Using history to challenge Communist Party rule. Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future describes how some of China's best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history. The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and glorify its rule. Indeed, one of Xi Jinping's signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the party's survival. But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists, and filmmakers have begun challenging this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a regular pattern of disasters: from famines and purges of years past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present--powerful and inspiring accounts that have underpinned recent protests in China against Xi Jinping's strongman rule. Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinping's China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity's great struggles of memory against forgetting--a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.

'An indelible feat of reporting and an urgent read ... It's a privilege to read books like these' Te-Ping Chen, author of Land of Big Numbers 'A powerful reminder of the ways in which China's future depends on who controls the past' Peter Hessler A documentary filmmaker who spent years uncovering a Mao-era death camp; an independent journalist who gave voice to the millions who suffered through Covid; a magazine publisher who dodges the secret police: these are some of the people who make up Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, a vital account of how some of China's most important writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground - its monopoly on history. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and justify its rule. But in recent years, critical thinkers from across the land have begun to challenge this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a pattern of disasters: from past famines and purges to the ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present. Based on years of research in Xi Jinping's China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity's great struggles of memory against forgetting - a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.

Throughout China's rapidly growing cities, a new wave of unregistered house churches is growing. They are developing rich theological perspectives that are both uniquely Chinese and rooted in the historical doctrines of the faith. To understand how they have endured despite government pressure and cultural marginalization, we must understand both their history and their theology. In this volume, key writings from the house church have been compiled, translated, and made accessible to English speakers. Featured here is a manifesto by well-known pastor Wang Yi and his church, Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, to clarify their theological stance on the house church and its relationship to the Chinese government. There are also works by prominent voices such as Jin Tianming, Jin Mingri, and Sun Yi. The editors have provided introductions, notes, and a glossary to give context to each selection. These writings are an important body of theology historically and spiritually. Though defined by a specific set of circumstances, they have universal applications in a world where the relationship between church and state is more complicated than ever. This unique resource will be valuable to practical and political theologians as well as readers interested in international relations, political philosophy, history, and intercultural studies.

Kant's landmark essay, "On Perpetual Peace," is as timely, relevant, and inspiring today as when it was first written over 200 years ago. In it, we find a forward-looking vision of a world respectful of human rights, dominated by liberal democracies, and united in a cosmopolitan federation of diverse peoples. This book features a fresh and vigorous translation of Kant's essay by Ian Johnston. And it includes an extended introduction by philosopher Brian Orend, author of the widely-used text, The Morality of War. This extensive, yet highly readable, introduction situates Kant's essay in its historical context, while also offering a substantial analysis, section-by-section, of the essay itself. In doing so, Orend not only discusses Kant's personal life and the history of "the perpetual peace tradition," he also shows how Kant's provocative ideas have inspired and infused our own time, especially the concept of a global alliance of free societies committed to respecting human rights. The book also sports an enlightening set of appendices that cleverly and sharply debate the promise of perpetual peace. A few are from Kant's works, but most are from other acclaimed thinkers, including: Hegel, Leibniz, Bentham, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. A chronology of Kant's life and a recommended reading list round out this inquiry into one of the most hopeful, stirring, and imaginative political proposals: a cosmopolitan federation uniting us all and securing perpetual peace between nations.

Geoffrey Chaucer is widely acknowledged as the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages. His texts are studied extensively but, in order to be fully appreciated, they demand a nuanced understanding of the medieval period. This volume provides freshly illuminated access to Chaucer's writing through an unrivalled repertoire of contextual information and perspectives designed to enhance the independence and critical capacities of his modern readers. The featured essays are written not only by distinguished literary scholars but also by leading international historians. Geoffrey Chaucer in Context is an essential reference tool for anyone studying Chaucer and will help readers to identify his different voices and engage with the complexity and colour of his times with new awareness.

