Despite Asia's protracted economic troubles, the region is poised to recover and perhaps become stronger than ever. This timely work identifies the major challenges facing Asia's Four Tigers (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong), Japan, China, and their Southeast Asian neighbors (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines) as the region increases it role and stature on the world stage. Highly regarded Asia policy makers and opinion shapers consider such key questions as: What is the appropriate response to China's ascent? Are there prospects for U.S.-Asian partnerships (in such areas as the environment)? Is economic cooperation between both sides of the Pacific realistic? How can Americans gain from Asia's attempts to rebuild her institutions? And will East Asia and the United States adjust to a multi-polar security and economic milieu?

Despite Asia's protracted economic troubles, the region is poised to recover and perhaps become stronger than ever. This timely work identifies the major challenges facing Asia's Four Tigers (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong), Japan, China, and their Southeast Asian neighbors (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines) as the region increases it role and stature on the world stage. Highly regarded Asia policy makers and opinion shapers consider such key questions as: What is the appropriate response to China's ascent? Are there prospects for U.S.-Asian partnerships (in such areas as the environment)? Is economic cooperation between both sides of the Pacific realistic? How can Americans gain from Asia's attempts to rebuild her institutions? And will East Asia and the United States adjust to a multi-polar security and economic milieu?

The essays in this volume cover lyric, hagiography, clerical verse narrative, frontier balladry, historical and codicological studies, and include the draft of an unpublished essay found amongst Professor Deyermond's papers. Professor Alan Deyermond was one of the leading British Hispanists of the last fifty years, whose work had a formative influence on medieval Hispanic studies around the world. There were several tributes to his work published during his lifetime, and it is fitting that this one, in his memory, should be produced by Tamesis, the publishing house that he helped establish and to which he contributed so much as author and editor right up to his death. The contributors to this volume are some of Professor Deyermond's former colleagues, doctoral students, and members of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar. Given Professor Deyermond's breadth of expertise, the span of the essays is appropriately wide, ranging chronologically from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and covering lyric, hagiography, clerical verse narrative, frontier balladry, historical and codicological studies. The volume opens with a personal memoir of her father by Ruth Deyermond, and closes with the draft of an unpublished essay found amongst Professor Deyermond's papers, and edited by his literary executor, Professor David Hook. Andrew M. Beresfordis Reader and Head of Hispanic Studies at the University of Durham. Louise M. Haywood is Reader in Medieval Iberian Literary and Cultural Studies, and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge. Julian Weiss is Professor of Medieval & Early Modern Hispanic Studies at King's College London.

An examination of the ideas of space and place as manifested in medieval texts, art, and architecture. This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a wide variety of critical approaches and cover architecture, the visual arts (painting and manuscript illumination), epic, romance, historiography, hagiography, cartography, travel writing, as well as modern English poetry. Challenging simplistic binaries of East and West, self and other, Muslim and Christian, the volume addresses the often unexpected roles played by space and place in the construction of individual and collective identities in religious and secular domains. The essays move through world spaces (mappaemundi, the exotic and the mundane East, the Mediterranean); empires, nations, and frontier zones; cities (Avignon, Jerusalem, and Reval); and courts, castles and the architectureof subjectivity, closing with modern visions of the medieval world. They explore human movement in space and the construction of time and place in memory. Taking up pressing contemporary issues such as nationalism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and confessional relations, they find that medieval material provides narratives that we can use today in our negotiations with the past. Julian Weiss is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Studies, Sarah Salih Senior Lecturer in English, at King's College London. Contributors: Richard Talbert, Paul Freedman, Sharon Kinoshita, Luke Sunderland, Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih, Konstantin Klein, Katie Clark, Elizabeth Monti, Elina Gertsman, Elina Rasanen, Geoff Rector, Nicolay Ostrau, Andrew Cowell, Joshua Davies, Chris Jones, Matthew Francis

At a time when the discourse of a clash of civilisations has been re-grounded anew in scaremongering and dog-whistle politics over a Hispanic "challenge" to America and a Muslim "challenge" to European societies, and in the context of the War on Terror and migration panics, evocations of al-Andalus - medieval Iberia under Islamic rule - have gained new and hotly polemic topicality, championed and contested as either exemplary models or hoodwinking myths. The essays in this volume explore how al-Andalus has been transformed into a "travelling concept": that is, a place in time that has transcended its original geographic and historical location to become a figure of thought with global reach. They show how Iberia's medieval past, where Islam, Judaism and Christianity co-existed in complex, paradoxical and productive ways, has offered individuals and communities in multiple periods and places a means of engaging critically and imaginatively with questions of religious pluralism, orientalism and colonialism, exile and migration, intercultural contact and national identity. Travelling in their turn from the medieval to the contemporary world, across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and covering literary, cultural and political studies, critical Muslim and Jewish studies, they illustrate the contemporary significance of the Middle Ages as a site for collaborative interdisciplinary thinking.

A fresh approach to the mester de clerecia, a group of narrative poems (epics, hagiography, romances) composed in thirteenth-century Spain by university-trained clerics for the edification and entertainment of the predominantly illiterate laity. In the thirteenth century, profound changes in Spanish society drove the invention of fresh poetic forms by the new clerical class. The term mester de clerecia (clerical ministry or service) applies to a group of narrativepoems (epics, hagiography, romances) composed by university-trained clerics for the edification and entertainment of the predominantly illiterate laity. These clerics, like Gonzalo de Berceo, understood themselves as cultural intermediaries, transmitting wisdom and values from the past; at the same time, they were deeply involved in some of the most contentious and far-reaching changes in lay piety, and in economic and social structures. The author challenges the predominantly didactic approach to the verse, in an attempt to historicize the category of the intellectual, as someone caught in the duality of the worlds of contingency and absolute values. The book will have a broad appeal to medievalists, in part because of the topics covered (feudalism, gender, nationhood, and religion), in part because many poems are either adaptations from French and Latin or have counterparts in other literatures (e.g., the romances or Alexander and Apollonius, the miracles of the Virgin Mary). JULIAN WEISS is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Spanish at King's College London.

Unter dem Schlagwort "Medienkonvergenz" wird eine medienpolitische Diskussion auf nationaler und europaischer Ebene um die Zukunft der Medien- und Telekommunikationsregulierung gefuhrt. Im Rahmen einer Gesamtbetrachtung ist es Ziel dieser Dissertation, einen Beitrag zur Diskussion der rechtlichen Einordnung elektronischer Dienste in bestehende Regulierungsstrukturen zu leisten. Die Arbeit analysiert die bislang tatsachlich eingetretene Konvergenzentwicklung und untersucht ihre Auswirkungen auf Medienpolitik und Medienrecht. Ausgehend von der systematischen Untersuchung des Konvergenzphanomens werden die medienpolitischen Konfliktfelder identifiziert sowie ordnungspolitische Loesungsvorschlage unterschiedlicher Handlungstrager dargestellt. Den Schwerpunkt der Arbeit bildet die Untersuchung der medienrechtlichen Abgrenzungsproblematik zwischen Internet und klassischen Medien. Hierzu werden sowohl die verfassungsrechtlichen Vorgaben als auch die relevanten einfachgesetzlichen Regelungswerke des deutschen Rundfunk- und Presserechts sowie des europaischen Gemeinschaftsrechts umfassend gepruft und diskutiert.