New Books in Western European Studies

An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 6 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism’s terrible potencies, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, and the limits of resistance. He reconstructs the desperate creativity of activists seeking to counter despair where they could not redress its causes. And he recovers a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews, young and powerless, as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves – in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally.

Join Kenneth Moss in conversation with Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein for a discussion on this new publication and the history it unveils.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on March 2, 2022.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tom Trier, "Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner: The South Caucasus and Scandinavia, 1880s–1920s" (Northern Illinois UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner: The South Caucasus and Scandinavia, 1880s–1920s (Northern Illinois University Press, 2026) tells the story of the historical connections between two geographically distant and culturally distinct regions on the edges of Europe: Scandinavia and the South Caucasus. From the late nineteenth century, maritime trade fostered new commercial links and consular relations. Scandinavian merchants, particularly in Batumi and Baku, played key roles. The discovery of oil along the Caspian Sea shores attracted Scandinavian entrepreneurs, notably the Swedish Nobel family, helping to develop Baku into a booming industrial hub.

Tom Trier focuses on the years of upheaval surrounding World War I and the collapse of the Russian Empire, when Georgia—along with Armenia and Azerbaijan—briefly emerged as an independent republic. The four-decade relationship ended abruptly during the Bolshevik Red Army's invasion of the South Caucasus from 1920 to 1921. Drawing on both Scandinavian and Georgian perspectives, Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner examines how Nordic merchants, consuls, and diplomats navigated the shifting political landscape and how Georgia's social democratic leadership looked to neutral Scandinavia as a gateway to broader European political, diplomatic, and economic engagement.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Educating for an Uncertain Future in Interwar Poland

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In the two decades between the First and Second World Wars, Jewish parents in Poland faced a proliferation of choices when it came to educating their children. Each choice offered a vision of what future Polish Jews desired, what they expected, and the gap between the two. State schools taught in Polish (sometimes with a schedule to accommodate traditional religious observance), secularist Yiddish schools with strong ties to Jewish socialism and the labor movement, Hebraist schools promoting political and cultural Zionism, and religious schools that retained--or innovated upon--traditionalist educational models reflected different opinions for what Jewish children in interwar Poland would need in the present to secure their future.

In this lecture, Elena Hoffenberg draws upon materials held by YIVO to explore how projections about the future in terms of work, culture, and politics guided parents, educational activists, and young people themselves. Choices as reflections of competing political and religious commitments, as well as material constraints, to better understand what Polish Jews expected for their individual and communal futures.

This lecture originally took place on March 2, 2026.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

John Davie, "Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Ancient Greek lives on in our culture in surprising ways. Sometimes funny - the word for an actor, hupokrites, gives us 'hypocrite'; sometimes beautiful - an astronaut is literally a sailor of the skies. And that's before we get to the myths which gave us our Achilles heel or our Midas Touch. And what about crocodile tears, which comes from the Greek's belief that crocodiles cried while eating their victims!

Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World (Bloomsbury, 2026) is a learned but always entertaining journey through the world of the Ancient Greeks, their extraordinary language and how it has shaped our own understanding of the world today. After all, what is language but the frame through which we understand the world? Davie aims to bring more than just humour, he seeks to trace the thread of ancient Greek thought that runs through our own civilization, always with the lightness of touch and fascinating etymology. We meet Eros and Aphrodite, Alexander the Great and Oscar Wilde, the stoics, Epicurus and Sparta.
While this is a book about language and the touching and illuminating presence of the ancient Greeks in our current words, it's also about how Ancient Greece shapes our culture today.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chenchen Zhang, "Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China" (Oxford UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

With commentary on the emergence of a ‘multipolar’ world, of transatlantic rifts and the rise of ‘middle powers’ ubiquitous, tales of the decline of something called ‘the West’ seem to be everywhere. Yet the meanings the idea of ‘the West’ acquires in spaces beyond it tell us at least as much about the state of the world as portents of its demise.

Based on a combination of cultural analysis of historical writings and—most strikingly—deep immersion in often very spicy Chinese social media fora, Chenchen Zhang’s new book Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China (Oxford University Press, 2026) theorises the shifting significations ascribed to ‘the West’ in China since the late-imperial collision with European empires. Whether imagined as a source of modernity, a colonial exploiter, geopolitical rival or—most recently—a civilisation sunk into decadence and decay, ‘the West’—Zhang shows—is a foil for China-based worldviews which, whatever their anticolonial or anti-Western sentiments, are also entangled with Eurocentric hierarchies of race, nation and gender whose patriarchal and civilisational histories are rooted at least partly that very same ‘West’.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A.J.A. Woods, "The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West" (Verso, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso Books, 2026) is the definitive history of a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory.

“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister orchestrators of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements that have declared war on all that passes for Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.

Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat—a conflict causing real-world damage—can we effectively resist. This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents shaping politics in the twenty-first century.

A.J.A. Woods is an intellectual historian who lives in Brighton, England. In 2022, Woods received a PhD from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada. Their writings on conspiracy theories and reactionary politics have been translated into four languages and appeared in Open Democracy, Patterns of Prejudice, and Marx & Philosophy Review of Books.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Claudia Kreklau, "The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910" (Berghahn, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans merely aimed to survive long winters, experiment with translated recipes and curious ingredients from abroad, and embrace the conveniences of industrial life, their consumption habits and cooking practices created a new product landscape. Throughout this transitional era of history, individuals visibly communicated their self-understandings through food.

The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910 (Berghahn, 2026) by Dr. Claudia Kreklau provides a study of central European food modernity and middle-class identity aims to provide fresh footing for discussions in our own changing global era.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Roderick Beaton, "Europe: A New History" (Allen Lane, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

What do we talk about when we talk about Europe? Is it defined by geography? Or is it politics, or shared culture? In Europe: A New History (Allen Lane, 2026), award-winning historian Roderick Beaton tells the story of Europe as never before—as the history of an idea, and a collective identity.

Since its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, 'Europe' has been defined, and redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, and with the narrative drive and scope of a novelist, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s major historical developments: the rise and fall of Rome; the explosion of Christianity; the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; the arrival of Europeans in the Americas; the violent upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the uncertainties of the present. Throughout, original sources allow the voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves.

Grappling with the multilayered identities that have always come with being European, Europe places the Europe of today in a long arc of history stretching back more than 2,500 years.

Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London and Chair of Trustees of the British School at Athens, an institute of advanced research. He is a four-time winner of the Runciman Award, for his books An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel: A Biography, Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution, and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, published by Penguin in 2019. He is also the author of The Greeks: A Global History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic, and an honorary citizen of Greece. He was knighted in 2025.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jon Mackenzie, "The Spectre of Pep: How Guardiola Haunts Modern Football Tactics" (Seven Dials, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Spectre of Pep: How Guardiola Haunts Modern Football Tactics (Seven Dials, 2026) by Jon Mackenzie

A spectre is haunting European football. Watch almost any game, no matter the level, and you will notice it. From inverted full backs to extreme high lines, the tactical threads of the match will eventually converge onto a singular point: Pep Guardiola.

For some though, his near total dominance has come at the cost of the game itself, with modern football's protagonists caught between acknowledging Guardiola's greatness and wanting to evolve the sport beyond him. In The Spectre of Pep, acclaimed tactics writer Jon Mackenzie explores this contradiction.

But this is much more than the story of just one man. After tracing Guardiola's ascendancy, displacing giants like Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, it examines how other elite coaches have fought to establish their own legacies within this landscape - including the likes of Jurgen Klopp, Roberto De Zerbi, Luis Enrique and Mikel Arteta. And with his time at Manchester City coming to an end - in a world where his influence is arguably diminishing - it also speculates on what the next generation of tactics may look like, and how Guardiola's legacy will be viewed in the future.

If you want to understand football today, you have to understand the tactical spectre of Pep Guardiola. To do that, you need this book.

Jon Mackenzie is a writer and presenter working for The Athletic.

Samee Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of World History at Drury University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sarah Ellen Zarrow, "Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941" (Cornell UP, 2025.)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 (Cornell UP, 2025.) illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. As Jews comfortable in the Polish language and within Polish artistic and academic society, they saw themselves as intermediaries between less-integrated Jews and the Polish cultural elite.

At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation though the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After the First World War, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong.

By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. This is not a case of assimilation, nor of acculturation, but rather of displaying a parallel culture that was at once similar and yet distinctive.

Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.

Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Book here Faculty page here Email & Social Media: plerner@usc.edu @plerner.bsky.social

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yulia Gradskova et al., "Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Cases from Lithuania, Russia and Sweden" (CEU Press, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press, 2026) talks with Yulia Gradskova and Ieva Bisigirskaitė, two of the three authors behind Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Cases from Lithuania, Russia and Sweden. Together with Soheyla Yazdanpanah, they explore what nationalists mean by "good mothers," demographic anxiety, and maternal activism in Lithuania, Russia and Sweden.

You can purchase a copy here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more:

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steven Veerapen, "Overlord: A New History of the Life and Reign of Henry VIII" (Simon & Schuster, 2026

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 6 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Henry VIII is England’s most famous king. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant, the religious disruptor and the much-married glutton.

Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII (Birlinn, 2026) is a groundbreaking study of Henry’s life examines and destroys many of the long-repeated myths about this complex monarch: he was not particularly gluttonous, not particularly prudish, and not particularly messy in his religious changes. Nor did he see himself as simply King of England. Drawing on archival sources from across the British Isles, Dr. Steven Veerapen reveals how Henry fashioned an image of himself as a law-abiding and benevolent emperor who dreamed of uniting England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and swathes of France under Tudor rule.

Yet the image was false and the dream a nightmare for his queens, his ministers and many of his subjects. This new portrait shows Henry for what he really was: a self-aggrandising actor who, by fair means and foul – murder plots, marriage negotiations and military ventures – did all he could to realise his imperial fantasy.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Laura Jockusch on Jewish Revenge after the Holocaust (JP)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 6 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system?

To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle, Brandeis University's Laura Jockusch (author, previously, of Collect and Record and Jewish Honor Courts) has written about Jewish revenge on genocide perpetrators in her searching, and shocking Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust. Drawing on her great erudition and painstaking archival research, she explores how views changed during and after the war--and in following decades when justice and vengeance came to seem potentially compatible, especially if revenge could be rendered an aesthetic or imaginative phenomenon.

Mentioned in the episode

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds
Seekers for vengeance and also justice: Eli Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal
The killing of Ernst Vom Rath (pretext for the Night of Broken Glass)
Aeschylus, The Oresteia (5th century B.C.)
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, no episode of RTB would be complete without it...)
Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)
Tony Judt Postwar (2005)
Recallable Books:
Zalman Gradovsky, The Last Consolation Vanished
Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities
Filip Müller Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers
Kleist, Michael Kohlhass (1810)

Read a transcript here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Katie Barclay, "The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 1 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Katie Barclay tells the surprising history of our most intimate gesture: the kiss. Richly illustrated, it explores a millennium of kisses, asking how and why the kiss has retained its power over the centuries, and what it might mean today. From the furtive kisses of fated lovers Heloise and Abelard to The Godfather’s ‘kiss of death’, Professor Barclay shows how the kiss can be romantic, peaceful, transgressive, intimate, erotic and more. There are kisses that are bad ideas, dangerous kisses and funny ones. New kisses are invented and old ones fall out of favour. 

While the kiss continues to change, Professor Barclay shows that we kiss fewer people, and less often, than we used to. The Kiss reveals a cultural inheritance transmitted in story and song, art and literature, and through the everyday kisses that we receive from our parents, or reserve for our lovers; when we kiss, we kiss with the weight of history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew N. Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor eds., "The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives" (Cornell UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Andrew Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor, The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 2025)

This ambitious edited collection encourages readers to think in bigger ways about the global Second World War. That includes a wider frame in space and time, but also a larger geopolitical perspective of the war as a world-system crisis and an expanded social perspective on who fought the war and why. A team of international scholars take on this task in chapters ranging from the global alliance system and colonial mobilization to studies of particular cities and dockyards.

In a wide-ranging conversation with both editors, we discuss questions of imperialism, the rise and limits of US global hegemony, the 'ragged ends' of the war, and the social movements of a window of global possibility in 1945–46.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Patrick Nunn, "Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe" (Reaktion, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change—floods, land loss and shifting shorelines—carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. With clarity and insight, it also brings to life the tellers and collectors of these stories, tracing how oral knowledge endured even as literacy spread. A compelling invitation to listen again to old stories, and to hear what the land and sea remember.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elisabeth van Houts, "Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English" (Yale UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Born in 1102, Empress Matilda combined the blood of two dynasties: the house of Wessex and their conquerors, the dukes of Normandy. As a widowed German empress, she was named as heir successor by her father, Henry I. But, after his death in 1135, Matilda’s place on the English throne was usurped by her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Civil war followed, and she ruled the south-west of England in opposition.

In Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Elisabeth van Houts explores the remarkable life of medieval England’s only queen regnant. Van Houts examines female rulership in the Middle Ages, from Matilda’s relationships with her husbands, to her self-identification as granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Matilda used her persuasiveness effectively with the men who surrounded her, including her father, husbands, half-brothers and cousins.

This is a fascinating account, which reveals Matilda to be an assertive, if on occasion disappointed, woman who made the best of her position with intelligence and stamina.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mikuláš Pešta, "Student Internationalism and the Global Cold War: The International Union of Students in Socialist Prague" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast, I sat down with Mikuláš Pešta to talk about his new book, Student Internationalism and the Global Cold War: The International Union of Students in Socialist Prague (Bloomsbury, 2026). During our discussion we touched upon how the International Union of Students ended up being headquartered in Prague, the organisation's various activities, and the life of the Secretariat, amongst other topics.

You can purchase the book from Bloomsbury here. The book is also available Open Access here.

The CEU Review of Books Podcast Series explores the questions that affect us all through in-depth talks with researchers, policy makers, journalists, academics and others. We showcase the most current research linked to Central Europe through these discussions.

At the CEU Review of Books, we encourage an open discussion that challenges conventional assumptions to foster a vibrant debate.

Visit our website to read our latest reviews, long reads and interviews.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Martin Shaw, "The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza" (Agenda Publishing, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Israeli destruction of Gaza has returned the idea of genocide to the center of world politics, with sharp conflicts between the protesters and lawyers who invoke it and the governments and media that deny it. The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza (Agenda Publishing, 2025), by the foremost sociological theorist of genocide, Martin Shaw, defends the idea against thinkers who have questioned it, and argues that it is essential to the understanding of mass atrocities. It maintains that Gaza has opened a new age in which the West not only fails to prevent, but also participates in genocide.

As well as discussing the genocide idea, the book analyses the Gaza genocide in the context of the longer histories of the problem, both globally and in Palestine. Further chapters deal with "forgotten genocides," the attempted Russian elimination of Ukraine, and the history of British complicity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lucy D. Curzon, "Art and Citizenship in Conflict: British Women War Artists, 1939–45" (Manchester UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Art and Citizenship in Conflict: British Women War Artists, 1939-45 (Manchester UP, 2026) by Dr. Lucy Curzon examines the work of women war artists in order to highlight the complexity of citizenship and gender in Britain during the Second World War.

Evelyn Dunbar, Mary Kessell, Ethel Gabain, Stella Schmolle, and Laura Knight, among others, were commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) to document the millions of women who took up sometimes unconventional roles-in agriculture, the auxiliary services, and manufacturing, among others-to support the British war effort. Indeed, their prints, drawings, and paintings were part of a broader scheme to uphold morale and promote much-needed citizen involvement on the home front. While there is growing interest, the importance of their remit in the history of the Second World War and the quality of their artistry have nonetheless not yet secured them a significant place in scholarship. Art and Citizenship in Conflict seeks to amend this gap.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sarah Kaminsky, "The Forger of Paris" (Doppelhouse Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Forger of Paris (Doppelhouse Press, 2025) presents Adolfo Kaminsky’s biography in its only authorized edition, expanded with photographs from Kaminsky's 2019 exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris and accompanied by essays from MAHJ director Paul Salmona and National Jewish Book Award winner Deborah Dash Moore.

"This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.... has a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." — Jewish Book Council

At seventeen, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic, technical ability to reproduce official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation and for the next twenty-five years, Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he continued to forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world.

"At a moment when someone’s passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky’s story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring." — Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman for The New York Times

"A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness." — Foreword Review

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Thomas Smith, "The Fifth Crusade: A History of the Epic Campaign to Conquer Egypt" (Yale UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In 1217, the crusader states were in a highly fragile condition. The Fourth Crusade had failed, and Jerusalem had not been recovered. The crusaders now set their sights on Egypt. If the breadbasket of the Mediterranean could be conquered, long-term Christian control of the Holy Land could be ensured. Led by the rulers of Hungary and Austria, and backed by the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, the Fifth Crusade was launched.

In The Fifth Crusade: A History of the Epic Campaign to Conquer Egypt(Yale University Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas Smith tells the gripping story of the crusade for Egypt. Looking at a wide range of Christian and Muslim sources, Dr. Smith sheds new light on the brutal reality of medieval combat on land and water. We see a dramatic beach landing, the invention of a unique floating siege engine, and the conquest of the crucial port city of Damietta—one of the most famous and successful sieges of the crusades. Dr. Smith provides fresh insights into strategy, showing how, despite early victories, foolish decision making meant that the crusaders ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rod Phillips, "Cats: A History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard rodent controllers to cherished internet icons.

Professor Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive nature—and their associations with women, the supernatural, and outsiders—have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers, reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics, gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and rodents.

The many roles that cats have played throughout history illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them: as affectionate yet aloof, adorable and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story of the feline presence in human history—an elegant study of how we live with animals whom we see as living by their own rules.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A. G. Hopkins, "The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot" (Princeton UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 9 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings. Public services are no longer fit for purpose. A malaise seems to infect every aspect of British life: its economy, polity, social order, sense of well-being, domestic regional relationships, and place in the world. In The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot (Princeton University Press, 2026), the distinguished historian A. G. Hopkins offers an explanation, tracing Britain’s current problems to decisions made in the 1980s that abandoned its postwar experiment in social democracy and mimicked policies of deregulation and privatisation promoted by the United States.

In 1945, the new Labour government’s development programme aimed at creating a social democracy that would benefit all members of society. The counterrevolution launched by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, which remains in force today, promoted individualism and deregulation. The transition from one programme to another was a response to the growth of finance and services centred on the City of London, and to decolonisation, which redirected trade to Europe. The expansion of credit led to the financial crisis of 2008 and the years of austerity that followed, and fuelled the populist movement that culminated in Brexit. Hopkins argues that, instead of following the free-market policies of its mentor, the United States, Britain should draw on its own history of social democracy and borrow from its neighbours in Europe, where communitarian principles continue to be upheld.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Roberta J. Magnusson, "Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 8 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society. In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed, and sustained their defenses, bridges, streets, water systems, and harbors.

Dr. Magnusson reveals how even modest communities, like the Warwickshire town of Atherstone, boldly pursued projects that reshaped their futures. Grants of tolls and taxes funded paving initiatives, bridge repairs, and fortified walls, while enterprising lords and abbots sponsored sluices, conduits, and quays. These efforts were not confined to England's great cities; small towns with limited means also sought to enhance their competitive edge, even when such investments strained their resources. Drawing on royal records, municipal archives, and archaeological evidence, Dr. Magnusson situates these civic undertakings in their broader social and environmental contexts. She shows how townsmen adapted traditional obligations of labor and charity alongside innovative fiscal tools to sustain projects that could span generations. Yet the balance was fragile. The crises of the fourteenth century—famine, plague, and the harsher climate of the Little Ice Age—undermined local resources, leaving many communities to struggle with maintenance or watch their infrastructures decline.

At once a history of engineering, economy, and community, this study illuminates how medieval people conceived of security, health, and prosperity through the material fabric of their towns. By tracing the rise, transformation, and survival of these infrastructures, Dr. Magnusson demonstrates how urban communities navigated centuries of change while shaping the very landscapes in which they lived.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bjørn Berge, "Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense" (Reaktion Books, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 3 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The sense of smell is often linked to the dark, the antisocial, the primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. Today we live in an almost odorless world, where everything is reduced to images. Yet smell plays a vital role in how we relate to others and our surroundings, forming our experiences and our memories. Tracing a history of smell from the first ancient cities, through medieval plagues and the Industrial Revolution to the present day, Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense (Reaktion, 2026) is a tribute to the sense of smell in all its beauty and disgust. Along the way, Bjørn Berge introduces us to twenty iconic scents—from blood and soil to the ocean—and invites readers to reflect on and reawaken their senses.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chinese EVs: From Nordic Streets to Central Asian Hubs

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 2 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Can Europe afford to stand back as China rewrites the global electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem? In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen at the University of Helsinki talks to United Nations Senior Adviser Matthew Gray for Europe and Central Asia Markets, who discusses the rapid international expansion of Chinese EVs. The conversation highlights how Chinese brands have moved beyond public buses to growing passenger car markets in the Nordic region and Central Asia through superior technology, lower price points, and patient policy.

While European markets face limited model availability due to protectionism and strategic caution, Central Asian nations have seen an immediate and total transformation of their transport infrastructure with far higher and lower end Chinese EVs than in Europe - and dramatic new challenges in electrification capacity. Based in Copenhagen, with 20+ experience in the regions, Gray is speaking freshly with us after two recent months in Tajikistan and China. He compares EV and soft power growth in Scandinavia vs Central Asia, and explains that modern EVs act as geopolitical infrastructure, shifting the focus from simple manufacturing to long-term digital service ecosystems, data control, and entry into more vertical industries. As the West maintains protective barriers, China’s control over the battery supply chain and hybrid innovations will likely force a global shift in both consumer and freight industries. Listeners can find Gray’s fact-finding recap of Chinese EVs in Tajikistan here.

Julie Yu‑Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Master’s Programme in Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Her new book, Global Knowledge Production about China, explores how the practice of “China‑watching” has evolved over the decades. The book is freely accessible online.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremy D. Popkin, "The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France" (Princeton UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 1 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France (Princeton UP, 2026) is a dramatic account of how slavery and race profoundly influenced the course of the French Revolution and had a central impact on the lives of key leaders, including Mirabeau, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon. Acclaimed historian Jeremy D. Popkin brings this often-forgotten story to life, highlighting the arguments put forward by French abolitionists and their opponents and the profound repercussions of the first abolition of slavery in a Western empire.
When the French revolutionaries passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, they immediately faced a burning question: did that document’s first article—“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—apply to the 800,000 enslaved Black people in the country’s colonies? Over the next dozen years, revolutionary leaders fought over this question. The First Emancipation tells how French lawmakers initially protected slavery in their constitution but reversed themselves in 1794, making France the first western country to abolish slavery throughout its empire. Yet only eight years later, in 1802, Napoleon tried to force the emancipated Black populations of the colonies back into slavery. His decision led to his first major military defeat and to the proclamation of the independence of the Black nation of Haiti, but also to the reestablishment of slavery in other French colonies, where it would not finally be abolished until 1848.
The story of how France emancipated its enslaved people and declared them full citizens only to return many of them to bondage, The First Emancipation reveals that the course of abolition in the modern world was more winding and halting than is often remembered.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cleo Nisse, "Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting" (Princeton UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on canvas instead of wood or walls. Nowhere was more important to this shift than Venice, where painters experimented with canvas with remarkable creativity and innovation. In Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting (Princeton University Press, 2026), Dr. Cleo Nisse investigates why Venetian artists adopted canvas and how it revolutionized their art between 1400 and 1600.

