Coomans

By exploring the uniquely dense urban network of the Low Countries, Janna Coomans debunks the myth of medieval cities as apathetic towards filth and disease. Based on new archival research and adopting a bio-political and spatial-material approach, Coomans traces how cities developed a broad range of practices to protect themselves and fight disease. Urban societies negotiated challenges to their collective health in the face of social, political and environmental change, transforming ideas on civic duties and the common good. Tasks were divided among different groups, including town governments, neighbours and guilds, and affected a wide range of areas, from water, fire and food, to pigs, prostitutes and plague. By studying these efforts in the round, Coomans offers new comparative insights and bolsters our understanding of the importance of population health and the physical world - infrastructures, flora and fauna - in governing medieval cities.

Christian monasteries and convents, built throughout Europe for the best part of 1,500 years, are now at a crossroads. This study attempts to understand the sacred architecture of monasteries as a pro

This booklet deals with human dignity by looking at the different roles the human rights defender, the scholar and the human rights NGO can play in defending dignity.

From the Foreword by Prof. Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food: "This volume is the result of over ten years of research conducted jointly by non-governmental o

This beautifully illustrated volume (it's oversized, at 9x11.25") offers an unusually substantial look at the vigorous school of Gothic Revival art that took place in northern Europe in the 19th centu

In academic human rights research, especially legal human rights research, little attention tends to be devoted to questions of methodology. One reason for this may be that human rights scholars often

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Biomedical Informatics and Technology, ACBIT 2013, held in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, in September 2013. The ??? rev

Sacred places have long exercised a special fascination. Sacred places are not static entities but reveal a historical dynamic. They are the result of cultural developments and have varied multidimens