A Woman of Pleasure by Kiyoko Murata

In 1903, a fifteen-year-old girl named Aoi Ichi is sold to the most exclusive brothel in Kumamoto, Japan. Despite her modest beginnings in a southern fishing village, she becomes the protégée of an oiran, the highest-ranking courtesan at the brothel.

Through the teachings of her oiran, Shinonome, Ichi begins to understand the intertwined power of sex and money. And in her mandatory school lessons, her writing instructor, Tetsuko, encourages Ichi and the others to think clearly and express themselves. By banding together, the women organize a strike and walk away from the brothel and into the possibility of new lives.

Based on real-life events in Meiji-era Japan, award-winning and critically acclaimed veteran writer Kiyoko Murata re-creates in stunning detail the brutal yet vibrant lives of women in the red-light district at the turn of the twentieth century—the bond they share, the survival skills they pass down, and the power of owning one’s language.

Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe by Tali Berner

This edited collection examines different aspects of the experience and significance of childhood, youth and family relations in minority religious groups in north-west Europe in the late medieval, Reformation and post-Reformation era. It aims to take a comparative approach, including chapters on Protestant, Catholic and Jewish communities. 

The chapters are organised into themed sections, on 'Childhood, religious practice and minority status', 'Family and responses to persecution', and 'Religious division and the family: co-operation and conflict'. 

Contributors to the volume consider issues such as religious conversion, the impact of persecution on childhood and family life, emotion and affectivity, the role of childhood and memory, state intervention in children's religious upbringing, the impact of confessionally mixed marriages, persecution and co-existence. Some chapters focus on one confessional group, whilst others make comparisons between them.

Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas

Bohemian culture exercised an important influence on the court of King Richard II, but it has been somewhat overlooked, with previous scholarship on its writers and artists generally confined to the role played by the French court of King Charles V and the Italian city states of Milan and Florence. 

This book aims to fill that gap. It argues that Richard's marriage to Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, one of the greatest rulers and patrons of the age, exposed England to the full extent of this international court culture. 

Ricardian writers, including Chaucer, Gower and the Gawain-poet, wrote in their native language not because they felt "English" in the modern national sense but because they aspired to be part of a burgeoning vernacular European culture stretching from Paris to Prague and from Brabant to Brandenburg; thus, one of the major periods of English literature can only be properly understood in relation to this larger European context.