Intertwining approaches from art history and art conservation, and featuring stunning new photographs that show details as never before, the book presents groundbreaking research based on close study of Venetian artworks, archival sources, art-making treatises, and early modern art criticism. It sheds new light on the materiality of early modern canvas, its production and supply, and the influence of climate on its use. The book offers fresh interpretations of iconic works and important concepts such as pittura di macchia and non finito, and demonstrates how canvas contributed to the radical new style of painters such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. But above all else, it shows how canvas changed the making and meaning of paintings.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Charles J. Stivale, "Unfolding the Deleuze Seminars, 1970–1987: Summaries and Commentary" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

From the inside flap:

“A rich resource of Deleuze’s research that is unavailable in his published writing

Includes summaries of 216 seminar sessions available in transcripts and recordings
Summaries are based on research for the Deleuze Seminars project (co-directed by Charles J. Stivale and Daniel W. Smith), where full transcripts and translations, to which readers will have access for simultaneous or subsequent consultation, have been developed by an international team of scholar-translators
Alongside summaries, an attached critical apparatus provides references to corresponding links within Deleuze’s writings, seminars, and other sources to facilitate additional research

The texts in this volume - summaries of the 216 seminars taught by Gilles Deleuze - provide unique insight into the latter half of Deleuze’s teaching career. Deleuze understood his seminars as a laboratory for developing his ongoing research, and this volume is a guide to the creative becomings in the development of his philosophical works through teaching.
From Anti-Oedipus (1972) to The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1987), Deleuze examined a wide range of philosophical perspectives in pursuit of successive thematic topics. These summaries and commentaries serve as incitement for further research, allowing readers familiar with Deleuze’s work to find new angles of approach and providing greater access to readers coming to his work for the first time."

New Books Network:

Stivale, Charles J., and Daniel W. Smith. (2025-10-21). "Gilles Deleuze, On Painting"

Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour:

Stivale, Charles J., Taylor Adkins, and Cooper Cherry. (2025-08-12). "Deleuze and Guattari – How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs"
Stivale, Charles J., Daniel W. Smith. (2023-06-29). "Deleuze on Painting and Cinema".

The Deleuze Seminars: here

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Catherine Fletcher, "The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires" (Princeton UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Renaissance Italy, the gun was not only a tool of war but also a desirable object, a luxury item carried at court. Guns were in use on the battlefield by 1440; later in that century Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a faster-firing, more portable handgun that could be hidden beneath a cloak. As the gun proliferated in society, it became both a means of self-defence and a threat to civic order. In The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires (Princeton University Press, 2026), historian Catherine Fletcher explores the emergence of firearms in Renaissance Italy and beyond, describing the social transformations that accompanied the evolution of the handgun from innovative military technology to widely used personal accessory.
Fletcher shows that as guns became smaller and the new wheellock mechanism made concealed carry possible, Italian states increasingly tried to control their use—even as they viewed firearms as necessary for their militias. In the end, Fletcher reports, the importance of civic defence trumped the concern for social order. As guns became ever more acceptable, stories of how firearms aided Europeans’ overseas conquests created a new and more positive image for a weapon once considered the devil’s work. Debates over the regulation of firearms five centuries ago—which included arguments over the restriction of gun ownership, the use of guns for self-defence and the regulation of an armed militia—in many ways anticipate discussions about gun control today. Fletcher’s groundbreaking account sheds new light on how governments weighed the competing priorities of defence and social order as they set out to build empires.

Catherine Fletcher is professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of several books on early modern Italy, including The Roads to Rome, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance and The Black Prince of Florence: The Life of Alessandro de’ Medici.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

European Jews in the 21st Century

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

What is the status of Jews in Europe in the 21st century? How do they maintain vital communities? Do they desire to remain in Europe? To remain Jewish? Where are the trendlines headed? A mere 0.1% of Europe's population is Jewish. Proportionally, this figure is at its lowest since the turn of the first millennium. European Jews' numbers have continued to decline even after the Holocaust. Once a major center of world Jewry, Europe often goes largely unmentioned in conversations about the global Jewish community.

K., the European Jewish Review, is a new magazine founded in March 2021 to document and analyze the current situation of the 1.3 million Jews living in Europe. The magazine is devoted to reporting from and fostering dialogue across all the various communities of European Jewry.

Daniel Solomon, the English-language editor of K. will lead a discussion with members of the editorial board of K.: Stéphane Bou (Editor of chief of K., European Jewish Review), Macha Fogel (Author at K., European Jewish Review), and Danny Trom (Senior Researcher, EHESS).

This panel discussion originally took place on October 12, 2021.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marinus De Jong, "A Church for a Secular World: The Development of Klaas Schilder's Ecclesiology" (Brill, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The relationship between the Church and the world has been a subject of debate since the Church's earliest days. In ⁠A Church for a Secular World: The Development of Klaas Schilder's Ecclesiology⁠ (Brill, 2025), Marinus De Jong explores how Stanley Hauerwas, with his emphasis on the Church as polis, made a significant contemporary contribution—one that has also faced strong criticism. This study examines the distinctive insights of second-generation neo-Calvinist theologian Klaas Schilder (1890-1952) on this issue. Neo-Calvinism is renowned for its development of Reformed theology, particularly in this area, and Schilder builds on this tradition with a critical eye. Engaging with the increasing secularity of the twentieth century, he carefully interacts with Karl Barth's writings while refining his own perspective. In doing so, Schilder's position comes close to the Anabaptist stance of Hauerwas, yet remains firmly rooted in the Reformed understanding of creation.

Marinus de Jong, Ph.D., is assistant professor of the theology of neo-Calvinism at Theologische Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands. He co-editedThe Klaas Schilder Reader: The Essential Theological Writings (Lexham, 2022).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Curtis Dozier, "The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate" (Yale UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for their violent and oppressive politics.
It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated philosophical inquiry. But, as Dozier points out in this thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists. Indeed, some of the most widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and political realities of the ancient world provide models for political systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.

Part introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past, this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this knowledge with disturbing success.

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space (Duke University Press, 2026), Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity.

Don Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University. He previously taught at Wesleyan University and received his PhD with distinction from DePaul University and BA from Cornell University. He is a Mellon Mays fellow and the recipient of a Mellon Career Enhancement Faculty Fellowship. His research focuses on the intersections of Latin American, Caribbean, and Contemporary Continental Philosophy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tania Sengupta and Stuart King eds., "Reclaiming Colonial Architecture" (Routledge, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 9 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (Routledge, 2024) explores the built inheritance of colonialism and considers how architects, heritage practitioners, students, communities, and activists might narrate, care for, transform, or challenge them today. Awarded the SAHGB’s Colvin Medal in 2025, the book draws on a variety of authors to combine historical context with thematically organised case studies across urban and architectural scales.

This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brexit Britain: 10 Years on from the Referendum

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 9 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Anniversaries provide opportunities to take stock and reflect. It is now ten years since voters in the United Kingdom cast their ballots in a referendum on whether the UK should Leave or Remain in the European Union. The subsequent decade has seen much churn and change in British politics. Join Tim Haughton and guests Maria Sobolewska, Charlotte Galpin and Monika Brusenbauch Meislova for a discussion of the causes, process and consequences of that decision made on 23 June 2016.

Maria Sobolewska is Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester. Among her many publications is the book, Brexitland, co-written with Rob Ford, which won the 2022 WJM Mackenzie Prize for the best book published in political science.

Monika Brusenbauch Meislova is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and European Studies at Masaryk University in Brno in the Czech Republic. Monika has published extensively on many aspects of Brexit in a host of academic journals including Political Quarterly, British Politics, Journal of Legislative Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, European Security and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

Charlotte Galpin is Associate Professor in German and European Politics at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on these aspects of Brexit, including in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, the Journal of Common Market Studies, and Social Movement Studies.

Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics and a Deputy Director of CEDAR at the University of Birmingham. He has published articles on David Cameron’s referendum pledge and a review article on Brexit, Ruling Divisions.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Transcript here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matti Friedman, "Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe" (Spiegel & Grau, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 9 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Was it one of the war’s most memorable feats of valor or an act of desperation, even madness?

In Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe (Spiegel & Grau, 2026), Matti Friedman unravels one of the strangest episodes of World War II: In 1944, a team of young women and men who had escaped the Holocaust made the inconceivable choice to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe under the cover of a British military operation. Yet by the end of the mission, not a single Nazi was harmed and not a single Jew was saved, and many of the parachutists died in the process. Even so, some of their names would become legendary, especially that of twenty-three-year-old Hannah Senesh, the author of the beloved Hebrew song “Eli, Eli.” Their story would become one of the young state of Israel’s founding myths—but what exactly was the mission, and what had the parachutists actually accomplished? What made them heroes?

Using thousands of original documents from once-secret files, manuscripts, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Matti Friedman follows four of the parachutists from the spring of 1944 to the operation’s dramatic end that winter. In Out of the Sky, he tells the gripping and surprising tale of a forgotten moment, demonstrating how storytelling itself can have a power even greater than warfare. And in exploring the line between myth and reality, heroism and futility, he creates an argument that has resonance in our own time.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stephen C.E. Hopkins, "⁠Translating hell: Vernacular theology and apocrypha in the medieval North Sea"⁠ (Manchester UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 8 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it to sort out who belonged within the faith. Translating hell: Vernacular theology and apocrypha in the medieval North Sea (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Stephen C. E. Hopkins explores how hell became a place for literary experiments with local challenges in theology and identity. Following the reception and transformations of two popular hell apocrypha, it argues that they served as this role because of their liminal textual authority. As noncanonical scriptures, apocrypha afforded medieval writers space to revise their hells (since they were not actually scripture), while also encouraging readers to revere those experiments as valid (since they seemed like scripture). The book brings together adaptations from early medieval England, Iceland, Ireland, and Wales, placing the early vernacular theologies of the North Sea in comparative conversation.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sarah M. Cushman et al eds., "The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau" (Routledge, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 7 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau (Routledge, 2026) examines Auschwitz-Birkenau as both a site and a symbol of Nazi genocide. Scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives consider Auschwitz’s history by engaging with Holocaust historiography and its place in Holocaust memory and representation, illustrating their mutual influence.

The chapters bring new insights to topics that other studies of Auschwitz have explored before, such as the Sonderkommando, the Czech family camp, and literary representations of Auschwitz. Other chapters cover recent developments and more neglected areas, such as the experience and memory of Romani prisoners, the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, and Auschwitz’s presence on social media. The handbook also responds to a number of recent trends and new paradigms in Holocaust Studies, including contributions from the fields of Environmental Studies, Spatial Studies, and Gender Studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Radio ReOrient S14:10: Muslims in the Neoliberal Era, with William Barylo, hosted by Salman Sayyid and Amina Easat-Daas

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 5 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode hosts Salman Sayyid and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by William Barylo to discuss his most recent book ‘Muslims in the Neoliberal Era: Resisting, Healing, and Flourishing in the Metacolonial Era’. The discussion centred on the differing nature of the Muslim experience in France, the UK, and beyond, and the ways in which Muslims find spaces and forms of community resistance in view of the dominant structures. William Barylo is a research fellow in Sociology at the University of Warwick.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steven Nadler, "Spinoza, Atheist" (Princeton UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 2 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was accused of unspecified “horrifying heresies,” but the precise reasons for his expulsion remain a mystery. When he published his Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, which was condemned as “the most atheistic book ever written,” he began to reveal to the world what his heresies may have been. Yet ever since the eighteenth century, most readers and scholars have assumed that Spinoza was a pantheist—even a “God-intoxicated man,” as the poet Novalis put it. After all, how could a person whose books are suffused with talk of God be an atheist? In Spinoza, Atheist (Princeton University Press, 2026), Steven Nadler, one of the world’s leading authorities on the philosopher, aims to settle the question and show that that’s exactly what he was.

Nadler makes a powerful case that there is no real divinity for Spinoza. God is Nature, and isn’t an object of worshipful awe or religious reverence but can only be understood through philosophy and science. There is nothing supernatural—no mystery, ineffability, or sublimity. Spinoza does speak of “blessedness” and “salvation,” but these, too, are to be understood in natural and rational terms, as the peace of mind and happiness that come from understanding ourselves and the world.

Whether Spinoza believed in God is a fascinating and enduring controversy. Spinoza, Atheist promises to transform our understanding of his views and to make clear just how radical a thinker he was and remains.

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His many books include Rembrandt’s Jews, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Spinoza: A Life, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die, and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age.

Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint doctoral program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 31 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol's police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled "a scourge of humanity."

Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, in A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.

While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Demshuk, "The Filthiest Village in Europe: Grassroots Ecology and the Collapse of East Germany" (Cornell UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 30 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Filthiest Village in Europe: Grassroots Ecology and the Collapse of East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2026) traces how a community shrouded by "industrial fog," at the brink of gaping coal pits, became a symbol that galvanized grassroots ecology—campaigns by diverse local actors that exposed environmental and economic crises East Germany's political system could not resolve. Notoriously known by the late 1980s as "the filthiest village in Europe," Mölbis suffocated downwind from the massively polluting carbochemical Espenhain plant. Applying a myriad of private collections, interviews, and untapped archival sources, Andrew Demshuk reveals how pastors, parents, officials, inspectors, workers, and spies negotiated ossified party structures whose inability to reform was showcased by ever-worsening environmental conditions.

After peaceful protests a few kilometers north in Leipzig triggered a revolution, pre-1989 grassroots players launched innovative reconstruction programs with financial and organizational expertise from West Germans. Together, they transformed Europe's filthiest village into a healthy place to live and imbued it with new symbolism, turning it into a sign of hope. The political will and social engagement that saved Mölbis and rejuvenated the surrounding wasteland can inform how to revitalize other postindustrial "filthy places" in our world today.

Andrew Demshuk (he/him) is a Professor of History at the American University in Washington D.C. His research focuses on post-1945 German and Polish history with an emphasis on how grassroots human stories can help to explain big political developments.

Jenna Pittman (she/her), is a PhD student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christopher S. Celenza, "The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A rich and immersive reinterpretation of the history of Western thought, The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) – the first in a major trilogy – explores the transmission and development of philosophical ideas from Plato and Aristotle to Jesus, Paul, Augustine and Gregory the Great. Christopher Celenza recalibrates philosophy's story not as abstract argumentation but rather as lived practice: one aimed at excavating wisdom and shaping life. Emphasizing the importance of textual tradition and elucidation across diverse contexts, the author shows how philosophical and religious ideas were transformed and readjusted over time. By focusing on the centrality of Christianity to Western thought, he reveals how ancient ideas were alchemized within religious frameworks, and how – across the centuries – ethical and intellectual traditions intersected to shape culture, memory, and the pursuit of sagacity. Ever attentive to ongoing conversations between past and present, this expansive intellectual history brings perspectives to the subject that are both nuanced and fresh.

Christopher S. Celenza is an American scholar of Renaissance history and the current James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also a professor of history and classics

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Timothy McCall, "Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood.

Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt--all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jason S. Spicer, "Co-Operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American?" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 24 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Co-operative enterprises, which are democratically owned and governed by their workers, customers, or suppliers, have long captured the imagination of activists and social scientists alike. In centering economic democracy and a collectivist-democratic logic, and in embodying a "third way" alternative to profit-maximizing corporations and state-owned enterprises, co-operatives offer the promise of a more sustainable and equitable economy.

Despite extensive study of co-operatives' real and imagined benefits, we know little about the conditions under which they achieve the lasting scale needed to be a viable alternative and transform the economy. Under what conditions can co-operatives achieve such scale? And are such conditions present in the United States, where, despite repeated organizing efforts, co-operatives remain exceptionally rare at scale?

Through a rigorous comparative-historical analysis of co-operative enterprises in different national contexts, Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American? (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jason Spicer seeks to answer these questions. Deploying two different variants of the new institutionalism, Dr. Spicer treats the United States as a central case of comparative failure, as contrasted to three rich democracies where the co-operative business model has been more successful: Finland, France, and New Zealand.

The cause of co-operatives' comparative weakness in the United States is identified as reflecting the joint effect of economic liberalism and structural racism. Only in the United States did the co-operative face, in its initial development, two well-entrenched incumbents operating with competing ownership models: the investor-owned firm and the race-based chattel slavery system of ownership of people. Proponents of these two models acted to deprive the co-operative movement of resources, and undermined the solidarity at the co-operative business model's heart, splintering the American co-operative movement in the process. In subsequent waves of co-operative organizing, advocates have never fully succeeded in overcoming these initial obstacles, resulting in a different outcome in the United States, consistent with broader conceptions of the United States as a perennial outlier (i.e., ""American exceptionalism""). In contrast, in the successful cases, advocates were better able to leverage resources to animate a national solidarity and procure the necessary political and economic resources to achieve scale.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

John Waddell, "The Celtic World: A History" (Four Courts Press, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

At the dawn of history the Celts occupied a vast swathe of Europe from Ireland in the west to lands south of the Black Sea in Asia Minor. The study of this Celtic past has often been a disputed and debated territory and for centuries the true story of these Celtic-speakers of old was obscured by fanciful origin myths. Their origins and subsequent history were slowly revealed when linguistic studies and archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth century began to expose a rich and complex narrative that is still being clarified today. 

A series of dramatic finds in France and Germany in particular have brought these ancient peoples to scholarly and popular attention. This was a prehistoric world that offered an intricate picture of connectivity and diversity across much of Europe. These were people who have bequeathed us a remarkable archaeological heritage, an astonishing art style, several living languages, and, in Irish and Welsh, the most substantial body of early written texts in a non-Latin tongue in western Europe.

The Celtic World: A History (Four Courts Press, 2026) by Professor John Waddell is a historical exploration of how our understanding of the ancient Celts and the concept of a European-wide world inhabited by Celtic-speaking peoples developed over time.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ruth Balint, "Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe" (Cornell UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this unique “history from below,” Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe (Cornell University Press, 2021) chronicles encounters between displaced persons in Europe and the Allied agencies who were tasked with caring for them after the Second World War. The struggle to define who was a displaced person and who was not was a subject of intense debate and deliberation among humanitarians, international law experts, immigration planners, and governments. What has not adequately been recognized is that displaced persons also actively participated in this emerging refugee conversation. Displaced persons endured war, displacement, and resettlement, but these experiences were not defined by passivity and speechlessness. Instead, they spoke back, creating a dialogue that in turn helped shape the modern idea of the refugee.

As Ruth Balint shows, what made a good or convincing story at the time tells us much about the circulation of ideas about the war, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Those stories depict the emerging moral and legal distinction between economic migrants and political refugees. They tell us about the experiences of women and children in the face of new psychological and political interventions into the family. Stories from displaced persons also tell us something about the enduring myth of the new world for people who longed to leave the old.

Balint focuses on those persons whose storytelling skills became a major strategy for survival and escape out of the displaced persons’ camps and out of the Europe. Their stories are brought to life in Destination Elsewhere, alongside a new history of immigration, statelessness, and the institution of the postwar family.

Ruth Balint is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of When Migrants Fail to Stay (Bloomsbury, 2023), Smuggled: An Illegal History of Migration (NewSouth, 2021), and Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea (Allen & Unwin, 2008).

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Radio ReOrient 14:8: Dutch Islamophobia and Muslim Exceptionalism, with Martijn de Koning, hosted by Marchella Ward and Amina Easat-Daas

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode Chella Ward and Amina Easat-Daas spoke with Dr Martijn de Koning about the nature of Islamophobia in the Netherlands and how this sits in relation to common perceptions about Dutch society as a liberal and tolerant society and the Islamophobic realities of the Netherlands. De Koning also spoke at length of the recent NTA affair in the Netherlands, the exceptionalising of surveilling Muslim communities and how Muslims in the Dutch context have begun to challenge this. Dr de Koning is an Associate Professor in Islam, Politics and Society at Radboud University and has published extensively on Islamophobia in the Netherlands.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matthew L. Reznicek, "Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale" (Liverpool UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool UP, 2026) is about the way the Romantic National Tale exercises power and defines the boundaries of citizenship through the categories of health, illness, and disability. When we see these categories at work in these novels, we understand how socio-political belonging is premised on the conception of the healthy body, to the exclusion of bodies deemed otherwise. Employing the medical humanities and, especially, the social determinants of health, this book shows that the National Tale achieves its consolidation of the nation through its enforcement of a rigorous politics of health that polices its characters' and citizens' bodies. Focusing on novels from Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Germaine de Staël, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen allows this argument to show that the imbricated concerns of health and citizenship extend well beyond the immediate anxiety roused by the implementation of the 1800 Act of Union. This book argues that, by prioritizing the categories of health, illness, and disability, we better understand how power and citizenship function in this widely influential early nineteenth-century genre of Romantic fiction and, thus, how we continue to envision citizenship as an extension of bodily characteristics.

Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature to explore the impact of social, historical, and cultural factors in the experience of medicine
and health.

Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th- and 21st-century Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hugo Drochon, "Elites and Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A central paradox of democracies is that they are always ruled by elites. What can democracy mean in this context? Today, it is often said that a populist revolt against elites is driving democratic politics throughout the West. But in Elites and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2026), Hugo Drochon argues that democracy is more accurately and usefully understood as a perpetual struggle among competing elites—between rising elites and ruling elites. Real political change comes from the interaction between social movements and elite political institutions such as parties. But, although true democracy—the rule of the people—may never be achieved, striving towards it can bring about worthwhile democratic results.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels put forward “elite” theories of democracy and gave us terms such as the “ruling class” and “elites” itself. Drawing on their work and tracing the history of democratic thought through figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, C. Wright Mills, and Raymond Aron, Elites and Democracy reveals that this fundamentally elitist basis of democracy—democracy understood as competition between elites—was there all along. The challenge is to think it anew.

Moving away from procedural or principled conceptions of democracy, Elites and Democracy develops a dynamic theory of democracy, one grounded in movement. With current politics defined by a populist backlash against elites, dynamic democracy offers the tools we urgently need to understand our contemporary predicament and to act upon it.

Hugo Drochon is an Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is a historian of modern political thought, with interests in Nietzsche's politics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brett Neilson, "The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World" (Verso, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

At the heart of the fiercest international conflicts is the struggle for the future of globalization.

In the wake of a pandemic that tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict has taken on a new intensity. The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (Verso, 2024) locates the origins of this development in the turbulent dynamics of the capitalist world market. Rather than reducing global conflict to a matter of great power rivalries or the process of economic decoupling, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson investigate the increasing centrality of war to capital operations and to the transformation of capitalism. The goal is to forge a theory of imperialism adequate to a world in which the ‘rest’ no longer provides a putative unity that defines and opposes the ‘West’.

Brett Neilson is professor and deputy director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. In the last decade, his work has centered on issues of migration, borders, and globalization, logistics and digitalization, contemporary capitalism, geopolitics, and automation. Apart from writings with Sandro Mezzadra, he has published many articles and books, including Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle … and Other Tales of Counterglobalization (Minnesota, 2004).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denise Z. Davidson, "Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters" (Cornell UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Denise Z. Davidson joins Jana Byars to talk about Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters (Cornell UP, 2025). The book explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement.

Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters.

