In the later Middle Ages a European 'core' of culturally and administratively sophisticated societies with rapidly growing populations, on an axis from England to Italy, colonised the European 'periphery'. In northern Europe this periphery included Wales and Ireland, as colonised by the English, and Prussia and Livonia, as colonised (mainly) by Germanic and Nordic peoples. A key tool of colonisation was the chartered town, giving citizens distinguishing legal privileges and a degree of self-regulation. Towns on the Edge in Medieval Europe contends that while the chartered town, as a legal and social-political concept, was transferred to peripheral areas by colonisers, its implementation and adaptation in peripheral areas resulted in unique societies, not simply the replication of core urban forms and communities. In so doing, it compares the development of social and political institutions in the chartered towns of medieval Ireland, Wales, Prussia, and Livonia. Research themes include community formation, normalisation/social disciplining, and peace making/keeping.

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This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe's mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been 'solved' and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a 'forty years' crisis' for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.

The gripping and masterfully-crafted new thriller from award-winning author Matthew Frank 'Tense and twisty . . . completely gripping. I ignored children, a ringing phone, hunger, everything just to devour the last hundred pages' KAREN PERRY, Sunday Times bestselling author of YOUR CLOSEST FRIEND ________ Julian Sinclair is a serial killer. Charming, manipulative, deadly. He hunted girls for sport, and it's high time justice was served. But when Sinclair's conviction is thrown out in court, DC Joseph Stark and DS Fran Millhaven are forced to protect the man they're sure is guilty from those who would rather see him pay in blood. Then another girl dies. And Sinclair can't have killed her from his hospital bed . . . Is a killer lurking in someone they never suspected? And have they had the wrong man all along? ________ 'A clever compelling spiderweb of a plot' JANE CORRY, bestselling author of My Husband's Wife 'A gripping, pacy read with a "one more chapter" compulsiveness' LAURA MARSHALL, bestselling author of Friend Request 'Seriously good . . . a tightly plotted thrilling page turner of a book' JAMES OSWALD, author of the Inspector McLean series 'Matthew Frank is a master at juggling light and darkness . . . while serving up satisfying plots with plenty of twists' SARAH HILARY, award-winning author of the Marnie Rome series 'Nail-bitingly tense' Susi Holliday, author of The Last Resort

Fresh approaches to how premodern women were viewed in legal terms, demonstrating how this varied from country to country and across the centuries. There has been a tendency in scholarship on premodern women and the law to see married women as hidden from view, obscured by their husbands in legal records. This volume provides a corrective view, arguing that the extent to which the legal principle of coverture applied has been over-emphasized. In particular, it points up differences between the English common law position, which gave husbands guardianship over their wives and their wives' property, and the position elsewhere in northwest Europe, where wives' property became part of a community of property. Detailed studies of legal material from medieval and early modern England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Ghent, Sweden,Norway and Germany enable a better sense of how, when, and where the legal principle of coverture was applied and what effect this had on the lives of married women. Key threads running through the book are married women'srights regarding the possession of moveable and immovable property, marital property at the dissolution of marriage, married women's capacity to act as agents of their husbands and households in transacting business, and married women's interactions with the courts. Cordelia Beattie is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh; Matthew Frank Stevens is Lecturer in Medieval History at Swansea University Contributors: Lars Ivar Hansen, Shennan Hutton, Lizabeth Johnson, Gillian Kenny, Mia Korpiola, Miriam Muller, S.C. Ogilvie, Alexandra Shepard, Cathryn Spence.

**WINNER of the 2014-2015 Waverton Good Read Award** If I Should Die is the astounding debut from British author Matthew Frank. ---------- When a homeless man walks into Greenwich police station and confesses a killing, it should be the admission that cracks open a murder enquiry. Instead, he stumbles out on to the street and collapses, bleeding from a stab wound he's attempted to repair himself . . . The newest member of the Met's murder investigation team, twenty-five year-old Afghan veteran Joseph Stark, doesn't believe the man's story. Yet it becomes clear that Stark and the down-and-out share a connection. And that this could provide the key to unlocking the case. Soon, the young detective and his colleagues are drawn deeper into a dark, disturbing world as dangerous as anything Stark has known on the frontline. And where there's enough at stake for a man to risk everything . . . If I Should Die is the first title in a new crime series, and outstanding characterization, pitch perfect dialogue and precision plotting mark out Matthew Frank as a debut writer to watch. With the introduction of series character and ex-soldier police detective Joseph Stark, fans of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels will be hooked from the word go. Praise for If I Should Die: 'Skilfully plotted, with a great clarity of style . . . such an original newcomer' Alison Joseph, Chair of the Crime Writer's Association 'A gripping murder story ... Frank brilliantly maintains a balance between the demands of a complex plot and his character's difficulty in returning to civilian life ... an accomplished first novel' Sunday Times 'Well researched and totally convincing, this is the first of several Stark books. Great news if they're as good as this' Sunday Mirror 'A powerful debut ... intensity, outstanding characterisation, passion, perfect dialogue and pinpoint plotting' Crime Review

Subscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort adding their names to subscription lists. Shining a spotlight on private play-producing clubs, public repertory theaters, amateur drama groups, and theatrical magazines, Matthew Franks locates subscription theaters in a vast constellation of civic subscription initiatives, ranging from voluntary schools and workers' hospitals to soldiers' memorials and Diamond Jubilee funds. Across these enterprises, Franks argues, subscribers created their own spaces for performing social roles from which they had long been excluded. Whether by undermining the authority of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays and London's commercial theater producers, or by extending rights to disenfranchised women and property-less men, a diverse cast of subscribers including typists, plumbers, and maids acted as political representatives for their fellow citizens, both inside the theater and far beyond it. Citizens prized a "democratic" or "representative" subscription list as an end in itself, and such lists set the stage for the eventual public subsidy of subscription endeavors. Subscription Theater points to the importance of printed ephemera such as programs, tickets, and prospectuses in questioning any assumption that theatrical collectivity is confined to the live performance event. Drawing on new media as well as old, Franks uses a database of over 23,000 stage productions to reveal that subscribers introduced nearly a third of the plays that were most frequently revived between 1890 and the mid-twentieth century, as well as nearly half of all new translations, and they were instrumental in staging the work of such writers as Shaw and Ibsen, whose plays featured subscription lists as a plot point or prop. Although subscribers often are blamed for being a conservative force in theater, Franks demonstrates that they have been responsible for how we value audience and repertoire today, and their history offers a new account of the relationship between ephemera, drama, and democracy.

Making Minorities History examines the various attempts made by European states over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, under the umbrella of international law and in the name of international peace and reconciliation, to rid the Continent of its ethnographic misfits and problem populations. It is principally a study of the concept of 'population transfer' - the idea that, in order to construct stable and homogeneous nation-states and a peaceful international order out of them, national minorities could be relocated en masse in an orderly way with minimal economic and political disruption as long as there was sufficient planning, bureaucratic oversight, and international support in place. Tracing the rise and fall of the concept from its emergence in the late 1890s through its 1940s zenith, and its geopolitical and historiographical afterlife during the Cold War, Making Minorities History explores the historical context and intellectual milieu in which population transfer developed from being initially regarded as a marginal idea propagated by a handful of political fantasists and extreme nationalists into an acceptable and a 'progressive' instrument of state policy, as amenable to bourgeois democracies and Nobel Peace Prize winners as it was to authoritarian regimes and fascist dictators. In addition to examining the planning and implementation of population transfers, and in particular the diplomatic negotiations surrounding them, Making Minorities History looks at a selection of different proposals for the resettlement of minorities that came from individuals, organizations, and states during this era of population transfer.

Expelling the Germans focuses on how Britain perceived the mass movement of German populations from Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of British archival material, Matthew Frank examines why the British came to regard the forcible removal of Germans as a necessity, and evaluates the public and official responses in Britain once mass expulsion became a reality in 1945.
Central to this study is the concept of "population transfer": the contemporary idea that awkward minority problems could be solved rationally and constructively by removing the population concerned in an orderly and gradual manner, while avoiding unnecessary human suffering and economic disruption. Dr Frank demonstrates that while most British observers accepted the principle of population transfer, most were also consistently uneasy with the results of putting that principle into practice. This clash of "principle" with "practice" reveals much not only about the limitations of Britain's role but also the hierarchy of British priorities in immediate post-war Europe.

Between the Crosses is another sophisticated and brilliantly crafted crime novel, featuring Afghan army veteran and Detective Constable Joseph Stark. First book If I Should Die was the WINNER of the 2014-2015 Waverton Good Read Award. Previous winners include Mark Haddon, Marina Lewycka, Tom Rob Smith and Rachel Joyce. *** No longer a trainee but a freshly-minted Detective Constable, Joseph Stark finds himself working a double homicide. Thomas and Mary Chase were shot dead in their London home, and first impressions are that this is a burglary-gone-bad. But Stark is unconvinced. Burglary-murders are usually a tragic case of unfortunate timing, but this feels like something else entirely. And when evidence arises to link this murder to a twenty year old cold case the hunt is well and truly on. Following If I Should Die Joseph Stark's second investigation is a clever, action-packed and entertaining mystery. Praise for Matthew Frank: 'Stark is such a terrific hero' Sarah Hilary 'A gripping murder story . . . Frank brilliantly maintains a balance between the demands of a complex plot and his character's difficulty in returning to civilian life . . . an accomplished first novel' Sunday Times on If I Should Die 'Well researched and totally convincing, this is the first of several Stark books. Great news if they're as good as this' Sunday Mirror on If I Should Die

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. This volume offers a new history of Europe's mid-20th century as seen through the lens of its recurrent refugee crises. Borrowing from and adapting E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, the editors of this volume conceive of the two post-war eras as a single 'forty years' crisis', which enables them not only to explore the continuities and disjunctures across the period but also to challenge established historiographical certainties and master narratives. As the essays in this volume show, the story of the 'forty years' crisis' can be told in very different ways: as one of upheaval, disintegration and suffering, or as one of newly emerging national and international solutions and possibilities; as a 'top-down' history of nations, institutions and policies, or as a 'bottom-up' history of refugees, relief workers and refugee advocates; by assessing the historical developments themselves or their historiographical afterlives. This volume is unique in that it brings these different perspectives together and provides a coherent intellectual framework within which they can be made sense of. Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe represents the first comprehensive treatment of refugees in Europe of this breadth and depth for over a generation. It will provide an indispensable research guide for students of migration, nationalism and international diplomacy in 20th-century Europe, and an up-to-date overview of current research for specialists. As such it will make a major contribution to European and international history.