New approaches to religious texts from the Middle Ages, highlighting their diversity and sophistication. From the great age of pastoral expansion in the thirteenth century, to the revolutionary paroxysms of the English Reformation, England's religious writings, cultures, and practices defy easy analysis. The diverse currents of practice and belief which interact and conflict across the period - orthodox and heterodox, popular and learned, mystical and pragmatic, conservative and reforming - are defined on the one hand by differences as nuanced as the apophatic and cataphatic approaches to understanding the divine, and on the other by developments as profound and concrete as the persecution of declared heretics, the banning and destruction of books, and the emergence of printing. The essays presented in this volume respond to and build upon the hugely influential work of Vincent Gillespie in these fields, offering a variety of approaches, spiritual and literary, bibliographical and critical, across the Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation and beyond. Topics addressed include the Wycliffite Bible; the Assumption of the Virgin as represented in medieval English culture; Nicholas Love and Reginald Pecock; and the survival of latemedieval piety in early modern England. LAURA ASHE is Professor of English Literature and Tutorial Fellow, Worcester College, Oxford; RALPH HANNA is Professor of Palaeography (emeritus), Keble College, Oxford. Contributors: Tamara Atkin, James Carley, Alexandra da Costa, Anne Hudson, Ian Johnson, Daniel Orton, Susan Powell, Denis Renevey, Michael G. Sargent, Annie Sutherland, Nicholas Watson, Barry Windeatt.

San Francisco based artist Ian Johnson has been busy since his 2008 monograph Beauty is a Rare Thing. Six solo shows and a group exhibition later, his work has evolved while remaining jarringly cool and full of life. This new book from Paper Museum Press presents new paintings and drawings by Johnson in his signature style: portraits of jazz musicians from the '40s, '50s, and '60s produced using gouache, acrylic, or pen on paper or wood panel. Johnson combines abstract backgrounds with figurative representations to create jaw-dropping pieces that succeed at evoking the music of each artist. Creative geometric compositions of space and color unfold to express the tone of each musician's output. Ian Johnson's work has been featured in Juxtapoz and Jazz Colours and he has created illustrations for The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wax Poetics, and The New Yorker.

This is the first-ever history of the literary theory and criticism produced during the Middle Ages that covers all the main traditions in Latin, the major European vernaculars and Byzantine Greek. Starting with the study of grammar and the formal 'arts' of poetry, letter-writing and preaching, it proceeds to offer a full description of the Latin commentary tradition on classical and classicising literature, followed by explanations of medieval views on literary imagination and memory and the ways in which certain texts were believed to achieve moral profit through pleasure. Subsequent essays explore the diverse theoretical and critical traditions which developed in the vernacular languages, ranging from Medieval Irish to Old Norse, Occitan to Middle High German, concentrating particularly on Dante and his commentators and Italian humanist criticism. The volume concludes with an examination of the attitudes to literature and its uses in Greek Byzantium.

This is the first-ever history of the literary theory and criticism produced during the Middle Ages that covers all the main traditions in Latin, the major European vernaculars, and Byzantine Greek. Starting with the study of grammar and the formal 'arts' of poetry, letter-writing and preaching, it proceeds to offer a full description of the Latin commentary tradition on classical and classicizing literature, followed by explanations of medieval views on literary imagination and memory, and the ways in which certain texts were believed to achieve moral profit through pleasure. Subsequent essays explore the diverse theoretical and critical traditions which developed in the vernacular languages, ranging from Medieval Irish to Old Norse, Occitan to Middle High German, concentrating particularly on Dante and his commentators and Italian humanist criticism. The volume concludes with an examination of the attitudes to literature and its uses in Greek Byzantium.

In the late medieval and early modern periods, Scottish latinity had its distinctive stamp, most intriguingly so in its effects upon the literary vernacular and on themes of national identity. This volume shows how, when viewed through the prism of latinity, Scottish textuality was distinctive and fecund. The flowering of Scottish writing owed itself to a subtle combination of literary praxis, the ideal of eloquentia, and ideological deftness, which enabled writers to service a burgeoning national literary tradition.

In Wild Grass, Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Ian Johnson tells the stories of three ordinary Chinese citizens moved to extraordinary acts of courage: a peasant legal clerk who filed a class-action suit on behalf of overtaxed farmers, a young architect who defended the rights of dispossessed homeowners, and a bereaved woman who tried to find out why her elderly mother had been beaten to death in police custody. Representing the first cracks in the otherwise seamless facade of Communist Party control, these small acts of resistance demonstrate the unconquerable power of the human conscience and prophesy an increasingly open political future for China.

