When the mendicant orders were founded in the thirteenth century, they quickly began to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with the emerging merchant class, but these relationships have rarely been addressed by scholars. Mendicants and Merchants in the Medieval Mediterranean, edited by Taryn Chubb and Emily Kelley, is an interdisciplinary study of the intricate connections that developed between the two groups, focusing specifically on three examples of mendicant-merchant interaction in Barcelona, Mallorca and Florence. The studies in this volume demonstrate the complexities of commercial and religious trade and exchange in the region and they reveal the extent to which the friars and merchants came to depend upon one another. Contributors are Taryn E.L. Chubb, Francisco Garcia-Serrano, Emily D. Kelley, Allie Terry-Fritsch, Robin Vose, and Antonio M. Zaldivar.

Buildings Across Time brilliantly explores the essential attributes of architecture by uniquely combining both a detailed survey of Western architecture, including Pre-Columbian America, and an introduction to architecture from the Middle East, India, Russia, China, and Japan. Authors have searched out the stories these buildings have to tell, considered the intentions of the people who built them, and examined the lives of those who used them. The text contains extensive descriptive narrative leavened with focused critical analysis, which both allows the book to stand alone and invites lecturers to impose their studied interpretations on the material without the danger of undue ambiguity or conflict. In a world that grows smaller by the day, it presents a global perspective, and in a discipline that concerns built objects that are often beautiful as well as functional, it is copiously illustrated, intelligently designed, and consistently usable.