By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Radio ReOrient S14:7: Surveilling Muslimness in Denmark, with Amani Hassani, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Amani Hassani, to discuss her most recent work around Islamophobia and Muslimness in Denmark. Hassani discussed Danish colonial histories and the surveilling nature of the Danish welfare state, and how these are employed to construct a narrative of Danish benevolence while simultaneously marking Muslims in Denmark as ‘other’ and deserving of intolerance in an otherwise tolerant nation. Amani Hassani is a lecturer at Brunel University and her work spans urban ethnography, sociology, anthropology and human geography.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sophie Rose, "Intimacy and Social (Dis)Order in Dutch Colonial Expansion: Regulating Sex, Marriage, and Family Life, 1600–1800" (Brill, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 4 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Explosive sexual scandals, bitter domestic conflicts, and dramatic changes in fortune. Sex, marriage, and family life were matters of enormous consequence in the highly complex societies that formed across the early modern Dutch overseas empire. This was not only true for the colonial authorities that administered settlements on behalf of the Dutch East and West India Companies (VOC and WIC), but also for the people of various backgrounds and statuses that inhabited these places. Focusing primarily on the eighteenth century, this book explores how these disparate and unequally empowered groups contested the norms that governed intimate life in Dutch colonial outposts from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

Sophie Rose, Ph.D. (2023), is a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

James Q. Whitman, "Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 4 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that there is no natural form of ownership. Whitman dives deep into the long Western history of this transformation in the legal imagination – the transformation from the ownership of humans and other living creatures to the ownership of land. This change extended over many centuries, coming to fruition only on the threshold of the modern era. It brought with it profound changes, not only in the way we understand ownership but also in the way we understand the state. Its most dramatic consequence arrived in the nineteenth century, with the final disappearance of the lawful private ownership of humans, which had been taken for granted for thousands of years.

James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and Law School and also holds an M.A. in European History from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Chicago.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Paola De Santo, "The Ambassador and the Courtesan: Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy" (U Delaware Press, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 2 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Paola de Santo joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Ambassador and the Courtesan: Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy (U Delaware Press, 2026). Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers a comparative analysis of these two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society. While these two figures may appear unrelated, this book demonstrates their shared relation to the body politic, including the relationship of their very bodies to that metaphorical body. One imagines the early modern ambassador as traveling from one center of power to another, gathering news and disseminating it in writing, as well as negotiating in person. The courtesan, in contrast, is normally imagined employing her body in the service of entertaining elite clients in the enclosed space of the urban salon. These characterizations reinforce their very different roles in Renaissance Italian society and culture, but by placing them in dialogue, salient points of convergence emerge detailing how they were integral to the concurrent emergence of a modern subjectivity of the individual and the formation of the modern state.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

D. Vance Smith, "Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 2 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A major new look at Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe.
Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate with many as cornerstones of European culture. Yet, in Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe (U Chicago Press, 2025), D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in political thought, its religious beliefs—originated in the writings of African thinkers like Augustine, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella, or Europeans who thought extensively about Africa. In fact, a third of Virgil’s Aeneid takes place in Africa. Francis Petrarch believed his most important achievement was his epic Africa; while Geoffrey Chaucer wrote repeatedly about the figures of Scipio Africanus, actually two different men who defeated and destroyed Carthage.
Smith tells the story of how Europe created a false “medieval” version of Africa to acquire resources and power during the era of imperialism and colonialism. The first half of the book, “Reading Africa,” traces Egypt’s, Libya’s, and Carthage’s influence on classical and medieval thinking about Africa, highlighting often ignored literary and legendary traditions, for example, that Alexander the Great named himself the son of an African god. The second part, “Writing Africa,” focuses on how the different cultures of the two great African cities—Carthage and Alexandria—shaped modern literary criticism and political theology and examines the cross-influences of modern anthropology, medieval studies, and colonial law.
Atlas’s Bones firmly re-establishes the significance of Africa in European intellectual history. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how much of Africa informs our artistic and cultural world.

D. Vance Smith is professor of English and former director of medieval studies at Princeton University. His many books include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anthony Kaldellis, "1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople" (Oxford UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 1 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A detailed account of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, a watershed year that closed the book, once and for all, on the Roman Empire and confirmed for Europeans their worst fears about an expanding Ottoman Empire.
Anthony Kaldellis offers a new narrative of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, a watershed year that closed the book, once and for all, on the Roman Empire and confirmed for Europeans their worst fears about an expanding Ottoman Empire.

By the fifteenth century, Constantinople had seen better days, but it was still a vibrant center of learning, worship, commerce, and information. 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople (Oxford UP, 2026) sketches the tense but exciting shared world of Italians, Turks, and Romans that was thrown into crisis by Mehmed II's decision to conquer the city. Kaldellis showcases a detailed reconstruction following events on a day-by-day basis, pulling from gripping eye-witness testimonies in Latin, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Turkish. He weighs the strategies of both the attackers and defenders, and proves that, contrary to the fatalism that marks almost all narratives written with hindsight, in reality the defense was hardly a lost cause. The defenders knew exactly what they were doing. They were willing to risk their lives, but it was not their intention to become martyrs. Instead, it was the sultan who was scrambling to neutralize a seemingly impregnable defense. That he did so was a testament to his ingenuity and tenacity.

The final chapters of 1453 trace the fate of the vanquished and their captivity. It also weighs the impact of the city's fall on the conquerors, the conquered, and on world history. 1453 was not merely a symbol for the passing of the Middle Ages and the onset of early modernity: it changed the very nature of the Ottoman empire and redirected the transmission of cultural legacies, especially those of Greek classical scholarship. The fall of Constantinople is therefore a nexus of converging pathways between east and west, medieval and modern, ends and beginnings.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The British General Election of 2024: A Conversation with Robert Ford and Paula Surridge

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Why and how did Labour win the 2024 election? In The British General Election of 2024 Robert Ford, a Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, Tim Bale , Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, Will Jennings, Professor of Politics at the University of Southampton, and Paula Surridge, Professor of Politics at the University of Bristol present a detailed analysis of the context, campaign and election result. Part of a long running series of books that offer definitive accounts of British elections, the book uses a range of methods, including examining of social, print and televisual media, fieldwork with individuals from the key political parties, and deep psephological analysis to both describe and explain the 2024 result. As accessible and engaging as it as academically rigorous, the book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary politics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Justin Bailey, "An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture" (2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In a culture saturated by speed, safety protocols, and mediated fear, what might we rediscover by walking or hiking slowly into the unknown?

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Justin S. Bailey, author of An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture, published by Those Who Wonder Press in 2026. Drawing on his Appalachian Trail journey, Bailey offers a wide‑ranging reflection on wandering as an ancient human practice, one tied to resilience, trust, and the shaping of perspective.

Our conversation explores how fear is culturally produced and amplified, particularly through media and information overload, and how embodied experiences of movement can recalibrate our sense of risk. Bailey also reflects on the social world of long‑distance hiking, where shared hardship fosters community, vulnerability, and unexpected forms of solidarity.

At the same time, the interview raises broader ethical and structural questions, who is able to move freely, whose mobility is celebrated, and whose is constrained or scrutinized. We discuss migration, gendered safety, and the responsibilities that come with movement through landscapes shaped by inequalities.

This episode will be of interest to listeners working in anthropology, sociology, migration studies, psychology, archeology, religious studies, and anyone reflecting on fear, movement, and what it means to live well in an uncertain world.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tiffany Jo Werth, "The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tiffany Jo Werth explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a role that, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination. The scale of the human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide a conceptual framework for the various stony textual and visual archives this book studies. The texts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political, religious) although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue. The religious orbit encompasses the Christian rivalry with Jewish culture, touches on Christianity's tension with Islam, but most intently centers on the antagonism between Catholic and variants of Protestant and Reformed belief.
The volume features canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religious polemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers and stonemasons. Accordingly, the multimedia archive includes drama, lyric and prose as well as biblical illustrations, tapestries, church furniture, paintings, anatomical drawings and statues. The lithic too is capaciously construed as a continuum of rocky as well as mineral forms ranging from bodily encrustations like the kidney and bezoar stone, to salt, iron, limestone, marble, flint and silicon. The assemblage of materials bears witness to aspirational imperial fantasies and looming colonial conquests; it engages in both syncretism and supersession; upholds and subverts gender hierarchies; limns the race-making category of hue with desire; and supports, and sometimes thwarts, elitist ideologies of an elect, chosen people. All come together via the storied pathways of stone as densely material and as a foundation for the abstract imaginary along the scala naturae. Across the lithic-human fold, stone promises, fascinates, betrays. As alpha and omega, stone can herald salvation or it can threaten with damnation.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Vin Nardizzi, "Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Today, I interview Vin Nardizzi, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, about his new monograph Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance (U Toronto Press, 2025), published by the University of Toronto Press. Vin Nardizzi is the author of Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (University of Toronto, 2013). He is also the co-editor of Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009) and The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

In Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance, a wide-ranging, elegantly written book, Vin argues that one of the major works of sixteenth-century plant writing, John Gerard’s The Herball, can reanimate our thinking about early modern literature and visual art. Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance brings together a rich archive include Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its English translations, seventeenth-century anatomy textbooks, and the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldi and Nicholas Hilliard. The book also makes exciting methodological interventions in the critical practices of early modern scholarship.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mattie Fitch, "The People, the Workers, and the Citizens: Antifascist Cultures and the Popular Front in France, 1934–1939" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Today we are joined by Mattie Fitch, Associate Professor at Marymount University and author of The People, The Workers and the Citizens: Antifascist Cultures and the Popular Front in France, 1934-1939 (Routledge, 2026).

In our conversation, we discussed the way that antifascist culture undergirded the French Popular Front, the tensions between the Communists, Socialists, and Radical antifascist projects, and the ways that each Popular Front party of defined “the people.”

In The People, The Workers and the Citizens, Fitch explores Popular Front antifascist programs and the cultural work that illuminated their diverse visions for a “people’s government.” The book is thematic: in her first chapter, Fitch examines the Communists’ Maison de la Culture and the Fédération musicale populaire. The communist’s efforts to produce a worker’s culture successfully mobilized French national symbols in novel ways but had difficulties navigating between high and low culture.

By contrast, chapter 2 centres on Jean Zay and the Radicals. Zay’s influence abounded and he was willing to work with anyone in the Popular Front to see cultural access extended to all French citizens. Yet his vision of a civic nationhood clashed with his Communist and Socialist allies who privileged workers.

The most enigmatic were the Socialists. Although they were the largest party in the French National Assembly, Leon Blum’s party struggled to articulate an antifascist program that encompassed all of their voters. Their pacifism proved a problem in the context of a rising Nazi Germany, and they were squeezed between the increasing nationalism of the French Communists and the Radicals’ appeal to the working class.

Fitch’s analysis moves beyond earlier studies that focus mostly (or only) on Paris. In chapters 4 and 5, she looks at the antifascist activities of politicians in Marseille and Rouen and finds two very different Popular Fronts at work in the regions. In Marseille, working class politics dominate and an authentic endogenous Popular Front culture precedes directives from the capital. While in Rouen, extremely moderate Radicals battle working class activists on the other side of town.

Fitch’s work is compelling and shines a new light on the history of the Popular Front. It will be of interest to scholars of modern France and political culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Berardino Palumbo, "Where Saints Show Respect: Mafia, Modernity, and Rituals of Power" (Berghahn Books, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Where Saints Show Respect: Mafia, Modernity, and Rituals of Power is an anthropological exploration of how authority is produced not only through violence or secrecy but also through public ritual. Drawing on more than thirty years of ethnographic research in Sicily, Professor Berardino Palumbo turns our attention to saints’ festivals, processions, fireworks, ritual gestures and moments when power becomes visible, tangible, and socially negotiated.

At the centre of the book is the now well-known practice of saints “showing respect”: statues pausing or bowing during processions in front of particular homes or streets. Palumbo treats these not as traditional leftovers, but as modern political acts through which hierarchy, recognition, and moral worth are publicly visible. Power, he argues, is learned not only through fear or coercion, but through piety, celebration, play, and spectacle.

The English edition is translated and edited by Cornelia Mayer Herzfeld. The book opens with a foreword by Michael Herzfeld, who situates it within broader debates on modernity, Europe, and anthropological critique. It closes with an afterword by Jane and Peter Schneider, placing Palumbo’s work in dialogue with the long tradition of anthropological research on Sicily and the mafia, while highlighting what is novel in his approach.

Rather than treating the mafia as a hidden or external force, Where Saints Show Respect shows how it is woven into everyday social relations, religious life, and shared moral worlds. In doing so, the book challenges readers to rethink modernity, not as the disappearance of ritual, but as its reconfiguration.

This is an invitation to look more closely at how power operates wherever it appears festive, familiar, or “traditional” and to ask what makes us see some rituals as political and others not.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Drew Flanagan, "From Occupation to Integration: Recivilizing the French Zone of Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1955" (LSU Press, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

After the collapse of the National Socialist regime in May 1945, France became one of four principal occupying powers in a defeated Germany. Within their zone of occupation along the Upper and Middle Rhine, French occupiers participated in the Allied project to remake German society. In the process, they confronted the long history of Franco-German rivalry in the region and their country’s diminished power in the wake of World War II.
From Occupation to Integration: Recivilizing the French Zone of Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1955 (LSU Press, 2026) by Dr. Drew Flanagan explores how French ideas about civilization and the civilizing process shaped the practice of occupation in the French Zone and the early stages of European integration. The French Zone was set apart from the other Allied zones by the occupiers’ belief that Nazi “barbarism” was deeply rooted in German culture and history. In seeking to transform the Germans along their border into acceptable partners for France within a united western Europe, the French occupiers applied aspects of France’s universal “civilizing” mission, adapting strategies and practices developed in the country’s overseas colonies to fit a European population.
Whether implementing counterinsurgency methods developed in French North Africa in the pacification and control of their zone or attempting to address what they perceived as the deep-rooted flaws of German culture through reeducation and propaganda, the French applied their civilizational thinking, using that vision to justify and guide the first postwar attempts at cross-border economic integration. Through both conflicts and cooperation with the German population, the French in occupied Germany negotiated a shared vision of western European civilization that they hoped would ensure French leadership in Europe.
In this engaging study, Dr. Flanagan deftly details and analyzes the entanglement between the Europeanization of the French Zone and decolonization in France’s empire, prompting readers to consider the continued impact of colonial and imperial ideas and practices on contemporary Europe and the European Union.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Audrey Borowski, "Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant" (Princeton UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant (Princeton UP, 2026) provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist and courtier navigating the learned and courtly circles of early modern Europe and the Republic of Letters.
Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his “Paris sojourn” as a young diplomat and in Germany at the court of Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover. She challenges the image of Leibniz as an isolated genius, revealing instead a man of multiple identities whose thought was shaped by a deep engagement with the social and intellectual milieus of his time. Borowski shows us Leibniz as he was known to his contemporaries, enabling us to rediscover him as an enigmatic young man who was complex and all too human.
An exhilarating work of scholarship, Leibniz in His World demonstrates how this uncommon intellect, torn between his ideals and the necessity to work for absolutist states, struggled to make a name for himself during his formative years.

Audrey Borowski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the philosophy of AI. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and Aeon.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Penny Roberts, "Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge UP, 2025), Penny Robert's latest book, takes us into the world of secret intelligence gathering during the French Wars of Religion. Robert's discovery of the interrogation record of a Huguenot merchant, Jean Tivinat, arrested in May 1570 for attempting to secretly carry letters to England, unspools into a broader story about the intersections between confessional affiliations, international affairs, knowledge, trust, and networking in a tumultuous time. As she argues, clandestine communication was crucial to maintaining ties amongst a widely dispersed and threatened religious community. Huguenot Networks is a lively read and sure to appeal to anyone interested in the history of espionage, Huguenots, international affairs in Elizabethan England, or the French Wars of Religion.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elias V. Messinas, "Synagogues of Greece: A Study of Synagogues in Macedonia and Thrace" (Bloch Publishing, 2011)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Across Greece, once-thriving Jewish communities stood for more than two thousand years. From the Romaniote Jews of Ioannina to the great Sephardic center of Salonika, Jewish life shaped the cultural and urban fabric of the eastern Mediterranean.

During the Holocaust, approximately 87 percent of Greek Jewry was murdered — one of the highest destruction rates in Europe. Entire communities disappeared almost overnight.

What remained were buildings — sometimes abandoned, sometimes altered, sometimes barely recognizable — silent witnesses to lives erased.

For more than three decades, architect, researcher, and author Elias V. Messinas has devoted his life to documenting, restoring, and re-interpreting these synagogues and Jewish spaces.

His major works include:

The Synagogues of Greece: A Study of Synagogues in Macedonia and Thrace, a foundational architectural and historical survey,
The Synagogue of Verona, a landmark study in restoration practice,
Kahal Shalom: The Synagogue of Kos — A Chronicle of Research, Restoration, Sanctity and Ecology, and
his recent reflective work, The Synagogue, which explores memory, encounter, and meaning through these spaces.

Messinas is both architect and historian — but perhaps most importantly, a custodian of memory, working to preserve places whose congregations no longer exist.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator, and host of the New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here and also contributes here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Potter, "Master of Rome: A Life of Julius Caesar" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

By any measure, Julius Caesar is one of the most significant and famous figures in Roman history. Self-identified as a "popular" politician, he advocated for effective government to better the lives of average Romans,but believed such a government could not be based upon the existing democracy. Only through his personal authority and the massive organization he built to overthrow the government could the prosperity of all Rome's citizens be ensured.

Through a careful analysis of the ancient sources, especially Caesar's own writings, David Potter offers us a stunning and original portrait of this great general and statesman. Master of Rome: A Life of Julius Caesar (Oxford UP, 2025) reveals Caesar as a highly organized manager with an extraordinary ability to adjust to circumstances while maintaining the ancient equivalent of a positive "media presence." After his death, Caesar's followers put forward a narrative of his life that made his rise to power seem inevitable, but Caesar's own writing tells us a different story—one of a detail-oriented general who demanded a high degree of accountability from his subordinates.
A critical aspect of Caesar's philosophy of command was the need to find room for former enemies to serve in his organization. While this philosophy catapulted Caesar to great fame as a general during the wars in Gaul, when he attempted to put this method into effect in the wake of the civil war that established him as the master of Rome, it led to his brutal assassination in 44 BCE.
Master of Rome tells the dramatic story of one of history's most intriguing figures, who rose from the fringes of Roman political society to unprecedented heights. Along the way, Potter identifies the extraordinary qualities that enabled Caesar to dominate the world in which he lived.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. His previous books include The Origin of Empire: Rome from the Republic to Hadrian, Constantine the Emperor, The Victor's Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, and Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Pavel Brunssen, "The Making of 'Jew Clubs': Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures" (Indiana UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 9 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Today we are joined by Pavel Brunssen, a Research Associate and Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University and author of The Making of “Jew Clubs”: Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures (Indiana UP, 2025).

In our conversation, we discussed the difference between Jewish clubs and “Jew Clubs,” the overlapping of antisemitism and philosemitism in football fan cultures, the language politics of clubs and supporter’s organizations, and the inability to completely master the unmastered past.

In The Making of “Jew Clubs,” Brunssen looks at four “Jew Clubs” – clubs that have been identified by either the organization, their supporters, or their opponents as having a Jewish identity. He focuses on Bayern Munich FC, FK Austria Vienna, Ajax Amsterdam, and Tottenham Hotspur. Each provides an angle into his deeply researched and theoretical discussion of how a club can become identified with Jewish identity, without necessarily having a significant number of Jewish members or supporters or even having identified as Jewish. His investigation into this phenomenon provides him a space to understand how postwar Europeans have attempted to come to terms with the unmasterable past of antisemitism and the Holocaust.

In his chapter on Bayern Munich FC, Brunssen examines a club that has self-consciously adopted a “Jew Club” identity as a way of working through the club’s complicated wartime history. Bayern Munich’s administration and fans each promote the club’s Jewish heritage, particularly expressed through the former president Kurt Landauer, as a way of creating a space between their association and German football’s Nazi past. For the club, their celebration of Landauer demonstrates their cosmopolitan values, but for fans Landauer’s legacy offers a space to critique the club’s current engagement with organizations such as the Qatari government.

FK Austria Vienna has long been associated with Jewishness because of the club’s location in Vienna, its association with café culture, and its “modern” style of play. Today the club mobilizes its “Jew Club” identity to differentiate itself from its rival Rapid Vienna and to repudiate the actions of a radical right segment of its own supporters.

Ajax Amsterdam became a “Jew Club” in response to the taunts of their rivals from Rotterdam – Feyenoord. Ajax supporters became “Super Jews” in response and the club’s carnivalesque stadium atmosphere creates a “virtual Jewish space.” The fandom’s philosemitism both opens the door for Jewish agency, including of fans from Israel, and normalizes antisemitic chants from rival fans.

Tottenham Hotspur might be the most infamous “Jew Club” in the world. Its identity emerged in the 1930s and by the 1970s, the club’s supporters adopted the Y-word as a form of linguistic reclamation. In becoming the Y-army, they take back the powerful taboo of the slur from their opponents, but Brunssen questions whether such linguistic triangulation works and points to the club’s ongoing efforts to police against the Y-word in public forums.

Brunssen’s work is fascinating, well researched, and theoretically rigorous. It will be of interest to scholars interested in antisemitism, football, and memory culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof, "The Burgeoning European Print Trade: The Distribution of Prints Via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp" (Harvey Miller, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 8 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof join Jana Byars to talk about their new book, The Burgeoning European Print Trade: The Distribution of Prints Via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp (Harvey Miller, 2025). The European print trade is an evocative topic. Not only art historians, but social, cultural, and economic historians all agree that it was of vital importance in the Early Modern Period, as the conveyer of established icons, as well as the most recent imagery and news. Yet, thus far it is often discussed solely on the basis of tantalizing, isolated case studies. Bowen and Imhof's ground-breaking publication will address this significant lacuna by demonstrating in unprecedented detail how booksellers were routinely engaged in the extensive international distribution and sale of hundreds of thousands of prints annually between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Based upon the exceptionally well-preserved archives of the renowned Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp, this book presents the often-overlooked interwoven worlds of booksellers and print sellers, while documenting Antwerp's continued fame for the production and distribution of prints. Together with a remarkable array of clients, ranging from the cultivated and influential elite to ordinary laymen, these figures provide palpable examples of suppliers, buyers, and middlemen that reveal how they interacted with one another. Simultaneously, this work illuminates numerous critical related topics, ranging from how prints were priced and the relative quantities in which they were sold, to the importance of national and professional networks in these transactions. The result is an essential, novel study that clarifies how the print trade worked in practice during a burgeoning period in its evolution.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Thomas Park, "Sarah Wambaugh and the Plebiscite: The Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 7 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Sarah Wambaugh and the Plebiscite: The Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War (Cambridge UP, 2026) Dr. Andrew Park tells the story of the rise and fall of the plebiscite, once seen as a promising democratic solution to international conflict which – more than once – became embroiled in controversy and war in the first half of the twentieth century. The book's central figure is the brilliant but largely forgotten American scholar Sarah Wambaugh, the leading expert on the plebiscite technique whose dramatic career took her to many of the world's political hotspots. The norms she developed for the technique continue to shape how self-determination and popular suffrage in international affairs are thought about and conducted today. In a world where borders are again being redrawn by force and democracy everywhere appears under strain, this book is a timely and compelling reminder that such events are not new.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dominik Berrens, "Naming New Things and Concepts in Early Modern Science: The Case of Natural History" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 6 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Naming new discoveries is central to science, and for centuries, Latin dominated this process. The resulting terminology still shapes modern science, yet the influences behind its creation have remained largely unexplored. Naming New Things and Concepts in Early Modern Science: The Case of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, 2026) by Dr. Dominik Berrens is the first comprehensive exploration of how modern scientific terminology took shape during the early modern period. Far from being the product of individual scientists or institutions, the development of this terminology emerged over several centuries, involving a remarkably diverse range of contributors. In particular, the process was often influenced by factors unrelated to science itself – such as the appeal of certain linguistic forms or even sheer coincidence – revealing the unexpected and sometimes arbitrary forces behind the creation of technical terms.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marta Lorimer, "Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 5 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

How did the far right go from illegitimate fringe to contender for public office, and did Europe have anything to do with it? Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that European integration functioned as an ideological resource for far right parties looking for legitimation because it enabled them to refashion their political message in a more acceptable form, while maintaining the allegiance of their existing supporters.
Drawing on the qualitative analysis of over 400 documents produced by the Movimento Sociale Italiano/Alleanza Nazionale in Italy (1978-2009) and the Rassemblement National in France (1978-2019), Lorimer identifies the core concepts and discourses the parties used to talk about Europe, and the legitimation mechanisms associated with them. The book's narrative is developed through the analysis of four key concepts: the concept of identity, which enabled the parties to transnationalise their message and create a positive association between themselves and Europe; the concept of liberty, which made it possible for them to foster an image of actors holding uncontroversial positions; the concept of threat, which helped them promote the idea that 'desperate times call for desperate measures; and the concept of national interest, which helped them stress commitment to core principles in their ideology.
Ever since its re-emergence on the European political scene, scholars have sought to explain the mainstreaming of the far right. By understanding how the process of European integration facilitated its transition from the margins to the mainstream, this book adds one piece to the puzzle of far right legitimation.

