This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory.

Politically and militarily powerful, early modern Scandinavia played an essential role in the development of Central European culture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this volume, Kristoffer Neville shows how the cultural ambitions of Denmark and Sweden were inextricably bound to those of other Central European kingdoms. Tracing the visual culture of the Danish and Swedish courts from the Reformation to their eventual decline in the eighteenth century, Neville explains how and why they developed into important artistic centers. He examines major projects by figures largely unknown outside of Northern Europe alongside other, more canonical artists ― including Cornelis Floris, Adriaen de Vries, and Johann Bernhard Fischervon Erlach ― to propose a more coherent view of this part of Europe, one that rightly includes Scandinavia as a vital component. The seventeenth century has long seemed a bleak moment in Central European culture. Neville’s authoritative and unprecedented study does much to change this perception, showing that the arts did not die in the Reformation and Thirty Years’ War but rather flourished in the Baltic region.

This book looks at the history of work and the meanings that are attached to it over time. Taking as its basis a number of international surveys and interviews conducted in Europe, the authors consider. The significance of work for Europeans today. Over the years the meaning of work has changed. It has become more highly diversified, and it is today invested with high expectations that conflict with organizational developments and the changing nature of the labour market. The authors use a generational perspective to explore whether it is possible to reconcile the contemporary “ethos” of work, especially with regards to women and young people, with organizations that are increasingly under pressure to be profitable and productive. Reinventing Work in Europe will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of sociology of work, employment and organizations, labour studies, digital economy and political economy.