New readings demonstrate the centrality of the rood to the visual, material and devotional cultures of the Middle Ages, its richness and complexity. The rood was central to medieval Christianity and its visual culture: Christ's death on the cross was understood as the means by which humankind was able to gain salvation, and depictions of the cross, and Christ's death upon it,were ubiquitous. This volume brings together contributions offering a new perspective on the medieval rood - understood in its widest sense, as any kind of cross - within the context of Britain and Ireland, over a wide periodof time which saw significant political and cultural change. In doing so, it crosses geographical, chronological, material, and functional boundaries which have traditionally characterised many previous discussions of the medieval rood. Acknowledging and exploring the capacity of the rood to be both universal and specific to particular locations and audiences, these contributions also tease out the ways in which roods related to one another, as well as how they related to their physical and cultural surroundings, often functioning in dialogue with other images and the wider devotional topography - both material and mental - in which they were set. The chapters consider roods in a variety of media and contexts: the monumental stone crosses of early medieval England, twelfth-century Ireland, and, spreading further afield, late medieval Galicia; the three-dimensional monumental wooden roods in English monasteries, Irish friaries, and East Anglian parish churches; roods that fit in the palm of a hand, encased in precious metals, those that were painted on walls, drawn on the pages of manuscripts, and those that appeared in visions, dreams, and gesture.

'Medical technology is beneficial for well researched dangerous diseases. However, most symptoms that people bring to their primary care physician have no single clearly identifiable cause: investigations and drugs do more harm than good - and also waste resources - ' - Wilfrid Treasure Diagnosis and Risk Management in Primary Care teaches that adopting an evidence-based approach to primary care improves patient care and treatment outcomes. It demonstrates that brief clinical assessments, repeated if necessary, allow effective diagnosis while avoiding the costs and complications associated with more advanced testing. Adopting a fresh approach, this book sets consultation skills alongside evidence-based information by both itemising the specific techniques and facts that are needed in the consulting room, and providing detailed information on odds and likelihood ratios to quantify risk and deal with uncertainty. This book provides food for thought, and helps doctors develop communication skills that support their personal styles of consulting, encouraging a more traditional, intuitive treatment. It provides a map of the consultation and a compass to navigate through symptoms, signs and evidence - listening to their patients with one ear and, with the other, to the reflective inner voice of reason. General Practitioner Specialist Trainees and their teachers will find much of interest, as will established General Practitioners with an interest in maintaining traditional models of care. Undergraduate medical students and candidates for the MRCGP will find this an ideal reader for the clinical skills assessment. 'What a breath of fresh air to find an author capable of putting the patient back at the centre of the consultation and who is able to entertain at the same time as he informs and to stimulate critical reflection while nudging us in the direction of a rigorous approach to diagnosis, and the assessment and communication of risk.' From the foreword by Roger Jones

This important book breaks new ground in addressing issues of gendered learning in different contexts across the (adult) life span at the start of the 21st century. Adult learning sits within a shifting landscape of educational policy, profoundly influenced by the skills agenda, by complex funding policies, new qualifications and the widening/narrowing participation debate. The book is unique in highlighting the centrality of gendered choices to these developments which shape participation in and experiences of lifelong learning.

"Gendered Choices" critically examines the continued expansion of a skills-based approach in areas of lifelong learning, including career decisions, professional identities and informal networks. It explores key intersections of adult learning from a gender perspective: notably participation, workplace learning and informal pathways.

Drawing on research from a range of contexts, "Gendered Choices "demonstrates that for women the public/private spaces of work and home are often conflated, although the gendering of 'choice' has largely been ignored by policy makers.

The themes of the book bring together some of these critical issues, explored through the multiple and fractured identities which constitute gendered lives. The book addresses these in an international context, with contributions from Canada, Spain and Iran that provide a wider international perspective on shared issues."

In 1889 uniformed post boys were found moonlighting in a West End brothel frequented by men of the upper classes. "The Cleveland Street Scandal" erupted and Victorian Britain was gripped by the possibility that the Post Office - a bureaucratic backbone of nation and empire - was inspiring and servicing perverse passions. The alliance between transgressive sex and the Post Office that the scandal illuminated was neither incidental nor singular; there was something queer about the post in the nineteenth century. Postal Pleasures tells the story of queer postal relations, from Post Office reforms initiated in 1840 up to the imperial end of the nineteenth century. It tells this story by analysing literature that expresses the cultural consequences of this peculiar kind of "going postal." Victorian writers abandoned the epistolary novel in favour of postal fiction. The postal network, its uniformed employees and its material trappings - envelopes, postmarks, stamps - were used to signal and circulate sexual intrigue. For Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Eliza Lynn Lynton, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and others, the idea of an envelope promiscuously jostling its neighbours in a post boy's bag, or the notion that secrets passed through the eyes and fingers of telegraph girls, was more stimulating that the actual contents of correspondence. By the period's end, the postal system had become both an instrument and a metaphor for sexual relations that crossed and double-crossed lines of class, marriage and heterosexuality.