Marta Lorimer is a Lecturer in Politics at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University, where she teaches on European politics and populism, and co-editor of the journal Political Research Exchange. Her research on far-right politics and European integration has been published widely, including in the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wout Saelens, "Fossil Consumerism: Energy, Ecology and Everyday Life in the Early Modern Low Countries" (Leuven UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 4 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Fossil Consumerism: Energy, Ecology and Everyday Life in the Early Modern Low Countries (Leuven UP, 2026) by Dr. Wout Saelens explores how the homes of ordinary city dwellers sparked our modern dependence on fossil fuels. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, including probate inventories, household manuals, personal journals, medical treatises and contemporary artwork, it reveals how households in the early modern Low Countries embraced peat and coal to fuel new standards of warmth, light and domesticity. Yet, with these new home comforts came rising indoor pollution, intensified and gendered housework and, ultimately, a quiet shift in humanity’s relationship with nature.

Bridging the histories of environments, material culture and consumption, Fossil Consumerism offers a reinterpretation of the historical roots of global warming, finding these not in the industrial mill, but in the intimate, overlooked spaces of the home. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the everyday origins of the Anthropocene and is available Open Access.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Avner Greif et al., "Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 2 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

It’s one of the biggest questions in economic history: How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of the Industrial Revolution, and not China? And what does that journey tell us about politics and culture?

In Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 (Princeton UP, 2025), Guido Tabellini, alongside his co-authors, argues that the answer comes from how European and Chinese organized cooperation—through corporations in Europe and through clans in China—and how that shaped each one’s society.

Guido Tabellini is the Intesa Sanpaolo Chair in Political Economics and Vice President at Bocconi University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Arthur W. Gullachsen, "The Defeat and Attrition of the 12. SS-Panzerdivision Hitlerjugend: Volume II: Operations Martlet, Epsom, Windsor and Charnwood 11 June-12 July 1944" (Casemate, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Following the Normandy landings, Rommel rushed Heeresgruppe B reserves towards the coast in order to crush the bridgehead and drive the Allied forces back into the sea. One of these armored reserves was the newly created 12. SS-Panzer-Division Hitlerjugend. Extremely well equipped and at near full strength by mid-1944 standards, it was seen as an extremely capable formation. As Allied forces flooded inland from the beaches, 12. SS-Panzer-Division attempted to capture and hold the battlefield initiative. However, despite this German armoured division's best efforts, it would be bludgeoned and driven back in a series of offensive set-piece operations by the British Second Army, supported by massive artillery programs and RAF air strikes. As a result, the division failed to succeed in its new defensive role, and was slowly weakened by attrition, reducing its combat arms regiments to a weakened Kampfgruppe by mid-July.

The Defeat and Attrition of the 12. SS-Panzerdivision Hitlerjugend: Volume II: Operations Martlet, Epsom, Windsor and Charnwood 11 June-12 July 1944 (Casemate, 2026) focuses on the fighting between 11 June and 12 July: the Cristot triangle; the Parc de Boislonde; Fontenay-le-Pesnel; Operation Epsom and the main events of the Battle of the Odon; Operation Windsor and the attack on Carpiquet airfield; and finally the massive Anglo-Canadian assault on Caen, Operation Charnwood. A detailed set of appendices will analyze German personnel, equipment, and armored losses during the battles, and losses inflicted on the Allies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elisheva Baumgarten, "Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

What can we learn about Jewish history when we stop focusing on great rabbis and turn instead to ordinary people? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz speaks with historian Elisheva Baumgarten about the groundbreaking volume she edited, Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe (Cornell UP, 2026).

Beyond the Elite invites readers into the everyday world of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe—not through the voices of famous scholars, but through the lives of ordinary people. Using four powerful lenses—people, spaces, objects, and rituals—the book reconstructs how non-elite Jews lived, worked, traveled, celebrated, and struggled within majority-Christian societies.

Across topics as wide-ranging as orphanhood, river travel, local political conflicts, pawnbroking, architecture, weddings, and religious practice, the volume reveals how Jewish communities were deeply woven into the fabric of medieval towns while still marked as outsiders. These stories capture the rhythms of daily life during periods of relative stability—and help explain how, by the late thirteenth century, anti-Jewish persecution emerged both from within existing social systems and as a rupture of them.

Together, Baumgarten and Katz explore what happens when historians shift their attention away from elites and toward the margins—and how recovering the lives of ordinary Jews reshapes our understanding of medieval Jewish identity, community, and survival.

About the Guest

Elisheva Baumgarten is Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading scholars of medieval Ashkenazic Jewish life. Her research focuses on the social and religious worlds of ordinary Jews, including women, families, and those outside the rabbinic elite. She led the multi-year collaborative research project that produced Beyond the Elite, bringing together scholars to reconstruct the daily lives of Jews across medieval northern Europe.

About the Host

Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with leading scholars, Katz brings cutting-edge academic scholarship into meaningful conversation with contemporary Jewish life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Colloquies on European Civil Procedure: A Conversation with Marco de Benito

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

This volume brings law to life through a free and lively dialogue on the new Model European Rules of Civil Procedure. In it, some of Europe's leading jurists engage in a free-wheeling discussion of the most important issues in procedural law today. With its elegant style and unconventional intellectual approach, Colloquies stands out as a rare gem of comparative legal literature.

Marco de Benito holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Civil Procedure at IE University. His research focuses on comparative civil procedure, international arbitration, private law, and legal history. He arbitrates and advises on international matters.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joanna Siekiera ed., "NATO Stability Policing: Beneficial Tool in Filling the Security Gap and Establishing the Rule of Law, and a Safe and Secure Environment" (NATO Stability Policing Centre Of Excellence, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Since the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of great power competition on the world stage, NATO has been in a period of transition to adapting to the new international security environment that is mark by great instability and violations of international law. These types of situation have in recent years have been labelled "grey-zone" style threats that can be dangerous but may avoid the official legal definition of warlike activity.
To combat this concerning situation has arisen the concept of "Stability Policing" that helps ensure that the rule of law is established and preserved in the long run. This includes the effective cooperation between military and civil law enforcement together to achieving long-term stability in troubled areas.
The NATO Stability Policing Centre Of Excellence commissioned its own extensive three volume study NATO Stability Policing: Beneficial Tool in Filling the Security Gap and Establishing the Rule of Law, and a Safe and Secure Environment (2024)edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera to investigate the nature and challenges of such stability operations.
The three volumes are available online:The Stability Policing Trilogy Volume I – Past
The Stability Policing Trilogy Volume II – Present The Stabilit y Policing Trilogy Volume III – Future

Dr. Joanna Siekiera is an expert in international law, NATO consultant, trainer, and educator. She has previously been featured on the New Books Network for 21st Century as the Pacific Century. Culture and Security of Oceania States in Great Power Competition (Warsaw University Press, 2023), Evolution on Demand: The Changing Roles of the U.S. Marine Corps in Twenty-first Century Conflicts and Beyond (Marine Corps University Press, 2025), and International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025).

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Claire Goldstein, "Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores the relationship between sensory experience, state ideology, and artistic form, examining literature and art inspired by comets that unsettled the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired.

Guest Claire Goldstein Professor of French and Director of the Humanities Program at UC Davis. Her research in ancien régime French-language literature and culture has explored subjects such as garden design, art and architecture; theater, ballet, and fête performances; astronomy; early modern fashion accessories; and early journalism. Claire’s current projects include Jesuit school ballets; female itinerant clothing resellers; and the innovative and enterprising publishing practices of Nicholas de Blégny, a best-selling and long forgotten multi-hyphenate physician-author. Her scholarship is motivated by her abiding interests in visual and material culture, her curiosity about how the things people see, and the objects and material practices that they engage with, create cultural meanings. She is the author of In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth Century France (Northwestern UP, 2025) and Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents That Made Modern France (U Penn Press, 2007).

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steffan Blayney, "Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body" (Activist Studies of Science, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Our guest today is Steffan Blayney, the author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body. In Health & Efficiency, Blayney explores a new model of health that emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health. Under this new "science of work," fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers' capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

Steffan Blayney is a former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, where his work focused on the relations between health, the body, and society, and on histories of political activism in modern and contemporary Britain. He has taught at Birkbeck, Kent, and Sussex, was previously a member of the editorial team at History Workshop Online, and was a co-founder and organizer of History Acts - a radical history workshop and network connecting activists and historians. He also authored the book Long Live Southbank, which celebrates the history and culture of the Undercroft area of the South Bank - the oldest recognized and still existing skateboarding space in the world - and the community that has evolved there over the years. Today, he no longer works within the walls of academia; instead, he is out in the field as a labor organizer, utilizing his talents, knowledge, and expertise in his work with EQUITY, a performing arts and entertainment trade union based in London.

My co-producer today is Drew Marczewski a student in the MA Program in Communication at Oakland University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Bather Woods, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods

An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.
A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.
Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today.

David Bather Woods is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is coeditor with Timothy Stoll of The Schopenhauerian Mind. He has contributed chapters to The Proustian Mind, Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, and The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Orsi Husz, "Bankminded: Banks As Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In today’s world, it is almost impossible to go through the day without interacting with a bank—whether through a salary payment, a debit card, a credit card, or a digital ID used to access public services online. Yet this intimate relationship between households and banks is relatively recent.

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Orsi Husz, Professor at Uppsala University, about her book Bankminded: Banks as Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden. The book traces how, from the late 1950s onwards, banks gradually became embedded in the everyday routines of ordinary people. Through wage accounts, credit cards, financial advice, and identity documents, financial institutions reshaped how households handled money—and how they thought about finance itself.

Drawing on rich archival research, Husz shows that this transformation was not simply a story of technology or markets. It involved cultural shifts around class, gender, morality, and identity, as well as the surprising role of the welfare state in expanding everyday banking. The result was what she calls the “bankification” of everyday life—a process that laid the groundwork for the financialised world we inhabit today.

If you are interested in the history of banking, the culture of finance, or how modern financial habits emerged, this conversation offers a fascinating perspective on a transformation that most of us now take for granted.

You can download the book for free (Open Access) here

Listen to the episode to learn how banks became an intimate part of everyday life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew I. Port, "Germany" (Polity, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Few countries are more haunted by the darker aspects of their history than Germany. Nazi crimes continue to cast a long shadow at home and abroad. Germans have nevertheless managed to put their violent, genocidal past behind them, creating a peaceful and prosperous democracy at the heart of Europe. In this refreshing book Germany (Polity, 2025), Andrew I. Port tells the story of that extraordinary transformation, from the vilified, destitute and divided Germany of 1945 to the respected, wealthy and unified international power we recognize today. Tracing the histories of the eastern and western halves of postwar Germany in tandem, he highlights their obvious differences and unexpected commonalities. This novel approach explains not only the country’s many accomplishments since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also the challenges it has faced—from the difficulty of unifying two distinct societies to violent forms of xenophobia and the rise of extremist parties. Whether the Federal Republic remains a stable and successful power is the new “German Question” of the twenty-first century.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maria A. Sanchez, "Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts" (Cornell UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Maria A. Sanchez tackles a central tension in global governance: how international human rights courts balance their mandates with the imperative to respect national sovereignty. Despite having similar mandates, the world's three regional human rights courts—the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights—interpret their authority differently, leading to uneven regional enforcement of global human rights principles.

Dr. Sanchez traces how the geopolitical dynamics of each court's founding moments have manifested in contemporary disparities across the courts' jurisprudences—focusing on disputes involving freedom of expression, personal integrity rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. Her findings expose a paradox: the courts that were founded in the most inhospitable environments for human rights have ended up asserting the most expansive authority over governments.

Deeply researched and insightful, Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts speaks to when and how international institutions can leverage authority to intervene in domestic affairs.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Foster Chamberlin, "Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War" (Louisiana State UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War (Louisiana State UP, 2025), Foster Chamberlin evaluates the role of militarized police forces in the political violence of interwar Europe by tracing the evolution of one such group, Spain’s Civil Guard, culminating in the country’s turbulent Second Republic period of 1931–1936. As his analysis shows, political violence provided the main justification for the military coup attempt that began the Spanish Civil War, and the Civil Guard was the most violent institution in the country at that time. Discovering how this police force, which was supposed to maintain order, became a principal contributor to the violence of the republic proves key to understanding the origins of the Civil War. By tracing the institution’s founding in the mid-nineteenth century, and moving through case studies of episodes of political violence involving the group, Chamberlin concludes that the Civil Guard had an organizational culture that made it prone to violent actions because of its cult of honor, its distance from the people it policed, and its almost entirely military training.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alec Ryrie, "The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It" (Reaktion, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Examining everything from popular novels to politics, an investigation of persistent fascination with Nazis—and where it might take us.

We live in an age where Hitler and the Nazis dominate our cultural imagination, shaping values once defined by religion. Historian Alec Ryrie explores why society remains captivated by this struggle, from history and fiction to modern myths such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. He examines the costs of our Nazi obsession and questions what will come as our anti-Nazi moral consensus frays and both the Left and Right begin to move on. With a fresh take on modern history and pop culture, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (Reaktion, 2025) offers a thought-provoking look at the culture wars and our shifting political crises, challenging assumptions on both sides and asking what a new moral vision might look like.

Alec Ryrie is professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University and a fellow of the British Academy. His previous books include Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. He lives in rural County Durham.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tristan J. Rogers, "Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2025), Tristan J. Rogers argues that philosophical conservatism is a coherent and compelling set of historically rooted ideas about conserving and promoting the human good. Part I, “Conservatism Past,” presents a history of conservative ideas, exploring themes, such as the search for wisdom, the limits of philosophy, reform in preference to revolution, the relationship between authority and freedom, and liberty as a living tradition. Major figures include Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, G.W.F. Hegel, and Roger Scruton. Part II, “Conservatism Present,” applies philosophical conservatism to contemporary conservative politics, focusing on issues such as nationalism, populism, the family, education, and responsibility.

Rogers shows that conservatism has been defined differently at different times: as a loose set of connected ideas reacting against the French Revolution; as a kind of disposition or instinct in favor of the status quo; and more recently as any ideas opposed to the political left. But he also allows a set of questions to guide his argument for conservatism’s merits: What is conservatism? Is it a coherent and attractive philosophy? What are conservatives for? And how is today’s conservatism related to its past? In his answers, Rogers paints a compelling and coherent picture of an aligned and attractive set of ideas.

Dr. Tristan J. Rogers teaches Logic and Latin at Donum Dei Classical Academy in San Francisco, CA. He has also taught philosophy at Santa Clara University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Authority of Virtue: Institutions and Character in the Good Society (2020).

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jessica Clarke, "A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

"Roman theatre" is a term often used to describe the theatre of ancient Italy during the second and third century BCE. Plautus and Terence are referred to as ‘Roman playwrights,’ and Rome itself is generally regarded as the driving force behind the development of theatrical culture in Italy. But was this early theatre in Italy specifically or characteristically Roman? Using previously marginalised archaeological source material and placing it in constructive dialogue with the surviving ancient literature, A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre (Liverpool UP, 2025) offers a significant reinterpretation of how theatre developed in the Italian peninsula, as well as a radical reappraisal of the role of Republican Rome as the impetus for cultural change. Challenging a long-held scholarly consensus, it is argued that whilst Rome would eventually rise to political and cultural dominance, the archaeological evidence does not encourage us to view Rome as a significant factor in the development of theatre in Italy until at least the end of the first century BCE and the construction of the Theatre of Pompey. Our attention is directed instead to other cities in the Italian peninsula during the third and second centuries BCE, which have hitherto been greatly overshadowed by imperialistic narratives of Roman cultural development.

Jessica Clarke is a historian and archaeologist specialising in ancient Roman theatre and entertainment culture. She was awarded her PhD by University College London in 2024.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kim Bowes, "Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton UP, 2025) unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor.

Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children’s toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans’ most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status.
Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today’s laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world.

Kim Bowes is professor of archaeology and ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast, "Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 3 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The battlefields were not the only places that threatened death during World War I. As conflict raged on and supply lines tightened, the allied powers of France, Britain, and Italy faced a fundamental problem: keeping their soldier and civilian populations safe from starvation.

Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War (Oxford UP, 2025) describes how, faced with this immense challenge, the Allies devised a multilateral institution--the Wheat Executive--to do what no state could do alone. Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast examine the difficult considerations made by the allied powers when ceding authority to an international body that would make decisions for them. Beyond successfully managing wheat shipping and distribution, they argue, the Wheat Executive proved to have significant influence in the evolving landscape of interstate cooperation. As a case study, the Wheat Executive improves our understanding of international institutional design, the importance of commodities during wartime, economic coordination amongst wartime coalition members, and the legacies of international cooperation during the First World War. As one of the first great experiments in supranationalism, the Allies' management of wheat while at war provides lessons about the emergence of international organizations and their contours.

Jobie Turner is a military historian who studies logistics in warfare. His most recent work is Feeding Victory: Innovative Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh, 1755-1968 which discuss the impact of technology on transportation across three centuries of warfare. Jobie is a retired Colonel in the USAF and a pilot for United Airlines

email: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Todd H. Weir and Lieke Wijnia, eds., "The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Heritage in Contemporary Europe" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The open access Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Heritage in Contemporary Europe (Bloomsbury, 2025) offers readers a state-of-the-art guide to the public debates and scholarship on religious heritage in contemporary Europe. It contains articles by scholars, policy makers and heritage practitioners, who explore the key challenges facing the organizations, churches, and government bodies concerned with religion and heritage.

Featuring polemics, case studies, and analysis, the volume is united by major themes,
including Jewish, Muslim and Christian heritage, the (post)secular, interreligious heritage, sacred texts, museums, tourism, and contemporary art.

The book explores the shifting significance of Europe's historic churches, synagogues, and mosques, many of which are caught between declining numbers of worshippers, increasing numbers of tourists, and the pressure to find new uses. It also examines the key role religious heritage plays in political discourse, both in the interest of including and excluding religious minorities.

Todd H. Weir is Professor of History of Christianity and Director of the Centre for Religion and Heritage at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

Lieke Wijnia is Head of Curation and Library at Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

James Bielo is an anthropologist and associate professor of religious studies at Northwestern University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Good and Bad Palm Oil: Food Security, Paradigm Shift and Stakeholder Negotiations in Indonesia and the EU

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Entangled in a nexus of commerce, industry, food security, and environmental concerns, palm oil has become a prominent topic of controversy and debate. In this episode, Dr. Ayu Pratiwi illuminates the complicated reality behind the controversy by introducing the University of Turku research project "Good and Bad Palm Oil: Food Security, Paradigm Shift and Stakeholder Negotiations in Indonesia and the EU." What is good and what is bad about palm oil, and what is the recent paradigm shift in its status between Southeast Asia and Europe?

Dr. Ayu Pratiwi is a Docent in economic geography at the Department of Marketing and International Business and Senior Researcher at the Department of Biodiversity Sciences at the University of Turku.

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How Corporate Lobbyists are Capturing EU Institutions

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Brussels is full of lobbyists. Over decades, big companies have been using their financial might not only to influence EU policies but even to shape how EU institutions are designed and what their key goals are. Host Licia Cianetti talks to Kenneth Haar, who for almost two decades has been conducting research on corporate lobbying in the EU for Corporate Europe Observatory. Kenneth explains how corporate lobbying works, what lobbyists want, and how a sketchily defined “competitiveness” agenda is driving a far-reaching deregulation drive by the European Commission, which endangers hard fought for environmental, social, health, and labour protections.

Guest: Kenneth Haar is a researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). His freely downloadable book, A Europe of Capital, details how corporate lobbyists got to the core of the European project. Corporate Europe Observatory is an advocacy and investigative research group. Their many reports, articles, and infographics on corporate lobbying in the EU are available on the CEO website. You can download their alternative tourist guide to Bussels here: “Lobby Planet – Brussels”. CEO’s podcast EU Watchdog Radio is also highly recommended!

Presenter: Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Manchán Magan, "Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape" (Chelsea Green, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:02:00 +0000

Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America.

But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic.

In Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape (Chelsea Green, 2026) Manchán Magan explores the enchantment, sublime beauty and sheer oddness of a 3000-year-old lexicon. Imbuing the natural world with meaning and magic, it evokes a time-honoured way of life, from its 32 separate words for a field, to terms like loisideach (a place with a lot of kneading troughs), bróis (whiskey for a horseman at a wedding), and iarmhaireacht (the loneliness you feel when you are the only person awake at cockcrow).

Told through stories collected from Magan’s own life and travels, Thirty-Two Words for Field is an enthralling celebration of Irish words, and a testament to the indelible relationship between landscape, culture and language.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A. Bagliani and N, Şenocak, "A People's Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050-1300" (Cornell UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 7 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

A People's Church brings together a distinguished international group of historians to provide a sweeping introduction to Christian religious life and institutions in medieval Italy. Each essay treats a single theme as broadly as possible, highlighting both the unique aspects of medieval Christianity on the Italian peninsula and the beliefs and practices it shared with other Christian societies. Because of its long tradition of communal self-governance, Christianity in medieval Italy, perhaps more than anywhere else, was truly a "people's church." At the same time, its exceptional urban wealth and literacy rates, along with its rich and varied intellectual and artistic culture, led to diverse forms of religious devotion and institutions. Contributors: Maria Pia Alberzoni on heresy; Frances Andrews on urban religion; Cécile Caby on monasticism; Giovanna Casagrande on mendicants; George Dameron on Florence; Antonella Degl'Innocenti on saints; Marina Gazzini on lay confraternities; Maureen C. Miller on bishops; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Pietro Silanos on the papacy and Italian politics; Antonio Rigon on clerical confraternities; Neslihan Şenocak on the pievi and care of souls; Giovanni Vitolo on Naples. Maureen C. Miller on bishops; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Pietro Silanos on the papacy and Italian politics; Antonio Rigon on clerical confraternities; Neslihan Şenocak on the pievi and care of souls; Giovanni Vitolo on Naples.Maureen C. Miller on bishops; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Pietro Silanos on the papacy and Italian politics; Antonio Rigon on clerical confraternities; Neslihan Şenocak on the pievi and care of souls; Giovanni Vitolo on Naples.Maureen C. Miller on bishops; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Pietro Silanos on the papacy and Italian politics; Antonio Rigon on clerical confraternities; Neslihan Şenocak on the pievi and care of souls; Giovanni Vitolo on Naples.

Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her current research focuses on cleaning gilded wooden frames using gels.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jacqueline Riding, "Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London" (Profile Books, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 5 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile, 2026) by Dr. Jacqueline Riding.

Charlie Chaplin rose from the hard streets of Edwardian London to worldwide fame. But his work and outlook were always shaped by the world he came from, a place of cheap entertainments and the threat of the workhouse, radical politics and desperate poverty.

