This monograph takes the example of the German Franciscans to examine the role of mendicant friars in social change in the late Middle Ages.

In the later Middle Ages, the mendicant friars strove to regulate a society in a process of radical change. This happened through a combination of apparently contradictory developments - the Christianisation of individual liberties on the one hand, and the simultaneous establishment of new control mechanisms on the other. The work of the early German Franciscans presented here exemplifies the dialectics of social diversification processes that...

One of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21^st century is how to master, organize and extract useful knowledge from the overwhelming flow of information made available by today's data acquisition systems and computing resources. Visualization is the premium means of taking up this challenge. This book is based on selected lectures given by leading experts in scientific visualization during a workshop held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. Topics include user issues in visualization, large data visualization, unstructured mesh processing for visualization, volumetric...