Founded to support Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land and most famous for their support for crusading, the Military Religious Orders' activities and interests stretched far beyond the frontiers of Christendom. Representing some of the most recent advances in research, in this volume eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore important and hitherto under-researched aspects of the Orders' history, scrutinising their relations with the papacy, their organisational structure, their devotional practices, their fortresses and their presence in the localities of Western Europe....

The twenty-first century is redefining the political relationship between performance and participation, with profound and sometimes contradictory consequences for theatre-makers and audiences. This edited collection gathers together leading voices in theatre and performance studies to debate the politics of participation across a range of performative forms including community theatre, live art, applied theatre, one-to-one performance and marathon running and to find points of connection between them.
Arranged in three sections, 'Recognising Participation', 'Labours of Participation',...

This book is the first major study of amateur theatre, offering new perspectives on its place in the cultural and social life of communities. Historically informed, it traces how amateur theatre has impacted national repertoires, contributed to diverse creative economies, and responded to changing patterns of labour. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, it traces the importance of amateur theatre to crafting places and the ways in which it sustains the creativity of amateur theatre over a lifetime. It asks: how does amateur theatre-making contribute to the twenty-first...