• A point of entry into the study of landscapes and environments of the middle ages for non-specialists this book explores the cultural ways that people in the middle ages made landscape and thought about the nonhuman worlds in which they lived providing students with the perfect introduction to this new field. • Examines a diverse range of environments, ranging from fields, fens, and forests to desert wastelands, castles and fortifications, from rivers and oceans to towns and cities, and from the depths of hell to the heights of heaven. Allowing students to see the range of ways that people in the Middle Ages interacted with the world around them. • Provides a wide range of primary source material, including evidence from texts, material culture, and visual arts, this book reflects the diversity of landscapes and human responses to them throughout the course of the middle ages, enabling students to see examples of the themes discussed in the book and provides lecturers with sources to critique in their seminars.

• A point of entry into the study of landscapes and environments of the middle ages for non-specialists this book explores the cultural ways that people in the middle ages made landscape and thought about the nonhuman worlds in which they lived providing students with the perfect introduction to this new field. • Examines a diverse range of environments, ranging from fields, fens, and forests to desert wastelands, castles and fortifications, from rivers and oceans to towns and cities, and from the depths of hell to the heights of heaven. Allowing students to see the range of ways that people in the Middle Ages interacted with the world around them. • Provides a wide range of primary source material, including evidence from texts, material culture, and visual arts, this book reflects the diversity of landscapes and human responses to them throughout the course of the middle ages, enabling students to see examples of the themes discussed in the book and provides lecturers with sources to critique in their seminars.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Widely studied and hotly debated, the Silk Road is often viewed as a precursor to contemporary globalization, the merchants who traversed it as early agents of cultural exchange. Missing are the lives of the ordinary people who inhabited the route and contributed as much to its development as their itinerant counterparts. In this book, Kate Franklin takes the highlands of medieval Armenia as a compelling case study for examining how early globalization and everyday life intertwined along the Silk Road. She argues that Armenia-and the Silk Road itself-consisted of the overlapping worlds created by a diverse assortment of people: not only long-distance travelers but also the local rulers and subjects who lived in Armenia's mountain valleys and along its highways. Franklin guides the reader through increasingly intimate scales of global exchange to highlight the cosmopolitan dimensions of daily life, as she vividly reconstructs how people living in and passing through the medieval Caucasus understood the world and their place within it. With its innovative focus on the far-reaching implications of local practices, Everyday Cosmopolitanisms brings the study of medieval Eurasia into relation with contemporary investigations of cosmopolitanism and globalization, challenging persistent divisions between modern and medieval, global and quotidian.

Radical Matter: Rethinking Materials for a Sustainable Future presents the eight 'Big Ideas' that will shape and inform the choices of materials, design methods and manufacturing processes made by designers in the years ahead. This book draws from a global community of designers who are pushing boundaries with new and disruptive approaches to their use of materials and design processes that go beyond the notion of 'sustainable design'. Holistic systems of design, production and consumption that will benefit our world environmentally, socially and economically are now possible, and material innovation will be a crucial element in achieving that goal. The eight 'Big Ideas' unpack the themes and ideas that are impacting on our material world through cutting-edge case studies and expert opinions: 1) Today's Waste, Tomorrow's Raw Material; 2) Natural Assets; 3) Shit, Hair, Dust; 4) Material Connections; 5) Co-Creation; 6) Designed to Disappear; 7) Living Materials; and 8) Future Mining. Each 'Big Idea' includes fully illustrated case studies from leading designers and engineers who are at the cutting edge of material and design technology. Packed with expert ideas and radical solutions to the current global changes faced by the design and manufacturing industries, Radical Matter contains a wealth of information to help design professionals and students turn revolutionary concepts into reality.

The Tattooed Mermaid was a local legend, a manufactured myth to the residents of the New England town of Breakers Pointe. But what more has she become? Does she appear in a teenage girl's dreams, as some people believe? What does she know about the crimes being perpetrated in what was once a small, sleepy town? The residents of Breakers Pointe are seldom what they seem: the self-made millionaire with layers of buried secrets, the junk yard owner, desperate to hide his past, the self-effacing artist, who peers into other people's lives, the newspaper publisher and the New Age book store owner-people tell them everything-but what do they do with what they learn about their neighbors? Who in Breakers Pointe is willing to kill to keep secrets from coming out? A single mother and her psychically gifted teenage daughter attempts to answer these questions, as they unravel secrets within their own family.