'Illuminating ... Johnson has not only lifted a corner of the curtain which covers China's reality beyond its glittering eastern cities; he has drawn the whole curtain' The Times Literary Supplement In Wild Grass, Pulitzer Prize-winning Ian Johnson describes a China caught between the desire for change percolating up from below and the ossified political structure above. He recounts the stories of three ordinary people who find themselves finding oppression and government corruption, risking imprisonment and even death. A young architecture student, a bereaved daughter, and a peasant legal clerk are the unlikely heroes of these stories, private citizens cast by unexpected circumstances into surprising roles.

Geoffrey Chaucer is widely acknowledged as the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages. His texts are studied extensively but, in order to be fully appreciated, they demand a nuanced understanding of the medieval period. This volume provides freshly illuminated access to Chaucer's writing through an unrivalled repertoire of contextual information and perspectives designed to enhance the independence and critical capacities of his modern readers. The featured essays are written not only by distinguished literary scholars but also by leading international historians. Geoffrey Chaucer in Context is an essential reference tool for anyone studying Chaucer and will help readers to identify his different voices and engage with the complexity and colour of his times with new awareness.

This manageable guide sets out to answer what harvesting and threshing equipment is available, what are the main characteristics of types of equipment and where can you go for more information and supply.

This is a collection of pioneering studies by a distinguished transatlantic team of scholars on a neglected yet canonical tradition of medieval English literature. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and beyond, the remarkable 'pseudo-Bonaventuran' tradition, flowing from the Latin Meditationes vitae Christi (and thought, wrongly, to have been composed by St Bonaventure), gave Europe orthodox models for how to represent, know, and follow Jesus Christ. The Meditationes, in a huge variety of Latin and vernacular versions, invite their readers and listeners to imagine themselves present within the Gospel narrative. How to live, what to believe, how to feel, and how to be saved: this eloquent mainstream tradition had an impact on the public and private lives of English people more profound and lasting than any text save the Bible itself. For many, it even did the Bible's work. The tradition of the Meditationes provides us with a gauge of lived religious sensibility without equal in the English later Middle Ages. Deriving from the Queen's Belfast-St Andrews AHRC-funded research project, Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping the English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, c. 1350-1550, this volume questions and revises previous descriptions of the devotional, cultural, and political contexts in which pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ were produced, circulated, read, and understood. The period spanning the rise and repression of Lollardy, the ostensibly 'orthodox' fifteenth century, and the Tudor Reformations will never look quite the same again.

The success, failure and revival of Barry Town is a story that needs to be told. Few clubs have risen so high – facing Dynamo Kiev and FC Porto in the Champions League – and then sunk so low – going into administration, relegated and eventually withdrawn from football altogether – before being brought back to life by loyal fans who even had to take the Football Association of Wales to court in order to play. Following the club over 25 years, starting with the 1993-94 season when they beat Cardiff City to win the Welsh Cup, Unbelievable Barry Town covers the club’s golden decade where they won the Welsh Premier seven times, through the years of playing as an amateur team under controversial owner Stuart Lovering, until the fans were able to take over and turn the club around to once again play in Europe in 2019.

These studies of the theory and practice of translation in the middle ages show a wide range of translational practices, on texts which range from anonymous Middle English romances and Biblical commentaries to the writings of Usk, Chaucer and Malory. Included among them is a paper on a hitherto unknown woman translator, Dame Eleanor Hull; a paper which compares a draft translation with its fair copy to show how its translator worked; a paper which shows how the mystic Rolle sought to 'translate' his heightened spiritual experiences into words; and so on. In a medieval translation the general priority of meaning over form and style enabled, even obliged, the translator to act more like an author than like a scribe. Consequently, the study of medieval translation throws important light on contemporary, attitudes to, and understandings of, fundamental literary questions: for example, and most importantly, that of the role of the author.