Books published by Manchester University Press

People in the Renaissance saw skin differently from how we do today. The Europe of 1500 to 1700 was a world of humours, and skin - the clothing of the body - was thought to be dangerously porous. In this landmark book, Evelyn Welch explores Renaissance skin as a bodily surface, as physical matter and as a generator of new knowledge. Ranging across anatomy, surgery and sausage making, she reveals how skin was managed by physicians as well as by glovemakers, butchers and parchment makers. How did people protect their health in a changing global environment, one where the air itself could be pathogenic? How did they see their bodies in a world where there was suddenly a multiplicity of skin colours and decorations? Addressing these questions and more, Welch show us what happens when you see skin differently, either in the marketplace, where men and women from far-away lands were put on display, or under the microscope. In doing so, she reveals that the past had a distinctive and very different way of understanding bodily experiences.

In the Western cultural production that puts individual or collective fear at its centre, East and Central Europe has been portrayed as an othered space of horror - lawless, frightening zones where anything can happen. Despite social and political changes in the region after the fall of communism that sparked hopes for the Easterners to join the modernised (and much desired) West, East/Central Europe remained a 'cursed zone.' Contemporary Slavic horror across media: Cursed zones is the first scholarly volume solely devoted to Slavic horror fiction. Focusing on the mid-20th century through the present, the book assesses current trends in Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and East/Central European horror media. With threefold objectives - educational, methodological, and critical - in mind, the politics and history of the region are the main frameworks for the anthology. Our contributors focus on crucial questions we face today, such as the migration crisis, war subjectivities in the post-Soviet context, modern forms of misogyny, and contemporary variants of emancipation, as well as rewriting East/Central European historical events through a diversity of media, including film, literature, video games, music, music videos, and visual art. We aim to problematise these issues through a careful examination of how horror is manufactured, distributed, and manipulated in Slavic regions. By doing so, we hope to tame 'the Easterner Other' and exorcise 'monstrous' East/Central Europe.

Spirits of extraction reexamines the entangled histories of racism, Christianity, and humanitarian biopolitics in the long nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective on the intersection of extractive industries, evangelical revivalism, and the violent civilisational metaphysics of race. Moving across eighteenth-century industrialising Bristol, the Cornish mining diaspora of the expanding British Empire, and the contested lands of Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canada/Ontario, this book traces how evangelical Christianity helped shape the colonial world through processes of extraction - of resources, bodies, and souls. Blending historical narrative with critical theory, the book makes two key interventions. Firstly, it repositions colonial religion and educational/cultural racism as central to the biopolitical project, analysing the wounding effects of 'truly Christian' education and exorcism in evangelical subject formation. Secondly, it extends thinking on the 'geology of race' by highlighting the extractive industries as the affective scene through which modern evangelical Christianity came to life. By showing how mining and missionary practices co-constituted racial hierarchies and modes of sovereignty, Spirits of extraction offers a major contribution to thinking about the politics of life and resource extraction. Evangelical experiences of salvation, exorcism, and the transformative power of faith, the book argues, resonate through geological consciousness and the logics of extraction, sustaining a quasi-divine force that continues to structure lives and landscapes today.

For millennia the 'wild' was a place heroic men went on epic quests. This book traces the lives of five women who fought against prejudice for their right to work in, enjoy and help save the earth's wild places.