This collection of essays examines the history of urban leisure cultures in Europe during the transition from the early modern to the modern period. Bringing together research on a wide variety of activities - from the theatre and art exhibitions to spas, seaside resorts and games - it develops a new scholarly agenda for the history of leisure, focusing on the complex processes of cultural transfer that transformed urban leisure culture from the British Isles to the Ottoman Empire. How did new models of urban leisure pastimes travel throughout Europe? Who were the main agents of cultural innovation, appropriation and adaptation? How did the increasingly entangled character of European urban leisure culture impact upon the ways men and women from various classes identified with their social, cultural or (proto-)national communities? These are some of the questions explored by this accessible and wide-ranging collection, which looks at leisure from a long-term, interdisciplinary and transnational perspective.

Reviews

'The various contributions from this book are particularly powerful and a very welcome criticism of national, monocausal, or unidirectional histories of leisure and entertainment in early modern and modern Europe.'
Wouter Ryckbosch, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis

Introduction - Peter Borsay and Jan Hein Furnée
Charting the flows: institutions and genres
1. Art in the urban public sphere: art venues by entrepreneurs, associations and institutions, 1800-50 - J. Pedro Lorente
2. Melodrama in post-revolutionary Europe: the genealogy and diffusion of a 'popular' theatrical genre and experience, 1780-1830 - Carlotta Sorba
3. Games and sports in the long eighteenth century: failures of transmission - Peter Clark
Processes of selection and adaptation: actors and structures
4. Georgian Bath: a transnational culture - Peter Borsay
5. Music and opera in Brussels, 1700-1850: a tale of two cities - Koen Buyens
6. Leisure culture, entrepreneurs and urban space: Swedish towns in a European perspective, eighteenth to nineteenth centuries - Dag Lindström
7. Coffeehouses: leisure and sociability in Ottoman Istanbul - Cengiz Kirli
Towards an 'entangled history' of urban leisure culture
8. The rules of leisure in eighteenth-century Paris and London - Laurent Turcot
9. City of pleasure or 'ville des plaisirs'? Urban leisure culture exchanges between England and France through travel writing, 1700-1820 - Clarisse Coulomb
10. The role of inland spas in the production of European leisure culture, 1750-1870 - Jill Stewart
11. Coastal resorts and cultural exchange in Europe, 1780-1870 - John K. Walton
Index

Editors

Peter Borsay is a Professor of History at Aberystwyth University

Jan Hein Furnée is Professor of European Cultural History at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands