current events in the former Dutch colony located on the Wild Coast of South America where Spanish and English adventurers once presumed El Dorado. This study concerns original Indigenous inhabitants, the arrival of enslaved Africans who toiled away on plantations, the colonial economy with its trade relations with both Europe and North America, the immigration of Asian indentured l...

Plants have constituted the basis of human subsistence. This volume focuses on plant food ingredients that were consumed by the members of past societies and on the ways these ingredients were transformed into food. The thirty chapters of this book unfold the story of culinary transformation of cereals, pulses as well as of a wide range of wild and cultivated edible plants.

Regional syntheses provide insights on plant species choices and changes over time and fragments of recipes locked insi...

The Caribbean region faces particular environmental challenges as a result of colonial land use, pressures from tourism and globalisation, as well as climate change. No less affected are its heritage resources, which include natural and cultural elements crucial to economic survival and local identity. This research explores the relationship between land, law and heritage in order to better understand the regulatory failures that undermine heritage protection in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Using a spatial justice lens to examine the legal framework of eight islands in the Lesser Antilles, the analysis posits that domestic heritage laws are ineffective, because they ignore the relevance of local places or landscapes to the formation of heritage. Relying instead on ideas of land as abstract property rights, heritage is presented as a mere visual embellishment that can deteriorate into an unsightly and costly burden for the landowner or State, rather than the outcome of dynamic and locally unique interactions between people and place...

Some people want to be rich, some want to be happy, but most want to be both.

Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's greatest novel, The Great

Gatsby is a consummate summary of the roaring twenties, extravagance and a

flamboyant demonstration of the Jazz Age which is a phrase that was coined by

the author. F. Scott Fitzgerald decribes the life of those that are rich and

enjoy life on the background of those that are happy but want to be rich to do

the same. Through the narrati...

Reference work by Koenraad Jonckheere offers a new vision on the history of art

“There are many stories of western art that have been written, almost all of them focused on artists, nations, and traditions. But Jonckheere's daring book is a learned and eminently readable story of the art itself, about the questions that works of art try and often fail to answer, and about what they do to us in the process. It's a catalyst for teaching and thinking anew.”

– Marisa Anne Bass, Yale University

“No other history of art comes close to Jonckheere’s. It’s as engagingly written as Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art. It’s neither pedestrian nor a survey of an out-of-date canon. It’s the most ambitious and original general history of art we have ever had. Vigorous, up-to-date, unprejudiced and lively, it’s a history of art of our time and for our time....