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.

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