Framed through the life of this iconic success story, acclaimed historian Jacqueline Riding reveals working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Breathing life into forgotten stories of mothers and sons, labourers and actors, vagrants and sex workers, of suffering, survival and success against the odds, this compelling social history paints a striking portrait of a vanished city.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 5 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past.

Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.

The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.

From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.

Mentioned in the episode

Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844)
George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876)
Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)?
The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample.
The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that.
Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair.
America's racial "one drop" rule.
Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Billing, "Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing" (Routledge, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 4 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment (Routledge, 2024) shows how our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David McCrone, "Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 3 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Scotland is a nation that has undergone significant changes over the last 50 years or so. This is, of course, true of much of the Western world but, as David McCrone shows in his Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity (Edinburgh UP, 2025), these change have had particular impacts and been understood in particular ways in Scotland. Using a sociological approach in which politics, identity and culture need to be understood as impacted by broader process of social, structural change, McCrone discusses how following the fracturing of the ‘warfare/welfare nexus’ which, until the 1980s tied the nations of the United Kingdom together, Scotland is transformed. The country which in the postwar period had seen the most outward migration begins to welcome more people, the class structure changes after deindustrialisation, yet a strong sense of working-class identity remains, opportunities for women improve significantly, Scots increasingly come to think of themselves as Scots and ‘the referendum decade’ of 2011-2021 sees changes in political allegiance and formations.

In our discussion David discusses what led him to a career producing the sociology of Scotland, how the country should be understood via its civil society, the importance of adopting a sociological approach to social change and what Émile Durkheim has to say about the number of Saltires flying from lampposts across the land.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), along with other texts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter H. Wilson, "Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500" (Harvard UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last five centuries, Wilson finds little unique or preordained in German militarism or warfighting.

Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Harvard UP, 2023) takes as its starting point the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which created new mechanisms for raising troops but also for resolving disputes diplomatically. Both the empire and the Swiss Confederation were largely defensive in orientation, while German participation in foreign wars was most often in partnership with allies. The primary aggressor in Central Europe was not Prussia but the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, yet Austria's strength owed much to its ability to secure allies. Prussia, meanwhile, invested in militarization but maintained a part-time army well into the nineteenth century. Alongside Switzerland, which relied on traditional militia, both states exemplify the longstanding civilian element within German military power.

Only after Prussia's unexpected victory over France in 1871 did Germans and outsiders come to believe in a German gift for warfare--a special capacity for high-speed, high-intensity combat that could overcome numerical disadvantage. It took two world wars to expose the fallacy of German military genius. Yet even today, Wilson argues, Germany's strategic position is misunderstood. The country now seen as a bastion of peace spends heavily on defense in comparison to its peers and is deeply invested in less kinetic contemporary forms of coercive power.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter Stansky, "The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War" (Stanford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.

Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist.

By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War (Stanford UP, 2023) is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age.

Peter Stansky is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford University. He has published extensively on the cultural, political, and literary milieu of twentieth-century Britain, including (with William Abrahams) the Orwell biographies The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1980), both finalists for the National Book Award.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tom Menger, "The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The violence of colonial wars between 1890 and 1914 is often thought to have been uniquely shaped by the nature of each of the European empires. The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914 (Cambridge UP, 2025) argues instead that these wars' extreme violence was part of a shared 'Colonial Way of War'. Through detailed study of British, German and Dutch colonial wars, Tom Menger reveals the transimperial connectivity of fin-de-siècle colonial violence, including practices of scorched earth and extermination, such as the Herero Genocide (1904-1908). He explores how shared thought and practices arose from exchanges and transfers between actors of different empires, both Europeans and non-Europeans. These transfers can be traced in military manuals and other literature, but most notably in the transimperial mobility of military attachés, regular soldiers, settlers or 'adventurers'. Pioneering in its scope, Menger's work re-thinks the supposed exceptionality of standout cases of colonial violence, and more broadly challenges conceptions we have of imperial connectivity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bram de Maeyer, "Building for Belgium: Belgian Embassies in a Globalising World (1945-2020)" (Leuven UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Embassy buildings are the most tangible evidence of a state’s diplomatic presence abroad. State authorities have invested in the architectural conception of purpose-built embassies to flex their diplomatic muscle and project nationhood on foreign soil. While scholars have primarily focused on purpose-built embassies of (former) world powers, Building for Belgium: Belgian Embassies in a Globalising World (1945-2020) (Leuven UP, 2025) by Dr. Bram de Maeyer shifts the perspective by scrutinising the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ embassy-building programme from 1945 to 2020.

Rather than a conventional political assessment of diplomatic relations, the book foregrounds the often-overlooked architectural lives of embassies and their social, economic, and political entanglements. By examining Belgian embassy projects across all continents, it reveals how the Belgian diplomatic corps has navigated diverse political regimes, geopolitical contexts, cultures, and building codes. More than the outcome of a deliberate policy, the embassy-building programme has been shaped by incidental decisions, private ambitions and personal tastes of Belgian diplomats, ministry officials and politicians.

Building for Belgium not only sheds light on diplomatic architecture but also connects domestic conversations about architecture in Belgium with global state-building projects. Offering fresh insights into the politics of space, it will be of value to scholars and practitioners in architecture, urban studies, international relations, cultural heritage, and Belgian and European studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Erika Quinn, "This Horrible Uncertainty: A German Woman Writes War, 1939-1948" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Through the diaries and personal papers of a German woman, Vera Conrad, This Horrible Uncertainty: A German Woman Writes War, 1939-1948 (Berghahn Books, 2024) documents her wartime experiences and deepens our understanding of the complex experiences of trauma and grief that National Socialist supporters experienced. Building on scholarship about mourning and widowhood that largely focuses on state policies and public discourses, This Horrible Uncertainty provides an interpretive framework of people’s perceptions of events and their capacity to respond to them. Using a history of emotions approach, Erika Quinn establishes that keeping the diary allowed Conrad to develop different selves in response to her responsibilities, fear, and grief after her husband was declared missing in 1943.
Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christian Raffensperger, "Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe" (Routledge, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader, medieval Europe that modern historians write about?

Christian Raffensperger's edited volume Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2022) brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they describe their world. While we see in these essays that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it. Instead, they talked about the wider world, and often they had informants or textual sources that informed them about the world, even if they did not visit those distant places themselves. This volume shows that they also used similar ideas to create space and identity – whether talking about the desert, the holy land, or food practices in their texts. By examining medieval authors and their own perceptions of their world, this collection offers a framework for discussions of medieval Europe in the 21st century. In this conversation we talk about how this volume goes about broadening both the geographical scope and methodological approaches to reading medieval sources.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alison Rowlands, "Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652" (Manchester UP, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Alison Rowlands, professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Essex, joins Jana Byars to talk about her classic book, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany, Rothenberg, 1561- 1652, out Manchester UP 2003. This conversation took place on the occasion of a new edition, this time a paperback release, in January 2026 Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652 (Manchester UP, 2026). This meticulously-researched book relies on copious, detailed archival documents concerning people accused of witchcraft in the German city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber between 1561 and 1652. This city experienced a very restrained pattern of witch-trials and just one execution for witchcraft during that time, unlike some other places in German lands and Europe more broadly. This book explores the social and psychological conflicts that lay behind the making of accusations and confessions of witchcraft and offers insights into other areas of early modern life, such as experiences of and beliefs about communal conflict, magic, motherhood, childhood and illness. It also includes analysis on the role of gender. Find the open source of the original edition here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sara Petrosillo, "Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture" (Ohio State UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Fantastic and informative talk with Sara Petrosillo of the University of Evansville about her new book, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2023). Listen all the way to the end for a great description of the process of hunting with birds! While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers.

Sara Petrosillo's Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo, "The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo's book The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950 (Liverpool UP, 2023) deals comprehensively with the process of Francoist state- and nation-building in Spain. Franco's chosen tools were mass repression and cleansing, undertaken both during the battlefield war of 1936-39 and in the decade afterwards, when war against defeated constituencies continued by institutional means. Mobilising its grass roots supporters made them complicit in the state's project. The complex process of cleansing and conversion of the political enemy required classifying soldiers from the defeated Republican army and Republican-zone civilians into pro-Franco, indifferent, or internal enemy. Many of the latter were either extrajudicially murdered or executed after cursory military trials. Classification used ultra-traditionalist Catholic means, including segregation and forced conversion.

The new society programme implemented between 1936 and 1950 was applied nation-wide to political activists, members of Republican parties, labour organisations, and (poor) urban and (landless) rural social constituencies. The Francoist project adapted to the changing national and international contexts across the period 1936-1950: from a civil war; through the period of relations with the Axis powers at the same time as receiving Nazi assistance in building up Franco's police force as an agent of repression; to the transformation of Franco into an anti-Communist client of the Cold War West. The Fabric of Fear addresses the social effects of the cleansing process on both victors and vanquished. On the one hand, Franco's violent policy forged a new society and tightened the links between the regime and its social base. On the other hand, the violence and coercion exerted on the vanquished resulted in their civil and legal death: they were expelled from Franco's national community and deprived of all rights in what became de facto an apartheid society in Spain.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jamie Kreiner, "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction" (Liveright, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Liveright, 2023) by Dr. Jamie Kreiner presents a revelatory account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge—and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later.

Although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Dr. Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death.

Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Dr. Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds—from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex, and diet. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elwin Hofman et al. eds., "The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe" (Leuven UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Elwin Hofman joins Jana Byars to talk about the volume he edited with Magaly Rodríguez García & Pieter Vanhees, The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe (Leuven UP, 2022). In 2022, the Belgian parliament made a landmark decision by approving the decriminalisation of sex work. This move positioned the small nation as the first country in Europe - and the second globally - to abandon the hypocrisy of tolerance. Yet this was not the first time paid sex in Belgium gained international notoriety. The bathhouses of the fifteenth-century 'frows of Flanders' were well-known throughout Europe. In the nineteenth century, Belgium faced international outrage as the alleged epicentre of white slavery. Although Belgians were then accused of forcing white women into prostitution, they were also free to include any suspect women in the prostitution registers of colonial Congo. Throughout the First and Second World Wars, both allied and German soldiers sought relief in Belgian brothels. The Business of Pleasure presents the compelling life stories of sex workers and their interactions with authorities, clients and pimps. Pushing beyond stereotypes, this history of commercial sex offers a nuanced understanding of the difficulties and opportunities associated with paid sex for women, men and trans persons past and present. Contributors: Elwin Hofman (Utrecht University), Magaly Rodríguez García (KU Leuven), Pieter Vanhees (former researcher KU Leuven), Jelle Haemers (KU Leuven), Amandine Lauro (Université libre de Bruxelles), Maarten Loopmans (KU Leuven), Ilias Loopmans (MA history student at University of Antwerp), Sonia Verstappen (former sex worker). English translation of 'Seks voor geld. Een geschiedenis van prostitutie in België', Elwin Hofman, Magaly Rodríguez García & Pieter Vanhees (red.), (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2022)

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anna Sergi, "How to Recognize the Mafia Abroad: Critical Notes on ‘ndrangheta Mobility" (Policy Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The influence and spread of clans and families within the ‘ndrangheta - the Calabrian mafia - is international yet recognising their activities is not always easy, especially when considering mafia groups’ apparent ability to ‘disappear’ when abroad. How to Recognize the Mafia Abroad: Critical Notes on ‘ndrangheta Mobility (Bristol University Press, 2025) by Professor Anna Sergi challenges existing myths about the mobility of this mafia group, emphasizing mafias' interconnectivity and ubiquity both at home and abroad, while providing practical tools for law enforcement and organized crime practitioners.

It considers potential biases around ethnicities and surnames and the intergenerational diversification of mafias – for example, the use of encryption technologies. Combining theory with case studies drawn from Dr. Sergi’s extensive fieldwork, the book sets out the policy and practice implications for combatting organized crime.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration.

Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.

Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sheiba Kian Kaufman, "Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama examines the concept of early modern globality and the development of European toleration discourse through English representations of Persian monarchs and Persianate conceptions of hospitality as paradigms of interreligious and intercultural hospitality for early modern and Shakespearean drama.

English playwrights depict Persia and its legendary monarchs, such as Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, and Darius, as alternative figures of cosmopolitanism in the period. By focusing on an archive of plays of Persia staged between 1561 and 1696 in conversation with Shakespeare's works, European peace proposals, legislative acts of toleration, and global traditions of hospitality found in Zoroastrianism, Islam, and the Judeo-Christian traditions, this book pioneers an interdisciplinary methodology, introduces Persianate conceptual lenses for literary analysis of English literature, and constructs capacities to imagine multiple globalities existing in early modernity through a spectrum of imagined and lived experiences on stage and on the ground.

Sheiba Kian Kaufman is an Assistant Professor of English at Saddleback College and Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of articles on Shakespeare, Persia, and early modern English drama. She has received fellowships from the UCLA Center for 17th-and 18th Century Studies, Clark Library, the UCI Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, the UCI Center in Law, Society, and Culture, Somerville College, Oxford, and the American Association of University Women.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Amitav Acharya, "The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West" (Hachette UK, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers—especially China—threaten to unravel today’s Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But the West has never had a monopoly on order.
Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West. Moving from ancient Sumer, India, Greece, and Mesoamerica, through medieval caliphates and Eurasian empires into the present, Acharya shows that humanitarian values, economic interdependence, and rules of inter-state conduct emerged across the globe over millennia. History suggests order will endure even as the West retreats. In fact, the end of Western dominance offers us the opportunity to build a better world, where non-Western nations find more voice, power, and prosperity. Instead of fearing the future, the West should learn from history and cooperate with the Rest to forge a more equitable order.

Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rachel Midura, "Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP, 2025) connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and offered new control over the public sphere. Rachel Midura focuses on the Tassis family, members of which served as official postmasters to the dukes of Milan, the pope, Spanish kings, and Holy Roman emperors. Using administrative records and family correspondence, she follows the Tassis family, their agents, and their rivals as their influence expanded from northern Italy across Europe. Postal Intelligence shows how postmasters and postmistresses were key players in early modern diplomacy, commerce, and journalism, whose ultimate success depended on both administrative ingenuity and strategic ambiguity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jürgen Zimmerer, "Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness" (Reclam Verlag, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 9 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Erinnerungskämpfe: Neues deutsches Geschichtsbewusstsein (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2023) is a new, provocative volume on German memory cultures and politics edited by Jürgen Zimmerer. What can be loosely translated as Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness is a collection of chapters that lay bare a mosaic of a diverse German memory landscape as well as the major debates and turning points by which it is continuously shaped. It is subdivided in five sections together encompassing 23 chapters and covers German Empire and colonialism, National Socialism and the Second World War, the Holocaust and multidirectional memory, East/West Germany and reunification, and, finally, today's Berlin Republic. This volume gains in relevance by the day and shows how the German past(s) and the way they are debated, commemorated, and weaponized today and by whom has real-life, if not existential, consequences. It is far from an exclusively German matter. Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness is of interest for all those who critically engage with the instrumentalization of memory in ongoing cultural wars in other national contexts as well, such as the heated debates and rightwing attacks in the United States and elsewhere surrounding fields such as Critical Race Theory, Gender or Queer Studies that emerge out of the White Supremacist backlash and the concomitant increase in racism, trans- and homophobia.

Jürgen Zimmerer is Professor of Global History and the head of the research center “Hamburg’s (post-)colonial legacy” at the University of Hamburg. He served as the founding president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars for twelve years until 2017 and was the Senior Editor of the Journal of Genocide from 2005 to 2011. His research interests include German Colonialism, Comparative Genocide studies, Colonialism and the Holocaust, and Environmental Violence and Genocide and, for the specific German context, his work has been crucial in revealing the deep connections between the Holocaust and German colonialism – up until that point two German histories of violence hegemonically thought of as ontologically different, if thought together at all. His publications include German Rule, African Subjects: State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia (2021) and From Windhoek to Auschwitz? Reflections on the Relationship between Colonialism and National Socialism forthcoming in English in 2024.

Miriam Chorley-Schulz is an Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow of Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon and the co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present. She holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and is the author of Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees (Berlin: Metropol, 2016) which was awarded the “Hosenfeld/Szpilman Memorial Award.”

Henriette Sölter is a communications and PR consultant with expertise on the interface of contemporary art and culture, international perennial formats, and strategic institutional positioning. She has worked with institutions such as documenta, Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), is a member of Bergen Assembly's executive board and is part of the New Patrons network for citizen-commissioned art.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 9 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about slavery revolved around one central question: How could free persons be made into slaves? John Samuel Harpham shows that English authors found answers to this question in a tradition of ideas that stretched back to the ancient world, where they were most powerfully expressed in Roman law. These ideas, in turn, became the basis for the earliest defenses of American slavery. The Roman tradition had located the main source of slavery in war: enslavement was the common fate of captives who otherwise faced execution. In early modern England, this account was incorporated into studies of the common law and influential natural rights theories by the likes of Hugo Grotius and John Locke. When Europeans started to publish firsthand accounts of Africa in the sixteenth century, these reports were thus received into a culture saturated with Roman ideas. Over time, English observers started to assert that the common customs of enslavement among the nations of Africa fit within the Roman model. Englishmen had initially expressed reluctance to take part in the Atlantic slave trade. But once assured that the slave trade could be traced back to customs they understood to be legitimate, they proved keen to profit from it.

An eloquent account of the moral logic that propelled the development of an immoral institution, John Samuel Harpham's The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2025) reveals the power of an overlooked tradition of ideas in the history of human bondage.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Moritz Föllmer, "The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 9 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

What does it mean to see oneself as free? And how can this freedom be attained in times of conflict and social upheaval? In this ambitious study, Moritz Föllmer explores what twentieth-century Europeans understood by individual freedom and how they endeavoured to achieve it. Combining cultural, social, and political history, this book highlights the tension between ordinary people's efforts to secure personal independence and the ambitious attempts of thinkers and activists to embed notions of freedom in political and cultural agendas. The quest to be a free individual was multi-faceted; no single concept predominated. Men and women articulated and pursued it against the backdrop of two world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of working life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and uncertain futures of colonial rule. But although claims to individual freedom could be steered and stymied, they could not, ultimately, be suppressed.

Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He is particularly interested in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and in concepts of individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 8 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Stuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jessica Kelly and Neal Shasore, "Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 7 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Reconstruction explores the impact of the First World War on the built environment - examining the immediate effects and aftermath of the Great War on the architecture of Britain and the British empire during the interwar years. While much attention has been paid by historians to post-war architectural reconstruction after 1945, the earlier developments of the interwar period (1919-1939) have been comparatively overlooked.

Sixteen essays written by leading and emerging scholars bring together new and diverse approaches to the period - a period of reconstruction, fraught with the challenges of modernity and democratisation. The collection considers the complex effects of reconstruction on design, discourse, practice, and professionalism, and deals with the full spectrum of architectural styles and approaches, privileging neither Modernism nor traditional styles. It brings to the fore social and political histories of the built environment, and makes important postcolonial interventions into the architectural history of British Imperialism at home and in its far reaches; in Egypt, South Africa, Australia, and India

This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on cultural techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matt Dawson, "The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies" (Routledge, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 6 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Matt Dawson's The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies (Routledge, 2023) presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series of studies, it argues that Durkheim’s normative vision, which can be called libertarian socialism, shaped his sociological critique and search for alternatives. With attention to the value of this political sociology as a means of understanding our contemporary world, the author asks us to look again at Durkheim. While Durkheim’s legacy has often emphasised the supposed conservative elements and stability advocated in his thought, we can point to a different legacy, one of a radical sociology. In dialogue with the decolonial critique, this volume also asks ‘was Durkheim white?’ and in doing so shows how, as a Jew, he experienced significant racialisation in his lifetime. A new reading and a vital image of a ‘political Durkheim’, The Political Durkheim will appeal to scholars and students with interests in Durkheim, social theory and political sociology.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

D. J. Taylor, "Orwell: The New Life" (Pegasus Books, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 5 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

A fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers.

We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian.

Using new sources that are now available for the first time, we are tantalizingly at the end of the lifespan of Orwell's last few contemporaries, whose final reflections are caught in this book. The way we look at a writer and his canon has changed even over the course of the last two decades; there is a post-millennial prism through which we must now look for such a biography to be fresh and relevant. This is what Orwell: The New Life (Pegasus Books, 2023) achieves.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew S. Curran, "Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson" (Other Press, 2026)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 4 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. Over the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly “processed” by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the human. By century’s end, naturalists and classifiers had divided the human species into racial categories using methods that we now associate with the Enlightenment era. In Biography of a Dangerous Idea, prize-winning biographer and Enlightenment specialist Andrew S. Curran retells this story through the medium of group biography. Written more like a detective story than traditional history, the book traces the emergence of race through the lives of 13 pivotal figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant, and Jefferson. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, this sweeping narrative not only reveals how the Enlightenment’s ultimate Promethean quest intertwined with systems of oppression and empire, but also offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the era’s most famous luminaries.

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of New Books Network.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Susan McCready, "Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 3 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Drawing on memory studies and theatrical history, Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War (University of Toronto Press, 2025) analyses a neglected body of plays staged in France after the Great War, between 1918 and 1937, to reveal their profound impact on collective memory and cultural identity.

In the aftermath of the Great War, a remarkable wave of collective commemoration emerged, but the aesthetic diversity of this period has often been overshadowed by a singular focus on the combatant experience, primarily conveyed through fiction and memoir. This selective historical narrative has fostered a homogenized memory of the war, neglecting the rich array of cultural productions that also emerged alongside it. Commemorative Acts challenges these prevailing assumptions about the memory of the Great War and its literary expression in interwar France by spotlighting theatrical works that have largely been forgotten. The book uncovers how the dominance of first-person accounts of soldiers’ experiences has subtly, yet powerfully, narrowed our understanding of what the memory of the Great War can encompass. It explores how drama, structurally at odds with the first-person perspective and defined by its simultaneous modes of expression and reception, has been lost to collective memory. By examining the unique capacity of the dramatic form to capture war trauma, Commemorative Acts offers insights that differ from those of other literary genres, highlighting the theatre’s potential to provide a more expansive and nuanced understanding of interwar memorial culture.

Author Susan McCready is Professor of French at the University of South Alabama and the co-director for the Center for the Study of War and Memory at South Alabama; she is also the author of 2016’s Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon and 2007’s The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre, as well as the co-editor of Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France in 2007. She has also co-edited a volume of Lingua Romana on France and Memory in the Great War, and has authored many academic articles and chapters on French theater and related topics, as well as a number of public humanities projects on war and memory.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 2 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical preceptor, "to lead the leader." Yet for years, Heidegger's defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger's "Black Notebooks," it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough.

The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger's philosophy was suffused with it. In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (Yale University Press, 2022), Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas--and why his legacy remains radically compromised.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hans Kundnani, "Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 1 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Oxford UP, 2023).

Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of colonialism to the pan-European movement that grew out of the first world war and peace project (or was it?) that emerged from the second.

Not only is pro-Europeanism “analogous to nationalism - something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale," Kundani argues, but the EU itself has “become a vehicle for imperial amnesia" thereby promoting and privileging “whiteness”.

Hans Kundnani is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations Workshop, an associate scholar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and a visiting scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research. From 2018-22, he was a full-time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe Programme. Before that, he was a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, the Transatlantic Academy, and the European Council on Foreign Relations. In 2014, he published The Paradox of German Power.

*The author's own book recommendations are Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006 - first published in 1956)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alison Stone, "Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today.

The aim of Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2023) is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women.

Alison Stone is a British philosopher. She is a Professor of European Philosophy in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances.

Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stephanie Barczewski, "How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Barczewski is an exploration of the evolution of the quintessentially English country house.

