Surely, Christian history in Germany principally followed the outlines of a Catholic and Protestant narrative, right? On the contrary, for Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda this dominant framework largely obscures the historical experience of most Christians, specifically rural Christians. The rural Christian narrative, animated for more than a millennium by agricultural and communal forces, principally followed an indigenous path characterized by long-term surges and setbacks. This path eventually bifurcated not in the 1517-1648 period but rather in the wake of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and it did so not into Catholic and Protestant storylines but rather into those Christian corpora (Gemeinden) which maintained their local civil-sacred unity into the twentieth century and those which lost that unity after succumbing to Westphalia's divisive effects.

In 1992 David Owen was appointed the EU Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, working alongside the UN's Co-Chairman, Cyrus Vance. The papers collected here provide fascinating primary source material and an insider's account of the intense international political activity at that time, which culminated in the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP). At a time when the international community is looking again at whether and how the Dayton Accords and the 1995 division into two entities should be adjusted in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Owen highlights elements of the VOPP which are of continuing relevance and which can guide political debate and decisions in 2012 and thereafter. Sadly, Bosnia-Herzegovina is still deeply divided, a direct consequence of not imposing the VOPP. The book reminds the international community and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that a unified structure for their country is still achievable.

During a television broadcast in 1959, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked that "people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days our governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." At that very moment international peace organizations were bypassing national governments to create alternative institutions for the promotion of world peace and mounting the first serious challenge to the state-centered conduct of international relations. This study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations, during the early cold war. It traces the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the cold war used, altered, and fought over a seemingly universal concept. These dynamic interactions involved three sets of global actors: cold war states, peace advocacy groups, and anti-colonial liberationists. These transnational networks challenged and eventually undermined the cold war order. They did so not just with reference to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe, but also by addressing the violence of national liberation movements in the Third World. As Petra Goedde shows in this work, deterritorializing the cold war reveals the fractures that emerged within each cold war camp, as activists both challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace and challenged each other over the best strategy to achieve it. The Politics of Peace demonstrates that the scientists, journalists, publishers, feminists, and religious leaders who drove the international discourse on peace after World War II laid the groundwork for the eventual political transformation of the Cold War.

This Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th-13th Centuries) offers the first major collection of studies dedicated to the medieval abbey of Le Bec, one of the most important, and perhaps the single most influential, monastery in the Anglo-Norman world. Following its foundation in 1034 by a knight-turned-hermit called Herluin, Le Bec soon developed into a religious, cultural and intellectual hub whose influence extended throughout Normandy and beyond. The fourteen chapters gathered in this Companion are written by internationally renowned experts of Anglo-Norman studies, and together they address the history of this important medieval institution in its many exciting facets. The broad range of scholarly perspectives combined in this volume includes historical and religious studies, prosopography and biography, palaeography and codicology, studies of space and identity, as well as theology and medicine. Contributors are Richard Allen, Elma Brenner, Laura Cleaver, Jean-Herve Foulon, Giles E.M. Gasper, Laura L. Gathagan, Veronique Gazeau, Leonie V. Hicks, Elizabeth Kuhl, Benjamin Pohl, Julie Potter, Elisabeth van Houts, Steven Vanderputten, Sally N. Vaughn, and Jenny Weston.