‘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

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

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