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In context of the late medieval state centralisation, the political autonomy of the towns of the Low Counties, Northern France and the Swiss Confederation was threatened by tensions with higher levels of power. Within this conflict both rulers and towns employed symbolic means of communication to legitimise their power position. The authors of Symbolic Communication in Late Medieval Towns explore how new layers of meaning were attached to well-known traditions and how these new rituals were perceived. They study the public encounters between rulers and towns, as well as the use of rituals to express the political and religious relations between the various social groups within the town.

Church buildings dominated the medieval towns. Higher and stronger than most buildings in town, they offered a venue for various kinds of activities. Primarily the faithful flocked towards the churches to attend masses. However, the use of sacred places was not restricted to religion. Secular authorities, the ruler, the town government, the trades or guilds also made use of these ecclesiastical buildings for practical or socio-political reasons. As such the sacred places were perceived to lend a kind of sacral aura to all proceedings taking place inside. Apart from a mere enumeration and description of the different uses eleven scholars explain why these sacred places were such appreciated venues for various kinds of secular activities, and why some churches and monasteries were more popular than others.

This book is all about the current state of music, about thinking, speaking, and writing about music in the immediate aftermath of that stirring and crucial twentieth century. Five distinguished authors with very different backgrounds, subscribe to the same seriousness of purpose: Jonathan Cross, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann, Albrecht Wellmer and Richard Klein. Two of them are British, three are Germans; two are prominent composers, both keen and provocative writers about music, one is a musicologist and daring critic who specializes in contemporary music, two are philosophers and Adorno specialists dealing with such fundamental and highly complex matters as music and language, and music and time. It makes a fascinating read.

How can we best define Russias long-term national interests in the field of political sovereignty, sustainable economic development and military security? How will Russia view its federal state structure, as it finds itself confronted with a centuries-old tension between national and regional identity? Does Russia have to make a choice between East and West? All these questions relate to the centuries-old debate on the Russian Idea. The contributors to this book seek to study the quest for Russian identity, approaching this multi-layered and diffuse problem from a historical, political, cultural and economic perspective.

For the first time ever, this book brings together extensive reports on the practice of victim-offender mediation in eight European countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom). The first six chapters consider victim-offender mediation and restorative justice from a more theoretical point of view. These analyses of theoretical, legal, policy, ethical and societal aspects of mediation and restorative justice have been written by well-known scholars in this field. The second part of the book consists of overviews of the situation with regard to victim-offender mediation in the eight European countries in which it is currently the most developed. A multitude of information was collected in each of these countries, and is here presented and analysed in a comparative study.