Country houses have come to be regarded as quintessentially English, not only in terms of their architectural style but because they appear to embody national values of continuity and insularity. The histories of country houses and England, however, have featured episodes of violence and disruption, so how did country houses come to represent one version of English history, when in reality they reflect its full range of contradictions and complexities? This book explores the evolution of the country house, beginning with the violent impact of the Reformation and Civil War and showing how the political events of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the reaction against the French Revolution, led to country houses being recast as symbols of England’s political stability.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In his influential Anti-Semite and Jew, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." In doing so he articulated the figure of an Antisemite responsible for imagining the Jew in a formulation that has lasted for decades. This figure became an indispensable trope in the period immediately after the war. It enabled Germans and Austrians to navigate a radically changed political and cultural landscape and reestablish lives upended by war by denying complicity in perpetuating antisemitic ideology. The deeply ingrained cultural practices that formed the basis for age-old prejudices against Jews persisted via coded references, taking new forms, and providing fertile ground for explicit eruptions.

Decades before the Nazi persecution of the Jews would emerge as a master moral paradigm of evil in popular culture, the constructed Antisemite became part of a forceful narrative structure that allowed stereotypes about Jews to persist, even as explicit antisemitism became taboo. Lisa Silverman examines the crucial development and implications of the figural Antisemite in a range of trials, films, and texts during the first years after the end of the Second World War. She argues that, in their economically shattered, emotionally exhausted, and culturally impoverished postwar world, Austrians, Germans, and others used the Antisemite as a way to come to terms with their altered circumstances and to shape new national self-understandings.

A readily recognizable and easily adaptable figure of evil, the Antisemite loomed large as a powerful and persistent trope in a wide range of artistic and cultural narratives. As a figure onto which to project or imagine as a source of the hatred of Jews, the Antisemite allowed audiences to avoid facing the implications of crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices and to deny the endurance of widespread and often coded antisemitic prejudices. In postwar Europe, where everyone looked to blame others for the murder and dispossession of the Jewish population, the authority to define the Antisemite as a receptacle for explicit Jew-hatred became a powerful force. As The Postwar Antisemite argues, antisemitism as a hidden code gained new force, packing stronger, more effective punches and affording its users more power. This era is critical to understanding ongoing struggles over the authority to set the parameters of antisemitism and the power and persistence of this hatred in society.

Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shlomo Pereira, "Monuments de Papel E Pergaminho: Hebrew Printing in Portugal at the End of the 15th Century" (Chabad Portugal Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Rabbi Professor Shomo Pereira discussed his book "Monuments of Paper and Parchment: Hebrew Printing in Portugal in the Late 15th Century." He explained that while Portugal lacks physical Jewish monuments due to natural disasters, earthquakes, and persecution, the book highlights the country's rich Jewish history through its manuscript and printing heritage of the late 15th century. He explained how Hebrew printing in Portugal was a vibrant force, contributing to the spread of knowledge and influencing printing practices in the Ottoman Empire.

Pereira also detailed the contributions of Rabbi Abraham Zakuto, a Jewish scientist and astronomer who developed crucial navigational tools and was recognized for his work by having a crater on the moon named after him.

Pereira discussed his book on Iberian Jewish history, emphasizing contributions to scholarship, mathematics, astronomy, and poetry during the late 1400s, when many Spanish Jews fled to Portugal. He explained his goal is to highlight these accomplishments to build bridges with non-Jewish communities and enrich Iberian history, while acknowledging the context of persecution. Pereira clarified that during this period, most Jews in Portugal were Spanish, and he uses "Iberian Jews" to reflect this diversity.

Pereira emphasized the unique characteristic of Iberian commentators, who often included personal experiences in their writings, contrasting this with the more detached approach of commentators like Rashi.

Pereira explained the complexity of uncovering colophons in historical Jewish texts, noting that simple colophons provide basic information about the work's completion, printer, sponsor, and date, while more sophisticated ones use cryptic biblical references that modern AI cannot translate. He discussed the challenges in interpreting colophons from historical Jewish texts, particularly those printed in 1494 and 1498 in Spain and Portugal. He explained that the dates and years in these colophons are often confused due to the use of astrological and astronomical coincidences.

Rabbi Shlomo Pereira emphasized that history is about how we perceive and learn from the past, rather than just focusing on the past itself.

This bilingual book on Hebrew printing in Portugal, highlighting its significance in Jewish and Iberian history is published by Chabad Portugal Press in 2025, and is available on Amazon and other platforms.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this effort was Ernst Fraenkel, who as an attorney sought to use the law as a means of opposing Nazi oppression. In Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Douglas G. Morris describes the ways in which Frankel stood up to the Nazis and what understandings he drew from that experience. As a veteran of the First World War, Fraenkel survived the initial purge resulting from the implementation of measures designed to bar Jews from practicing law in the Third Reich. Though his legal practice suffered, Fraenkel persisted in defending people prosecuted by the Nazis, and enjoyed success in a number of cases. While the increased restrictions and growing reach of the police state ultimately forced Fraenkel to emigrate in 1938, his experiences as a lawyer played a major role in the development of the “dual state” theory of dictatorship, the only analysis of totalitarianism written from within Nazi Germany and the cornerstone of Fraenkel’s contributions to the field of political science.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrea Maraschi and Francesca Tasca, "Food, Heresies, and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In Food, Heresies, and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam UP, 2024) by Dr. Andrea Maraschi & Dr. Francesca Tasca, readers will find stories about medieval heresies and “magic” from an unusual perspective: that of food studies. The time span ranges from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages, while the geographical scope includes regions as different as North Africa, Spain, Ireland, continental Europe, the Holy land, and Central Asia.

Food, heresies, and magical boundaries in the Middle Ages explores the power of food in creating and breaking down boundaries between different groups, or in establishing a contact with other worlds, be they the occult sides of nature, or the supernatural. The book emphasizes the role of food in crafting and carrying identity, and in transferring virtues and powers of natural elements into the eater’s body. Which foods and drinks made someone a heretic? Could they be purified? Which food offerings forged a connection with the otherworld? Which recipes allowed gaining access to the hidden powers within nature?

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tracey Norman and Mark Norman, "Devon's Forgotten Witches: 1860–1910" (The History Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Witchcraft and witches throughout history have long captured the imagination, yet hidden away in archives are records of long forgotten cases. Many of these are tragic, some are unusual – perhaps even inexplicable – but all are fascinating in their own right.

Devon’s Forgotten Witches 1860–1910 (The History Press, 2025) by Mark Norman and Tracey Norman takes a deep dive through these records, bringing to the surface accusations of witchcraft in the county that have languished, unacknowledged, in the British Newspaper Archive for decades. These are the stories of ordinary people whose lives were touched in some way by witchcraft.

Tracey Norman and Mark Norman examine these cases within their historical context, pulling together details from various news reports to explore what might really have happened. This work provides an intriguing snapshot of press coverage in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, showing how the public were urged to view those who still put their faith in ‘incredible superstition’. Most importantly, the retelling of these stories gives a new voice to those whom the historical record has silenced.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maddalena Alvi, "The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist investment and speculation, yet open to wider social strata. Delving into auction records, memoirs, newspaper articles, financial and legal documents in six languages, Alvi explores these cultural and socio-economic developments across the British, French, and German markets, as well as trade spheres such as Russia and Scandinavia. 1914 marked the end of the European art market and cemented the connection between art and finance.

The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925 (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Maddalena Alvi holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford, and an MLitt in Art History from the University of Glasgow.

Priya S. Gandhi is a writer and strategist based in New York City.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Aubrey Gabel, "The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Showing the political importance of play in postwar French literature In postwar France, authors approached writing ludically, placing rules and conditions on language and on the context of composition itself. They eliminated "e's" and feminized texts; they traveled according to strict rules and invented outright silly public personas. The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics (2025, Northwestern University Press) is a comprehensive examination of how and why French authors turned to these ludic methods to grapple with their political moment. These writers were responding to a range of historical upheavals, from the rise and fall of French feminist and Third-Worldist groups to the aftermath of international socialism both at home, in the former Parisian Belt and in France more broadly, and abroad, in post-Yugoslavia Balkan states and elsewhere. Juxtaposing an array of case studies and drawing on cross-disciplinary methodologies, Aubrey Gabel reads three generations of the formalist literary group Oulipo, including Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Jacques Jouet, alongside writers not traditionally deemed ludic--or sometimes not even conventionally known as novelists--such as the lesbian activist-writer Monique Wittig and the editor François Maspero. Gabel argues that literary ludics serve as both an authorial strategy and a political form: playful methods allow writers not only to represent history in code but also to intervene creatively--as political actors--in the fraught social fields of postwar France.

Author Aubrey Gabel is Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University, as well as an affiliate with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender (ISSG) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and currently a fellow with the Institute for Ideas & Imagination. She has also published a number of articles and chapters in edited volumes on literary play and constraints, but also on bande dessinée and other comic genres.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ulinka Rublack, "Dürer's Coats: Renaissance Men and Material Cultures of Social Recognition" (CEU Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Jana Byars meets one of her academic heroes when Ulinka Rublack joins her to talk about Dürer's Coats: Renaissance Men and Material Cultures of Social Recognition (Routledge, 2025). During the Renaissance, clothing became more and more elaborately decorated and expensive. It often emphasised the privilege of the male elite. Yet clothing could also subvert or reshape conventional cultural norms. This book draws on the case of Albrecht Dürer to examine Renaissance male outerwear as a key element of signalling communication in everyday life. The recognised artist fought for the esteem of urban creators. In asserting his dignity and taste, outerwear was particularly important to Dürer and his time. Ulinka Rublack argues that cloaks and gowns gained in importance during this period and were among the things that mediated social relationships for centuries to come. An investigation into outerwear opens a new window into how people and things were connected in the Renaissance and how important clothing was in shaping subjectivities in everyday life. Using the example of Dürer and his wife as emerging social types, the study follows the artist and the men and women of his time through the streets of Venice, Nuremberg, Augsburg and Antwerp. It poses pressing questions about Albrecht Dürer's entanglement in unequal networks of global trade and the German Renaissance Atlantic.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tullia d'Aragona, "The Wretch, Otherwise Known As Guerrino" (Iter Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

This is an unabridged bilingual, fully annotated edition of Tullia d’Aragona’s epic poem The Wretch. This mid-century epic reflects the many historical and religious changes taking place in the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe and the burgeoning literary debates following the publication of another Italian epic poem, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The Wretch recounts the adventures of Guerrino, a nobleman captured by pirates as an infant and sold into slavery. His famous quest in search of his parents and his identity involves abductions, same-sex seductions, and skirmishes with fantastical beasts as he travels through Europe, Turkey, Africa, India, Arabia, and the Purgatory of St. Patrick. The poem occupies an important position in the development of the prestigious epic genre, the highest step on the ladder to literary recognition and fame, and Tullia’s work paved the way for the epics of other women writers in subsequent decades.

Edited by Julia L. Hairston, with an Introduction by Julia L. Hairston, translated by John C. McLucas

Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the cultures of diplomacy and reception. Her monograph, Tasso and Women Readers: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) won the 28th annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.

Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Katrina Navickas, "Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England" (Reaktion, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

A radical history of England, Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Katrina Navickas is a gripping overview of increasingly restrictive policing and legislation against protest in public spaces. It tells the long history of contests over Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, Cable Street and Kinder Scout, as well as sites in towns and rural areas across the country. Dr. Navickas reveals how protesters claimed these spaces as their own commons, resisting their continuing enclosure and exclusion by social and political elites. She investigates famous and less well-known demonstrations and protest marches, from early democracy, trade union movements and the Suffragettes to anti-fascist, Black rights and environmental campaigners in more recent times. Contested Commons offers positive as well as troubling lessons on how we protect the right to protest.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Colm Murphy, "Futures of Socialism: ‘Modernisation', the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The transformation of the Labour Party by 1997 is among the most consequential political developments in modern British history. Futures of Socialism overhauls the story of Labour's modernisation and provides an innovative new history. Diving into the tumultuous world of the British left after 1973, rocked by crushing defeats, bitter schisms, and ideological disorientation, Colm Murphy uncovers competing intellectual agendas for modern socialism. Responding to deindustrialisation, neoliberalism, and constitutional agitation, these visions of 'modernisation' ranged across domestic and European policy and the politics of class, gender, race, and democracy. By reconstructing the sites and networks of political debate, Futures of Socialism: ‘Modernisation', the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997 (Cambridge UP, 2023) explains their changing influence inside Labour. It also throws new light on New Labour, highlighting its roots in this social-democratic intellectual maelstrom. Futures of Socialism provides an essential analysis of social democracy in an era of market liberalism, and of the ideas behind a historic political reconstruction that remains deeply controversial today.

Colm Murphy is a historian of modern British and Irish politics and political economy at Queen Mary University of London. He has published on 1970s-80s social democracy (including its political culture, evolving electoral strategy, and economic policymaking) and on Irish labour relations and nationalism in the 1910s. His more recent work has focused on the politics of economic policy, including Keynesianism, austerity, trade, and currency. Since 2018, Colm has worked for the Mile End Institute and is currently its Deputy Director.

Jacob Ward is a historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written in the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he’s currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dan Edelstein, "The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Political thinkers from Plato to John Adams saw revolutions as a grave threat to society and advocated for a constitution that prevented them by balancing social interests and forms of government. The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (Princeton UP, 2025) traces how evolving conceptions of history ushered in a faith in the power of revolution to create more just and reasonable societies.

Taking readers from Greek antiquity to Leninist Russia, Dan Edelstein describes how classical philosophers viewed history as chaotic and directionless, and sought to keep historical change—especially revolutions—at bay. This conception prevailed until the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers conceived of history as a form of progress and of revolution as its catalyst. These ideas were put to the test during the French Revolution and came to define revolutions well into the twentieth century. Edelstein demonstrates how the coming of the revolution leaves societies divided over its goals, giving rise to new forms of violence in which rivals are targeted as counterrevolutionaries.
A panoramic work of intellectual history, The Revolution to Come challenges us to reflect on the aims and consequences of revolution and to balance the value of stability over the hope for change in our own moment of fear and upheaval.

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) professor of political science and of history at Stanford University. His many books include On the Spirit of Rights and The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“Rurality 2.0”: How City Migrants are Reshaping Norway’s Rural Regions with Tom Bratrud

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 8 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In today’s episode, we talk to Tom Bratrud about his ongoing, long-term work with city-dwellers who migrate to rural parts of Norway. This research forms the basis of Tom’s forthcoming book project, which has the working title Rurality 2.0: Redefining Urban-Rural Divides in the Mountains of Norway.

Tom Bratrud is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His research investigates social life, political dynamics, value(es), religion/worldviews, emerging technologies, environmental issues and rural-urban relations. Prior to his work in his home valley of Valdres in southern Norway, he conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Vanuatu in the South-Pacific—resulting in his first monograph Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (Berghahn 2022).

Tom is the co-convenor of European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA)’s Future Anthropologies Network. Just after we spoke, Tom was also awarded the inaugural Thomas Hylland Eriksen Memorial Prize, presented during the Norwegian Anthropological Association’s Conference in Oslo at the end of October 2025. In explaining their decision, the jury commented that Bratrud “unites global and local perspectives and shows how social anthropological approach and methodology become a key to understanding ongoing change.”

Tom Bratrud is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen.

Tom Bratrud receives the Thomas Hylland Eriksen Memorial Prize.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 1 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

At the heart of University College London lies a long-forgotten map library packed with thousands of maps and atlases. Professor James Cheshire stumbled upon it, and spent three years sifting through hundreds of dusty drawers to see what was there. He was stunned to uncover some of the most significant maps and atlases from the last two centuries - many of which had not seen the light of day for decades. In The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress (Bloomsbury, 2025) we discover atlases for the masses that expanded nineteenth-century horizons, and maps that were wielded by those in power to wage war and negotiate peace; charts that trace the icy peaks of the Himalayas and the deepest depths of the ocean; and pioneering maps produced to settle borders in central Europe or the wealth of those in inner-city London.

Maps have played a vital role in shaping our scientific knowledge of the world, showing the impact of climate change and inspiring the theory of plate tectonics. They have also guided politicians, encouraging both beneficial reforms and horrific conquests, the consequences of which we continue to live with today. Brimming with astonishing discoveries, The Library of Lost Maps reveals why cartography really matters and how map-making has helped transform our understanding of the world around us.

Our guest is: Professor James Cheshire, who is Britain’s only Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography. A world-leading map maker, he is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and has been recognized with awards from the Royal Geographical Society and the British Cartographic Society. When he is not making, writing about, or teaching with maps, he spends his time scouring eBay for them in the hope that one day he’ll have a map library of his own.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an experienced writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a Ph.D. in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Carolyn J. Eichner, "Feminism's Empire" (Cornell UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 1 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Feminism's Empire (Cornell UP, 2022) investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.

Dr. Carolyn J. Eichner about is a Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Feminism’s Empire is her third book. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune came out in 2004 and The Paris Commune: A Brief History came out in 2022. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune was published in French as Franchir les barricades: les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020). Translated by Bastien Craipain, it was a finalist for the Prix Augustin Thierry in 2021, an award from the city of Paris for a historical study concerning the period between Antiquity and the late 19th century. In 2022-2023 she will be a Fulbright Research scholar in France and will be in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Patricia Anne Simpson, "Early Modern Women's Work: Kinship, Community, and Social Justice" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Patricia Anne Simpson joins Jana Byars to talk about Early Modern Women's Work: Kinship, Community, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2025). The book examines the contributions of female writers, artists, scientists, religious leaders, and patrons who engaged in entrepreneurial, intellectual, and emotional labor in German-speaking Europe. Through individual and collective authorship, the women analyzed in this study assert a claim to kinship and community, often beyond the hegemonic, heteronormative relationships to family, religion, and monarch. The contributions of early modern women to the construction of productive work spaces and the establishment of intellectual and actual communities are often overlooked or underestimated in scholarship on this period. This book serves as a cultural corrective to suppositions of gender-coded work, because alongside the dominant history of the private sphere as a feminine domain, a counter-narrative emerges with collective authorship. Despite the disparities in their biographies, the women whose work Simpson foregrounds highlight a range of early modern concerns, primarily but not exclusively in German-speaking Europe. These include debates about women's education and erudition; migration and displacement in search of religious or professional freedom; a persistent but varied discourse about female authorship and creative agency; and the assertion of subjectivity against the violent, fractious history of the Thirty Years' War and beyond. This book will be an ideal resource for students, scholars, and all those interested in German and European studies, women and gender studies, and the history of early modern work.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jacob Bloomfield, "Drag: A British History" (U California Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Drag: A British History (University of California Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form. Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture--drag artists have consistently asserted themselves as some of the most renowned and significant entertainers of their day. As Bloomfield demonstrates, drag was also at the center of public discussions around gender and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Victorian sex scandals to the "permissive society" of the 1960s. This compelling new history demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage.

Jacob Bloomfield is a Zukunftskolleg Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Konstanz and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent. His research is situated primarily in the fields of cultural history, the history of sexuality, and gender history. Jacob is the author of Drag: A British History (2023). His second monograph will be about the historical reception to, and cultural impact of, musician Little Richard.

Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Radio ReOrient 13.7: "Linguistics, Citizenship and Belonging,” with Kamran Khan, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Marchella Ward

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talked with Kamran Khan about linguistics, citizenship and belonging. The conversation travelled from the 2001 Northern riots in the UK, to the Prevent policy, all the way to more recent adjustments to the Nationalities and Borders Bill. Khan is currently the director of the MOSAIC research group on multilingualism and an associate professor of language, social justice and education. He also wrote the book “Becoming a Citizen: Linguistic Trials and Negotiations in the UK”.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Darcie Fontaine, "Modern France and the World" (Routledge, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

As she taught university-level courses on modern French history, Darcie Fontaine felt like she could not find a textbook that provided an up-to-date narrative about the ways in which France has been involved in and influenced by the rest of the world—certainly not one that incorporated contributions from scholars of social and cultural history, gender studies, and the history of imperialism. So when the opportunity to develop a textbook for college professors that did just that presented itself, she decided to take the leap. Modern France and the World (Routledge, 2023) is the result of years of research, reading, and collaborative engagement with scholars in a diverse array of fields that provides readers with an engaging narrative of French history from the 18th century to the present that incorporates a consistent awareness of how France’s empire and global politics has shaped it as a nation. A useful resource for teachers, students, and scholars of modern France, the book incorporates brief discussions of cultural objects and major themes in French history that can serve as a foundation for a one- or two- semester survey, a specialized course, or even general undergraduate classes.

In this conversation, we talk not only about how she decided to take on this gargantuan task, but how she went about writing the book – gathering ideas and advice from scholars with different methodological expertise, reading widely in fields with which she was less familiar, and, eventually, whittling down all of this information into a concise text. Along the way, we discuss how collaboration, teaching, and an awareness of the influence of academic history shaped the decisions she made about what to include and what to leave out of the narrative. Fontaine demonstrates an astute awareness of the political importance and stakes of creating national narratives. As she explains: “everything about [the book] is a historiographic intervention… every choice I make about what to include, what not to include, is embedded in the historiography.”

Darcie Fontaine is a scholar of modern French imperialism, particularly in North Africa, though she has studied transnational women’s movements and refugee politics in nineteenth and twentieth century French history. Her first book, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria was published in 2016—and was featured on an episode of New Books in French Studies! She is currently working as a developmental editor and translator at Les plumes rouges, the new company she has launched with Dr. Sandrine Sanos.

Sarah K. Miles is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who specializes in global francophone history and the history of the French Left. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (skmiles@live.unc.edu).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Taylor McCall, "The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Taylor McCall's The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe (Reaktion, 2023) is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first human dissections. On the contrary, she argues that these Renaissance figures drew upon centuries of visual and written tradition in their works.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is Happening in the Mediterranean Right Now – And Why You Should Care

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Since 2014 more than 32,000 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. As the EU and its member states have been increasingly prioritising migration deterrence over human life, civic organisations have stepped in and are carrying out search and rescue operations. SOS Humanity is one of these organisations. Janna Sauerteig joins us to talk about the work SOS Humanity and other civilian search and rescue organisations do, the obstacles they face from member states and the EU, the role of the so-called “Libyan Coast Guard”, the ways in which deadly policies are part of the European global and democratic crisis, and possible solutions.

The data about deaths in the Mediterranean mentioned in the podcast are from the Missing Migrants Project. We also mentioned the evidence that migrants and even Black residents are rounded up from North African cities and dumped in the desert; this is from a 2024 investigation by El Pais (in Spanish) and Lighthouse Reports (in English).

Transcript of episode here.

Guest: Janna Sauerteig is Mobilization and Advocacy Manager at SOS Humanity. Their latest report “Borders of (In)humanity”, published this May, demonstrates the connection between the EU’s migration externalisation policies and human rights violations in the Central Mediterranean, namely through EU and bilateral cooperation with Libya and Tunisia in the field of search and rescue. The report is based on survivors’ testimonies which collected by SOS Humanity.

Presenter: Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nina Wilén, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Sahel has become a focal point of international security interventions, with external actors providing extensive security force assistance (SFA) to local military, police, and paramilitary forces. Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Nina Wilen critically examines the rationale, implementation, and consequences of these efforts (2012-2024). With unique access to both military operations and strategy-making in European capitals, the author provides an innovative methodological approach, exclusive material, and a comprehensive perspective. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, including participant observation of military operations and over 100 interviews with policymakers, military personnel, and security practitioners across the Sahel and Europe,this book offers an unprecedented analysis of how SFA has shaped local security dynamics and broader geopolitical competition.

