This study of the Visigothic kingdom's monetary system in southern Gaul and Hispania from the fifth century through the Muslim invasion of Spain fills a major gap in the scholarship of late antiquity. Examining all aspects of the making of currency, it sets minting in relation to questions of state, monarchical power, administration and apparatus, motives for money production, and economy. In the context of the later Roman Empire and its successor states in the West, the minting and currency of the Visigoths reveal shared patterns as well as originality. The analysis brings both economic life and the needs of the state into sharper focus, with significant implications for the study of an essential element in daily life and government. This study combines an appreciation for the surprising level of sophistication in the Visigothic minting system with an accessible approach to a subject which can seem complex and abstruse.

This collection takes its inspiration from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, a landmark critique of American culture at the end of the 1950s. Goodman called for a revival of social investment in urban planning, public welfare, workplace democracy, free speech, racial harmony, sexual freedom, popular culture, and education to produce a society that could inspire young people, and an adult society worth joining. In postmodernity, Goodman's enlightenment-era vision of social progress has been judged obsolete. For many postmodern critics, subjectivity is formed and expressed not through social investment, but through consumption; the freedom to consume has replaced political empowerment. But the power to consume is distributed very unevenly, and even for the affluent it never fulfills the desire produced by the advertising industry. The contributors to this volume focus on adverse social conditions that confront young people in postmodernity, such as the relentless pressure to consume, social dis-investment in education, harsh responses to youth crime, and the continuing climate of intolerance that falls heavily on the young. In essays on education, youth crime, counseling, protest movements, fiction, identity-formation and popular culture, the contributors look for moments of resistance to the subsumption of youth culture under the logic of global capitalism.