The book argues that SFA in the Sahel is driven not just by regional security threats, such as insurgency, violent extremism, and transnational crime, but also by external actors' strategic interests. Through a comparative analysis of bilateral (France, U.S.) and multilateral (EU, UN) initiatives, it demonstrates how SFA has been framed as the primary policy tool to manage instability. Securitizing the Sahel offers both theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding SFA in fragile states. It challenges prevailing frameworks, provides critical insights for policymakers, and highlights the unintended consequences of militarized external assistance in the Sahel and beyond.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mary Edwards, "Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resisters of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context he was very much interested in: the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in, and this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works.

This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022). Working through Sartre’s output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there, it works to his later works, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempt suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change.

By examining key historical moments--from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI--Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past--such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain--ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term--findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today.

Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past.

Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tracy Borman, "The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In the long and dramatic annals of British history, no transition from one monarch to another has been as fraught and consequential as that which ended the Tudor dynasty and launched the Stuart in March 1603. At her death, Elizabeth I had reigned for 44 turbulent years, facing many threats, whether external from Spain or internal from her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. But no danger was greater than the uncertainty over who would succeed her, which only intensified as her reign lengthened. Her unwillingness to marry or name a successor gave rise to fierce rivalry between blood claimants to the throne—Mary and her son, James VI of Scotland, Arbella Stuart, Lady Katherine Grey, Henry Hastings, and more—which threatened to destabilize the monarchy.

As acclaimed Tudor historian Dr. Tracy Borman reveals in The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit, and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty (Grove Atlantic, 2025), according to Elizabeth’s earliest biographer, William Camden, in his history of her reign, on her deathbed the queen indicated James was her chosen heir, and indeed he did become king soon after she died. That endorsement has been accepted as fact for more than four centuries. However, recent analysis of Camden’s original manuscript shows key passages were pasted over and rewritten to burnish James’ legacy. The newly-uncovered pages make clear not only that Elizabeth’s naming of James never happened, but that James, uncertain he would ever gain the British throne, was even suspected of sending an assassin to London to kill the queen. Had all this been known at the time, the English people—bitter enemies with Scotland for centuries—might well not have accepted James as their king, with unimagined ramifications.

Inspired by the revelations over Camden’s manuscript, Dr. Borman sheds rare new light on Elizabeth’s historic reign, chronicling it through the lens of the various claimants who, over decades, sought the throne of the only English monarch not to make provision for her successor. The consequences were immense. Not only did James upend Elizabeth’s glittering court, but the illegitimacy of his claim to the throne, which Camden suppressed, found full expression in the catastrophic reign of James’ son and successor, Charles I. His execution in 1649 shocked the world and destroyed the monarchy fewer than 50 years after Elizabeth died, changing the course of British and world history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dag Nikolaus Hasse, "What Is European? On Overcoming Colonial and Romantic Modes of Thought" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

It is common to define Europe by its democratic, scientific, religious, and cultural traditions. But in What is European? On Overcoming Colonial and Romantic Modes of Thought (Amsterdam UP, 2025), Dag Nikolaus Hasse argues that the search for Europe's essence has taken a troubling turn. He shows that many traditional ideas about Europe are culturally one-sided and historically and geographically distorted, and calls for a decolonisation and deromanticisation of the discourse on Europe.

The book promotes an inclusive vision of Europe that reflects its long history of multiethnic cities, offers a cultural home to a wider range of people across the continent, and extends attention and respect to other continents, thus laying a more respectful foundation for shaping the future together.
At the same time, Hasse demonstrates that overcoming colonial ways of thinking does not and should not result in anti-Europeanism. Criticising European arrogance may well go hand in hand with feeling culturally at home in other traditions of Europe. For this, it does not matter whether one is a resident of the European continent or not. There is no privileged access to European culture or to the culture of any other continent.

Dag Nikolaus Hasse is professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Würzburg. Among his numerous publications, two monographs stand out: Avicenna's De Anima in the Latin West (2000), and Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (2016). In 2016, Hasse was awarded the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the highest disctinction for a scientist in Germany.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lars Cornelissen, "Neoliberalism and Race" (Stanford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it.

Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo, "Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century" (Manchester UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 8 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In her new book Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester UP, 2021), Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo explains how the modernization of this great city shaped and was shaped by print media and mass culture. A growing population, industrial immigration, mass connection with the wider world (making it both smaller and bigger), and the twilight of an empire shaped the Madrileños, their sense of identity, and their feelings of being modern and visually aware. A history of print media—and itself an example of print media—the book shows how people adapted to the dawning of a transnational, information age (perhaps a timely and familiar topic for today’s listener?) and presents a remarkable ‘glocal’ history of this event.

Vanesa Rodriguez Galindo is a cultural and visual historian, working in urban studies, print cultures in Spain and Latin America, transnationalism, and women’s studies. She holds an MA in Metropolitan History from the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and a PhD in History of Art from UNED, Madrid.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spain and the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jenny C. Mann, "The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime" (Princeton UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 8 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Today’s guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University’s English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Cornell University Press, 2012) and is the co-editor with Debapriya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Scientific Forms.” Additionally, Jenny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, "The Construction of Witchcraft in Early Modern Denmark, 1536-1617" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 1 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Louise Nyholm Kallestrup joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Construction of Witchcraft in Early Modern Denmark, 1536-1617 (Routledge, 2025) This book examines how the experience of witchcraft developed and evolved from the Lutheran Evangelical Reformation of Denmark 1536 to the celebration of the Lutheran centennial of 1617. As well as exploring witchcraft, this volume is a portrait of Denmark and how religion and politics in the 16th and 17th centuries were impossible to separate. It was in this period from 1536 to 1617 that witchcraft went from an offence condemned in the Bible and prohibited in the medieval Law of Jutland, to being described in detail as the worst of crimes. Witchcraft evolved from being defined as imposing harm to someone or something, to being a mockery of God. Approaching the theme from the new history of experience, this book refers to process as the construction of witchcraft as a crime. Contributions draw on a wide range of textual and visual sources, and bring together court records, sermons, legal regulations and correspondence with pamphlets, devotional literature and demonological treaties. The book is the first of its kind that aims to explain how this development occurred. This volume is useful for undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars, as well as non-specialist readers interested in the history of witchcraft, magic and alchemy, women's and gender history and European history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jakub Gortat, "Remembering National Socialism in Austrian Post-war Film" (1945-1955) (Brill, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Entrenched in the myth of being victim of the Nazi aggression, Austrian elites pursued a politics of memory that symbolically shook off any responsibility for the emergence, development and consequences of National Socialism. Authors of the vast majority of films produced early after 1945 were not interested in dealing with the recent Nazi past of their country. There were, however, exceptions. Through detailed analysis of the narratives, stylistic patterns and reception of films that were set during or immediately after World War II, Remembering National Socialism in Austrian Post-war Film" (1945-1955) (Brill, 2025) explains how cinema corroborated Austrian national self-stereotypes, at the same time offering a critique of the Nazi regime.

Guest: Jakub Gortat (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lodz.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kenneth G. Appold, "Luther and the Peasants: Religion, Ritual, and the Revolt Of 1525" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Kenneth G. Appold joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Luther and the Peasants: Religion, Ritual, and the Revolt of 1525 (Oxford UP, 2025). The German Peasants' Revolts of 1525 were a defining moment both for the Protestant Reformation and the history of European culture. But while the conflicts are well-studied, they are typically analyzed today from political and socioeconomic perspectives, whereas the protagonists themselves framed them in religious and theological terms. Luther and the Peasants takes these perspectives seriously to offer a novel and timely reinterpretation of the uprisings. A detailed examination of peasants' religious lives reveals commitments to peace, social harmony, and the environment that came into conflict with spiritual priorities of the Protestant Reformation, notably with those of Martin Luther. Drawing on the peasants' own documents, such as the famous manifesto The Twelve Articles, the book provides a thorough re-examination their actions, including their negotiations with lords and their organization into bands and Christian brotherhoods, and a fresh analysis of their behavior in battle. This ritual reconstruction makes peasants' statements and behaviors historiographically legible for the first time, effectively giving voice to an illiterate rural people, and offers new ways of reading Luther's 1525 writings on peasants, which are among his most challenging works. In this context, the 1525 conflict between Luther and the peasants comes to light as the collision of two different religious worlds, each incomprehensible to the other. This, in turn, reveals the important role played by religion in a defining moment of early modern European history.

Kenneth G. Appold, James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maurice Samuels, "Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair" (Yale UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting “Death to Judas!” In Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (Yale UP, 2024), Maurice Samuels gives readers new insight into Dreyfus himself—the man at the center of the affair. He tells the story of Dreyfus’s early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I.
Samuels’s striking perspective is enriched by a newly available archive of more than three thousand documents and objects donated by the Dreyfus family. Unlike many historians, Samuels argues that Dreyfus was not an “assimilated” Jew. Rather, he epitomized a new model of Jewish identity made possible by the French Revolution, when France became the first European nation to grant Jews full legal equality. This book analyzes Dreyfus’s complex relationship to Judaism and to antisemitism over the course of his life—a story that, as global antisemitism rises, echoes still. It also shows the profound effect of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of Jews around the world.

Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University. He is the author most recently of The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern. He lives in Branford, CT.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l'Affaire (1935; Gallimard, 1981).
Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945 (HarperCollins, 1991).
Alfred Dreyfus, Cinq années de ma vie (1894-1899) (Maspero, 1982).
Vincent Duclert, Alfred Dreyfus: l'honneur d'un patriote (Fayard, 2016).
Marcel Thomas, L'Affaire sans Dreyfus (Fayard, 1961).
Hannah Arendt, “From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today.” Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 3 (1942): 195–240. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4615201.
Exhibition « Alfred Dreyfus. Truth and justice » at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris
American Israelite newspaper

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting" (Yale UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (Yale UP, 2022) explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism. Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet’s native Franche-Comté to the beaches of Normandy, Paul Galvez follows the artist on his travels as he uses a palette-knife to transform the Romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world.

In this interview, Allison Leigh talks to Dr. Galvez about why he felt we needed another book on Courbet, how he tackled the voluminous scholarship on this artist, and how to make claims about an artist’s intentions from a historical standpoint. Their conversation ranges from how to best use comparisons in art historical argumentation to the difficulties of reproducing some art works—even with high resolution digital photography.

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Danny Orbach, "Plots Against Hitler" (Mariner, 2016)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In his new book, Plots Against Hitler (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Danny Orbach, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a profound and complete examination of the plots to assassinate Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. A riveting narrative of the organization, conspiracy, and sacrifices made by those who led the resistance against Hitler. Orbach deftly analyzes the mixed motives, moral ambiguities and organizational vulnerability that marked their work, while reminding us forcefully of their essential bravery and rightness. And he challenges us to ask whether we would have summoned the same courage.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.comor on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion, and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church, and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution (Reaktion Books, 2022) ends by discussing Napoleon's one great failure--his attempt to restore the colonial empire destroyed by war and slave rebellion. By the time this endeavor was abandoned, the fragile peace with Great Britain had broken down, and the Napoleonic wars had begun.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Arnar Eggert Thoroddsen, "Icelandic Pop: Then, Today, Tomorrow, Next Week" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Iceland punches well above its weight in the world of music, producing global icons like Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men, and Laufey, while at the same time nurturing a vibrant local scene. Icelandic Pop: Then, Today, Tomorrow, Next Week (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Arnar Eggert Thoroddsen explores how Iceland’s unique social habits, institutions and everyday practices contribute to its thriving music culture.

Tracing the development of Icelandic popular music since the rock ’n’ roll era, it examines key influences shaping the scene, from Reykjavík’s musicians to national institutions like radio and concert venues. With engaging explanations of sociological factors, the book sheds light on why Iceland has become a powerhouse in music. An illuminating journey through Iceland’s music history, this is a celebration of the artistry and cultural forces behind its global impact.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lorenzo Castellani, "Alberto Beneduce, Mussolini's Technocrat: Power, Knowledge, and Institutions in Fascist Italy" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Should "good" people work for authoritarians? Does their implicit endorsement do more harm than their replacement by someone potentially worse? This was a common debate during Donald Trump's first term in the White House. Less so, during his second as loyalists assume most top positions in the administration.

A century ago, this was a central question for Italy's governing class as Benito Mussolini's fascist movement seized and consolidated power, evolving over three years from a mix of authoritarianism and democracy into full-blown dictatorship. Some chose retirement and some exile.

Alberto Beneduce, who publicly denounced fascist violence in 1922 and called for police repression of Mussolini's movement, chose to stay. Over 15 years, this committed socialist leveraged the Duce's trust to build a network of economic agencies that outlasted Mussolini and provided the foundations of post-war Italian capitalism. At his zenith in the late-1930s, Beneduce was on the board of 26 corporations, chaired eight and was - in the words of Lorenzo Castellani, author of Alberto Beneduce, Mussolini’s Technocrat: Power, Knowledge, and Institutions in Fascist Italy (Routledge, 2025) - the head of a "state outside the state".

Lorenzo Castellani is a tenure-track researcher and professor at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome.

Tim Jones is a policy analyst at Medley Advisors and also writes and podcasts on European affairs at 242.news on Substack.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Thomas Smith, "Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns.

Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Dr. Thomas Smith, is grounded on extensive research into the original manuscripts, and presents numerous new manuscript witnesses. The book argues that some of the letters are post hoc “inventions”, composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary “reality”, it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary “confections”, they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Madeleine Chalmers, "French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary 'nonhuman turn' in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.
Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy, and theology, it offers readers new contexts - and questions - for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking.

Guest Dr. Madeleine Chalmers is a lecturer in French studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, and holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Dr. Chalmers is the recipient of or shortlisted for a number of prestigious essay prizes, and has written numerous articles as well on topics ranging from modernist authors to automation and the idea of “bricolage,” as well as editing a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies on “French Perspectives on Conflict” in 2022.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at the University of Alabama with research focusing on speculative literatures of metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, as well as the translator of the novels Mevlido's Dreams and The Inner Harbour.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matthias Egeler, "Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld" (Yale UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings and Arthurian legend, these sprites have undergone huge transformations. From J. R. R. Tolkien’s warlike elves, based on medieval legend, to little flower fairies whose charms even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle succumbed to, they permeate European art and culture.

In Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Matthias Egeler explores these mythical creatures of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and England, and their continental European cousins. Dr. Egeler goes on a journey through enchanted landscapes and literary worlds. He describes both their friendly and their dangerous, even deadly, sides. We encounter them in the legends of King Arthur’s round table and in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the terrible era of the witch trials, in magic’s peaceful conquest of Victorian bourgeois salons, in the child-friendly form of Peter Pan, and even as helpers in the contemporary fight against environmental destruction.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Lambert, "No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One" (Yale UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 7 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

How, for just over a century, Britain ensured it would not face another Napoleon Bonaparte--manipulating European powers while building a global maritime empire

At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, a fragile peace emerged in Europe. The continent's borders were redrawn, and the French Empire, once a significant threat to British security, was for now cut down to size. But after decades of ceaseless conflict, Britain's economy was beset by a crippling debt. How could this small, insular seapower state secure order across the Channel?

Andrew Lambert argues for a dynamic new understanding of the nineteenth century, showing how British policymakers shaped a stable European system that it could balance from offshore. Through judicious deployment of naval power against continental forces, and the defence strategy of statesmen such as the Duke of Wellington, Britain ensured that no single European state could rise to pose a threat, rebuilt its economy, and established naval and trade dominance across the globe.

No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One (Yale UP, 2025) is the remarkable story of how Britain kept a whole continent in check--until the final collapse of this delicately balanced order at the outset of World War One.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Justine De Young, "The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 6 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Using artworks by Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others, The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Justine De Young explores how women and artists in Impressionist Paris (1855-1885) crafted their public images to exploit and resist stereotypes.
French societal expectations and beauty ideals shaped how women were seen and how they chose to present themselves in public – whether on the street, in a photograph, or in a portrait on the walls of the annual Paris Salon. On Paris's broad new boulevards and in its public parks and theaters, women dressed to impress anonymous strangers as well as their friends. They even circulated aspirational photographs of themselves. Looking at a rich array of visual sources – from portraits to modern-life paintings, and from photographs to fashion plates – Dr. De Young reveals how women were seen, how they aspired to be seen, and how they navigated public life in Second Empire and Belle Époque Paris.
This book considers how fashionable feminine “types” made famous in books, caricatures, and paintings created a visual lexicon and stylistic guide for women. Men and women alike relied on these types – cocotte (mistress), jeune veuve (young widow), amazone (independent equestrienne), demoiselle de magasin (shopgirl), and Parisienne (chic Parisian woman) – to judge the class, character, morality, and worth of strangers. With a rich set of illustrations from the Impressionist canon and beyond, The Art of Parisian Chic shows how modern women used fashion and these stereotypes to construct and reinvent their identities.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David M. Whitford, "The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 5 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

David Whitford joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity (Routledge, 2025). This volume explores how Martin Luther's life and teachings reshaped and redefined masculinity during the Reformation, offering a more nuanced portrayal of him as a man grappling with the complexities of fatherhood, marriage, and the battlegrounds of religious controversy. This book demonstrates how Luther forged a new ideal of Christian manhood by examining his struggles with monastic vows, his transformation of the household as a spiritual center, and his reshaping of male authority. Integrating insights from cultural historians, gender studies, and feminist scholarship, Whitford analyzes the intersections of gender, power, and religion during a time of profound social upheaval and change. Through Luther's personal transformation, this book reveals how early Protestant ideals of masculinity were intricately tied to broader religious, political, and cultural changes that reshaped Europe. By placing Luther within the wider context of religious and social transformation, this work offers a fresh perspective on his impact and the changing notions of masculinity in the early modern period. The Making of a Reformation Man is a valuable resource for scholars and students of the Reformations and gender theory, as well as readers interested in the broader implications of religious thought on societal roles and identity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Georgios Varouxakis, "The West: The History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 4 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

How did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin to refer to themselves in this way? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined by nineteenth-century imperialists? Neither, writes Georgios Varouxakis in The West: The History of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2025), his ambitious and fascinating genealogy of the idea. “The West” was not used by Plato, Cicero, Locke, Mill, or other canonized figures of what we today call the Western tradition. It was not first wielded by empire-builders. It gradually emerged as of the 1820s and was then, Varouxakis shows, decisively promoted in the 1840s by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (whose political project, incidentally, was passionately anti-imperialist). The need for the use of the term “the West” emerged to avoid the confusing or unwanted consequences of the use of “Europe.” The two overlapped, but were not identical, with the West used to differentiate from certain “others” within Europe as well as to include the Americas.

After examining the origins, Varouxakis traces the many and often astonishingly surprising changes in the ways in which the West has been understood, and the different intentions and consequences related to a series of these contested definitions. While other theories of the West consider only particular aspects of the concept and its history (if only in order to take aim at its reputation), Varouxakis’s analysis offers a comprehensive account that reaches to the present day, exploring the multiplicity of current, and not least, prospective future meanings. He concludes with an examination of how, since 2022, definitions and membership of the West have been reworked to consider Ukraine, as the evolution and redefinitions continue.

Georgios Varouxakis is professor of the history of political thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London and Codirector of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. He is the author of Mill on Nationality, Victorian Political Thought on France and the French, and Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations and the coauthor of Contemporary France.

YouTube Channel: here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Árni Heimir Ingólfsson , "Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland" (Indiana UP, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland (Indiana University Press, 2019), Árni Heimir Ingólfsson provides a striking account of the dramatic career of Iceland's iconic composer. Leifs (1899–1968) was the first Icelander to devote himself fully to composition at a time when a local music scene was only beginning to take form. He was a fervent nationalist in his art, fashioning an idiosyncratic and uncompromising 'Icelandic' sound from traditions of vernacular music with the aim to legitimize Iceland as an independent, culturally empowered nation.

In addition to exploring Leifs's career, Ingólfsson provides detailed descriptions of Leifs's major works and their cultural contexts. Leifs's music was inspired by the Icelandic landscape and includes auditory depictions of volcanos, geysers, and waterfalls. The raw quality of his orchestral music is frequently enhanced by an expansive percussion section, including anvils, stones, sirens, bells, ships' chains, shotguns, and cannons.

Largely neglected in his own lifetime, Leifs's music has been rediscovered in recent years and hailed as a singular and deeply original contribution to twentieth-century music. Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland enriches our understanding and appreciation of Leifs and his music by exploring the political, literary and environmental contexts that influenced his work.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Carol Atack, "Plato: A Civic Life" (Reaktion, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Plato is a key figure from the beginnings of Western philosophy, yet the impact of his lived experience on his thought has rarely been explored. Born during a war that would lead to Athens’ decline, Plato lived in turbulent times. In Plato: A Civic Life (Reaktion, 2025), Carol Atack explores how Plato’s life in Athens influenced his thought, how he developed the Socratic dialogue into a powerful philosophical tool, and how he used the institutions of Athenian society to create a compelling imaginative world. Accessibly written, this book shows how Plato made Athens the place where diverse ideas were integrated into a new way of approaching the big questions about our lives, then and now.

Carol Atack teaches classical Greek and ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She is the author and coauthor of two books, most recently Anachronism and Antiquity.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, "The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New Tellings of Half-forgotten Stories from England's 39 Historic Counties" (The History Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Do you know the legends of the giants who ruled England before the first human kings? What about the demon dog Black Shuck who terrorized sixteenth-century Norfolk? Or the many times the Devil has tried to get his way before being outwitted by everyday people?

England’s historic counties are overflowing with folklore, and this collection of 39 stories from the hit podcast Three Ravens reimagines dozens of classic tales in surprising, spooky, and often hilarious ways. Filled with tales of ghosts, mermaids, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends and more, The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New tellings of half-forgotten stories from England's 39 Historic Counties (The History Press, 2025) by Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux spans centuries, styles, tones and narrators, making it perfect for bedtimes, reading by torchlight, or curling up on the sofa to enjoy with a mug of something hot.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christopher Millington, "Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe" (Manchester UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

On 9 October 1934, terrorists murdered King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in a Marseille street. The Croatian ultranationalist Ustashe was behind the attack. The Ustashe hoped that the king’s death would cause the collapse of Yugoslavia and the liberation of the Croat people. Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe (Manchester UP, 2025) examines the circumstances, processes, and trajectories that shaped the Ustashe terrorists and their attack in Marseille.

It brings questions about contemporary terrorism to bear on a historical attack: what prompts people to join terrorist organisations? How are these people ‘radicalised’ to commit violence? What roles do women play in terrorism? Murder in Marseille bridges the scholarly gap between historical and contemporary terrorism, paying attention to, and often guided by, current concerns, ideas, theories, and notions about terrorist violence.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brandon Bloch, "Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy" (Harvard UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Germany’s Protestant churches, longtime strongholds of nationalism and militarism, largely backed the Nazi dictatorship that took power in 1933. For many Protestant leaders, pastors, and activists, national and religious revival were one and the same. Even those who opposed the regime tended toward antidemocratic attitudes. By the 1950s, however, Church leaders in West Germany had repositioned themselves as prominent advocates for constitutional democracy and human rights.

Brandon Bloch reveals how this remarkable ideological shift came to pass, following the cohort of theologians, pastors, and lay intellectuals who spearheaded the postwar transformation of their church. Born around the turn of the twentieth century, these individuals came of age amid the turbulence of the Weimar Republic and were easily swayed to complicity with the Third Reich. They accommodated the state in hopes of protecting the Church’s independence from it, but they also embraced the Nazi regime’s antisemitic and anticommunist platform. After the war, under the pressures of Allied occupation, these Protestant intellectuals and their heirs creatively reimagined their tradition as a fount of democratic and humanitarian values. But while they campaigned for family law reform, conscientious objection to military service, and the protection of basic rights, they also promoted a narrative of Christian anti-Nazi resistance that whitewashed the Church’s complicity in dictatorship and genocide.

Examining the sources and limits of democratic transformation, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2025) sheds new light on the development of postwar European politics and the power of national myths.

Guest: Brandon Bloch (he/him) is a historian of modern Europe, with an emphasis on Germany and its global entanglements. His research and teaching foreground themes of democracy, human rights, memory politics, and social thought. Brandon is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Welsh, "The Social Railway and Its Workers in Europes Modern Era, 1880-2023: Moments of Fury, Ramparts of Hope" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Social Railway and Its Workers in Europe’s Modern Era, 1880-2023: Moments of Fury, Ramparts of Hope (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. David Welsh examines the evolution of rail transport and a number of railway workforces across Europe in the modern era, from around 1880 to 2023.
Each chapter explores how, within the context of a social railway, rail workers developed distinct national and international perspectives on the nature of their work and their roles in societies and states. Dr. Welsh convincingly argues that workers formed a raft of entirely new and enduring organisations such as trade unions that, in turn, became ramparts of hope. Welsh goes on to consider how the insurgent character of these organisations produced moments of fury during tumultuous periods in the 20th century. The Social Railway and its Workers in Europe's Modern Era, 1880-2023 explores the national and European contexts in which both characteristics came to the fore, including the ecology of fossil fuel technology (coal and oil). Above all, it argues that social, economic and political forces are not simply external 'scene-shifting' but integral to the history of railway systems.
The book examines the cultural construction of European railways through literature, art and other forms of writing as well as recent oral history. It also includes a detailed investigation of the role played by nationalisation and public ownership in Europe. In the context of neoliberalism and globalization, it proposes a 21st century programme for the social railway.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joanne Yao, "The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order" (Manchester UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 8 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came to shape the modern international order.

The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order (Manchester UP, 2022) examines nineteenth-century efforts to establish international commissions on three transboundary rivers - the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. It charts how the Enlightenment ambition to tame the natural world, and human nature itself, became an international standard for rational and civilized authority and informed our geographical imagination of the international. This relationship of domination over nature shaped three core IR concepts central to the emergence of early international order: the territorial sovereign state; imperial hierarchies; and international organizations. The book contributes to environmental politics and international relations by highlighting how the relationship between society and nature is not a peripheral concern, but one at the heart of international politics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steven Veerapen, "Witches: A King's Obsession" (Birlin, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 3 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Witches – whether broomstick-riding spell-casters or Wiccan earth-worshippers – have been culturally relevant for centuries. For centuries, too, belief in the potency of witchcraft has been debated, accused witches have been hunted and punished, and film and TV productions have brought the witch and the witch-hunter to big and small screens.

But where did our perception of witches – good and bad – come from? What motivated wide-scale panics about witchcraft during certain periods? How were alleged witches identified, accused, and variously tortured and punished?

In Witches: a King’s Obsession (Birlinn, 2025) Dr. Steven Veerapen traces witches, witchcraft, and witch-hunters from the explosion of mass-trials under King James VI and I in the late sixteenth century to the death of the witch-hunting phenomenon in the early eighteenth century. Based on documents and the latest historical research, he explores what motivated widespread belief in demonic witchcraft throughout Britain as well as in continental Europe, what caused mass panics about alleged witches, and what led, ultimately, to the relegation of the witch – and the witch-hunter – to the realm of fantasy and the fringes of society.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Woodman, "The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 2 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Professor David Woodman is a foundational biography of Æthelstan (d. 939), the early medieval king whose territorial conquests and shrewd statesmanship united the peoples, languages, and cultures that would come to be known as the “kingdom of the English.” In this panoramic work, Dr. Woodman blends masterful storytelling with the latest scholarship to paint a multifaceted portrait of this immensely important but neglected figure, a man celebrated in his day as much for his benevolence, piety, and love of learning as he was for his ambitious reign.
Set against the backdrop of warring powers in early medieval Europe, The First King of England sheds new light on Æthelstan’s early life, his spectacular military victories and the innovative way he governed his kingdom, his fostering of the church, the deft political alliances he forged with Europe’s royal houses, and his death and enduring legacy. It begins with the reigns of Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder, Æthelstan’s grandfather and father, describing how they consolidated and expanded the “kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.” But it was Æthelstan who would declare himself the first king of all England when, in 927, he conquered the viking kingdom at York, required the submission of a Scottish king, and secured an annual tribute from the Welsh kings.
Beautifully illustrated and breathtaking in scope, The First King of England is the most comprehensive, up-to-date biography of Æthelstan available, bringing a magisterial richness of detail to the life of a consequential British monarch whose strategic and political sophistication was unprecedented for his time.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chris Millington, "A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

FASCISM...FRANCE. Two words/ideas that scholars have spent much time and energy debating in relationship to one another. Chris Millington's A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a work of synthesis that also draws on the author's own research for key examples and evidence to support its narrative and claims. Moving chronologically, the book's chapters take the reader from the impact of the First World War right up to the contemporary period in French politics, culture, and society. A narrative and analysis focused on the French context, the book situates France within a broader European frame.

Engaging the complex historiographic battles surrounding French fascism in ways that will be helpful to non-specialists, and especially to student readers, the book condenses decades of previous scholarship while delving into concrete cases and moments that help to illustrate the stakes of this historical and political field. Examining movements like the Croix-de-Feu, Faisceau, Jeunesses Patriotes, Partie Social Français, and the Cagoulards within the broader interwar landscape of right-wing thought and politics, the book goes on to consider the Vichy period and the emergence of the National Front after the Second World War.

*Special note: Chris and I ran out of time before I could ask him about what he's been working on since the publication of A History of Fascism in France. Readers may also be interested in his most recent book, France in the Second World War: Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anders M. Greene-Crow, "Austerity Measures: The Poetics of Food Insecurity in Early Modern English Literature" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

My guest today is Anders M. Greene-Crow. Anders teaches at the Woods College of Advancing Studies and is a former Professor of English at Boston College. More recently, Anders has been preparing for the New York state bar exam, while also co-hosting the podcast “Say Podcast and Die!,” about R.L. Stine’s book series, Goosebumps. Today, we are discussing Anders’s first book, Austerity Measures: The Poetics of Food Insecurity in Early Modern English Literature (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

Austerity Measures is a brilliant intervention in how we read early modern poetry. Crow looks at a range of lyric poets and writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Thomas Tusser, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Anne Bradstreet, and Thomas Tryon. Austerity Measures argues that early modern poets used literary form to model solutions addressed to pressing concerns about food insecurity and food ethics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jérémy Filet, "The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational Travel and Small-States' Diplomacy" (Manchester UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational travel and small-states' diplomacy (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Jérémy Filet is the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent. In the book, Dr. Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power - embodied by educational academies - to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly supported the Jacobite cause during the crucial years surrounding the 1715 rising, while others stayed out of Jacobite affairs.

The book demonstrates how early modern small states sought to cultivate good relations with Britain by attracting travellers as part of a wider trend of ensuring connections with future diplomats or politicians in case a Stuart restoration never came. This publication therefore brings together a study of Britain, small states, Jacobitism, and educational travel, in its nexus at continental academies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Harald Bodenschatz et al., "Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933–1945" (DOM, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933–1945 (DOM, 2025) is edited by Uwe Altrock, Harald Bodenschatz, Victoria Grau, Jannik Noeske, Christiane Post, and Max Welch Guerra. The book includes contributions from Christian von Oppen, Piero Sassi, and Jannik Noeske.

Two co-editors, Victoria Grau and Max Welch Guerra, join the New Books Network to discuss this work.

In this book, urban planning under the Nazi dictatorship is for the first time examined not only as something that evolved during the different periods of Nazi rule but also in the context of other European dictatorships of the time. The period between 1933 and 1945 saw important changes in the focus of Nazi urban planning. These affected the cast of principal actors, the content of the regime’s propaganda, cities and areas affected, programs and practices, and winners and losers. The result of this survey is a multi-layered picture that goes beyond the usual presentation of well-known power-projecting buildings to consider a range of other important aspects including housing construction, urban renewal, internal colonization, buildings for rearmament, large-scale infrastructure, industrial areas, educational institutions, and camps.

This volume marks the conclusion of a series of academic publications about urban planning and dictatorship – in the Soviet Union, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933-1945 is the English language edition of Stadtbau im Nationalsozialismus: Angriff, Triumph, Terror im europäischen Kontext, 1933–1945.

Guests:

Victoria Grau is a researcher in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Sen. Prof. Dr. Max Welch Guerra is the Chair of Spatial Planning and Spatial Research at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Host:

Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Find Jenna on Scholars@Duke or her Linktree.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov, "The Russian Revolution and Its Global Impact: A Short History with Documents" (Hackett Publishing, 2017)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

"On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov have reinvigorated the study of a turning point in world history. Instead of rehashing the internal dynamics of the Bolshevik takeover, the authors have carefully juxtaposed the international ambitions of the Bolsheviks with the Revolution's reception around the world. Daly and Trofimov pair their lucid introductory essay with documents from Soviet officials, intellectuals in South America, W. E. B. Du Bois in the United States, and others, so readers will quickly realize how revolutionary ideas cross oceans and transcend geopolitical boundaries. The Russian Revolution and Its Global Impact: A Short History with Documents (Hackett Publishing, 2017) thus takes a topic once reserved for students of Russian history and places it in a world historical perspective; those interested in global history, European history, and, of course, those fascinated by events in Petrograd and Moscow will find ample sources of inspiration in this text. As the Russian Federation is now exerting its influence on a global scale, the time is ripe to consider the Russian Revolution in such broad terms." ―Nigel Raab, Loyola Marymount University

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Agnes Arnold-Forster's book The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2021) offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America.

The Cancer Problem argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Raymond Jonas, "Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire" (Harvard UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

For a few years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mexico was ruled by an Austrian and defended by a French army. This often neglected story is more than just historical trivia - it's a way of understanding 19th century imperial politics, and global insurgencies today. In Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire (Harvard UP, 2024), University of Washington professor Raymond Jonas explains the genesis, course, and end of this strange twist in the historical record. Jonas argues that, even deep into the nineteenth century, a successful American republic posed an existential threat to European monarchies, so much so that in the early 1860s a combined force of Spain, France, and Britain sent soldiers to North America to impose a monarchy on an unwilling population. The Second Empire under Emperor Maximilian I was short lived, however, and his rule never extended much past the capital city. Yet as Jonas argues, the fact that Mexican anti-monarchist partisans could fight the might of Europe and oust the monarchy has lessons to teach today about autocracy and resistance in the early twenty first century.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michelle P. Brown, "Bede and the Theory of Everything" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Bede and the Theory of Everything (Reaktion Books, 2023) investigates the life and world of Bede (c. 673–735), foremost scholar of the early Middle Ages and ‘the father of English history’. It examines his notable feats, including calculating the first tide-tables; playing a role in the creation of the Ceolfrith Bibles and the Lindisfarne Gospels; writing the earliest extant Old English poetry and the earliest translation of part of the Bible into English; and composing his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People, with its single dating system. Despite never leaving Northumbria, Bede also wrote a guide to the Holy Land. Michelle P. Brown, an authority on the period, describes new discoveries regarding Bede’s handwriting, his research programme and his previously lost Old English translation of St John’s Gospel, dictated on his deathbed.

Michelle P. Brown is Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and was formerly Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. Her books include Bede and the Theory of Everything (Reaktion, 2023).

YouTube Channel here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Konrad H. Jarausch, "Embattled Europe: A Progressive Alternative" (Princeton UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A bracing corrective to predictions of the European Union’s decline, by a leading historian of modern Europe Is the European Union in decline? Recent history, from the debt and migration crises to Brexit, has led many observers to argue that the EU’s best days are behind it. Over the past decade, right-wing populists have come to power in Poland, Hungary, and beyond—many of them winning elections using strident anti-EU rhetoric. At the same time, Russia poses a continuing military threat, and the rise of Asia has challenged the EU's economic power. But in Embattled Europe: A Progressive Alternative (Princeton UP, 2021), renowned European historian Konrad Jarausch counters the prevailing pessimistic narrative of European obsolescence with a rousing yet realistic defense of the continent—one grounded in a fresh account of its post–1989 history and an intimate understanding of its twentieth-century horrors. An engaging narrative and probing analysis, Embattled Europe tells the story of how the EU emerged as a model of democratic governance and balanced economic growth, adapting to changing times while retaining its value system. The book describes the EU’s admirable approach to the environment, social welfare, immigration, and global competitiveness. And it presents underappreciated European success stories—including Denmark’s transition to a green economy, Sweden’s restructuring of its welfare state, and Poland’s economic miracle. Embattled Europe makes a powerful case that Europe—with its peaceful foreign policy, social welfare solidarity, and environmental protection—offers the best progressive alternative to the military adventurism and rampant inequality of plutocratic capitalism and right-wing authoritarianism.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mariya Grinberg, "Trade in War: Economic Cooperation Across Enemy Lines" (Cornell UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Trade between belligerents during wartime should not occur. After all, exchanged goods might help enemies secure the upper hand on the battlefield. Yet as history shows, states rarely choose either war or trade. In fact, they frequently engage in both at the same time.

To explain why states trade with their enemies, in Trade in War: Economic Cooperation across Enemy Lines (Cornell UP, 2025) Dr. Mariya Grinberg examines the wartime commercial policies of major powers during the Crimean War, the two World Wars, and several post-1989 wars. She shows that in the face of two competing imperatives—preventing an enemy from increasing its military capabilities, and maintaining its own long-term security through economic exchange—states at war tailor wartime commercial policies around a product's characteristics and war expectations. If a product's conversion time into military capabilities exceeds the war's expected length, then trade in the product can occur, since the product will not have time to affect battlefield outcomes. If a state cannot afford to jeopardize the revenue provided by the traded product, trade in it can also occur.

Dr. Grinberg's findings reveal that economic cooperation can thrive even in the most hostile of times—and that interstate conflict might not be as easily deterred by high levels of economic interdependence as is commonly believed. Trade in War compels us to recognize that economic ties between states may be insufficient to stave off war.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Barry Strauss, "Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Barry Strauss recounts the history and events of three major uprisings: the Great Revolt of 66–70 CE, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, culminating in the Siege of Masada, where defenders chose mass suicide over surrender; the Diaspora Revolt, ignited by heavy taxes across the Empire; and the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Strauss has a way with telling stories that makes his subjects come alive. One walks away from his book not just knowing what happened, but with an appreciation for the different voices in the room, those supporting rebellion, those siding with Rome, the local leaders at the time, and the Roman governors and emperors who suppress these rebellions. We meet pivotal figures such as Simon Bar Kokhba but also some of those lesser-known women of the era like Berenice, a Jewish princess who played a major role in the politics of the Great Revolt and was improbably the love of Titus—Rome’s future emperor and the man who destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple. Today, echoes of those battles resonate as the Jewish nation faces new challenges and conflicts. Jews vs. Rome offers a captivating narrative that connects the past with the present, appealing to anyone interested in Rome, Jewish history, or the compelling true tales of resilience and resistance.

Barry Strauss is a leading historian of antiquity and the author of numerous books. He is a former Chair of Cornell's Department of History as well as a former Director of Cornell’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, where he studied modern engagements from Bosnia to Iraq and from Afghanistan to Europe. He is also Corliss Page Dean Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. His most recent book is Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JSP).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II and recasts the war as a brutal conflict for survival and hegemony between declining and ascendant imperial powers.

Scorched Earth dismantles the myth of World War II as a “good war.” Instead, Chamberlin depicts the conflict as a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers’ dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. And World War II did not deliver lasting peace: instead, the Soviet Union and United States emerged as hypermilitarized superpowers that would create arsenals of nuclear weapons, resulting in a decades-long Cold War standoff and subsequent violence across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth offers a revisionist history of World War II, revealing it was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its execution, and imperial in its outcomes.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (Penn State University Press, 2021) a provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic.

Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mark Braude, "The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile" (Penguin Press, 2018)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

I must’ve been a kid when I first heard the palindrome “Able I was ere I saw Elba”. Napoleon didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. “Elba” meant even less. Decades later, I had learned a little more about Napoleon and his time there, but not that all that much it turns out. And then came Mark Braude’s The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile (Penguin Press, 2018)…

This unexpected and absorbing book delves into the story of Napoleon’s exile on the island of Elba following his abdication in 1814. After his escape and return to France for the “100 Days,” Napoleon was, of course, finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. The Invisible Emperor explores a period in between the “bigger-ticket” events with which readers may be more familiar, a time and space in which Napoleon at once out of sight and more in contact with everyday people than perhaps at any other point in his career.

Written in multiple short chapters comprising four parts that follow the seasons of Bonaparte’s ten-month stay on Elba, The Invisible Emperor reconsiders the Napoleonic legend from the point of view of a moment of relative quiet in a modest setting. Carefully researched and a pleasure to read, it challenges aspects of the towering historical figure’s mythology. The space, timeline, and scale of this history may be small, but this is a Napoleon we don’t typically hear about. Presented in a narrative rich with curious details and a surprising intimacy, The Invisible Emperor manages to humanize an epic history and life about which so much has been written over the past two centuries.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David de Boer, "The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

David de Boer returns to the podcast to talk to Jana Byars about his first book, The Early Modern Dutch Press in the Age of Religious Persecution (Oxford UP, 2023). This book is available open source here. For victims of persecution around the world, attracting international media attention for their plight is often a matter of life and death. This study takes us back to the news revolution of seventeenth-century Europe, when people first discovered in the press a powerful new weapon to combat religiously inspired maltreatments, executions, and massacres. To affect and mobilize foreign audiences, confessional minorities and their advocates faced an acute dilemma, one that we still grapple with today: how to make people care about distant suffering? David de Boer argues that by answering this question, they laid the foundations of a humanitarian culture in Europe. As consuming news became an everyday practice for many Europeans, the Dutch Republic emerged as an international hub of printed protest against religious violence. De Boer traces how a diverse group of people, including Waldensians refugees, Huguenot ministers, Savoyard office holders, and many others, all sought access to the Dutch printing presses in their efforts to raise transnational solidarity for their cause. By generating public outrage, calling out rulers, and pressuring others to intervene, producers of printed opinion could have a profound impact on international relations. But crying out against persecution also meant navigating a fraught and dangerous political landscape, marked by confessional tension, volatile alliances, and incessant warfare. Opinion makers had to think carefully about the audiences they hoped to reach through pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers. But they also had to reckon with the risk of reaching less sympathetic readers outside their target groups. By examining early modern publicity strategies, de Boer deepens our understanding of how people tried to shake off the spectre of religious violence that had haunted them for generations, and create more tolerant societies, governed by the rule of law, reason, and a sense of common humanity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Enrique Dussel, "The Theological Metaphors of Marx" (Duke UP, 2024)–A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Theological Metaphors of Marx (Duke UP, 2024) by Enrique Dussel – A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta

In The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Enrique Dussel provides a groundbreaking combination of Marxology, theology, and ethical theory. Dussel shows that Marx unveils the theology of capitalism in his critique of commodity fetishization. Capitalism constitutes an idolatry of the commodity that undergirds the capitalist expropriation of labor. Dussel examines Marx’s early writings on religion and fetishism and proceeds through what Dussel refers to as the four major drafts of Capital, ultimately situating Marx’s philosophical, economic, ethical, and historical insights in relation to the theological problems of his time. Dussel notes a shift in Marx’s underlying theological schema from a political critique of the state to an economic critique of the commodity fetish as the Devil, or anti-God, of modernity. Marx’s thought, impact, and influence cannot be fully understood without Dussel’s historic reinterpretation of the theological origins and implications of Marx’s critiques of political economy and politics.

Enrique Dussel (1934–2023) was Emeritus Professor, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, and the author of many books, including Twenty Theses on Politics and Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, both also published by Duke University Press.
Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is coauthor of Human Rights, Hegemony, and Utopia in Latin America.
Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy and Latina/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

YouTube Channel here

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ned Richardson-Little, "The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The German Democratic Republic has come to stand as a symbol of communist tyranny, a source of Cold War nostalgia and socialist kitsch, and a failed alternative to the worst excesses of 21st century capitalism.

In this book, Ned Richardson-Little delves into the central contradictions of the GDR state: This book illustrates the fault lines of GDR society, the worldviews and experiences of not only those who ruled the GDR, but also those who rebelled against the strictures of state socialism, and those in between who sought a normal life under dictatorship.

The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a succinct and comprehensive history of East Germany that traces its story from the country's origins as the Soviet Zone of Occupation after World War II through key events such as the 1953 Uprising, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Helsinki Accords, and the collapse of state socialism in 1989. Some of the themes explored include the memory of Nazism and national identity, everyday life under dictatorship, including consumerism, sexuality, and racism, the global politics of the GDR, the diversity of dissenting voices, and the competing visions for East Germany's democratic future.

Guest: Ned Richardson-Little (he/him) is a Research Fellow in Department V: Globalizations in a Divided World at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF), in Germany. He is a historian of modern Germany, with a focus on the GDR, socialism, far-right extremism, and the history of international law and international crime. He is the author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (2020), and co-editor of Socialism and International Law (2024).

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Garrett M. Graff, "When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied northern France is one of the most consequential days of the 20th century. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, historian and author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate, brings them all together in a one-of-a-kind, bestselling oral history that explores this seminal event in vivid, heart-pounding detail.
The story begins in the opening months of the 1940s, as the Germany army tightens its grip across Europe, seizing control of entire nations. The United States, who has resolved to remain neutral, is forced to enter the conflict after an unexpected attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. For the second time in fifty years, the world is at war, with the stakes higher than they’ve ever been before. Then in 1943, Allied leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet in Casablanca to discuss a new plan for victory: a coordinated invasion of occupied France, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Failure is not an option. Over the next eighteen months, the large-scale action is organized, mobilizing soldiers across Europe by land, sea, and sky. And when the day comes, it is unlike anything the world has ever seen.
These moments and more are seen in real time. A visceral, page-turning drama told through the eyes of those who experienced them—from soldiers, nurses, pilots, children, neighbors, sailors, politicians, volunteers, photographers, reporters and so many more, When the Sea Came Alive “is the sort of book that is smart, inspiring, and powerful—and adds so much to our knowledge of what that day was like and its historic importance forever” (Chris Bohjalian)—an unforgettable, fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Federico Marcon, "Fascism: The History of a Word" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the term “fascist” and when and whether it is appropriate to use it. The landmark study Fascism: The History of a Word (The University of Chicago Press, 2025) takes this debate further by tackling its most fundamental questions: How did the terms “fascism” and “fascist” come to be in the first place? How and in what circumstances have they been used? How can they be understood today? And what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using “fascism” to make sense of interwar authoritarianism as well as contemporary politics?
Exploring the writings and deeds of political leaders, activists, artists, authors, and philosophers, Federico Marcon traces the history of the term’s use (and usefulness) in relation to Mussolini’s political regime, antifascist resistance, and the quest of postwar historians to develop a definition of a “fascist minimum.” This investigation of the semiotics of “fascism” also aims to inquire about people’s voluntary renunciation of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 9 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union.

On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But French diplomats had other motives, too. From Africa to Southeast Asia, France’s empire was unraveling. France insisted that Algeria—the crown jewel of the empire and home to a nationalist movement then pleading its case to the United Nations—be included in the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. The French hoped that Algeria’s involvement in the EEC would quell colonial unrest and confirm international agreement that Algeria was indeed French.

French authorities harnessed Algeria’s legal status as an official département within the empire to claim that European trade regulations and labor rights should traverse the Mediterranean. Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany conceded in order to move forward with the treaty, and Algeria entered a rights regime that allowed free movement of labor and guaranteed security for the families of migrant workers. Even after independence in 1962, Algeria remained part of the community, although its ongoing inclusion was a matter of debate. Still, Algeria’s membership continued until 1976, when a formal treaty removed it from the European community.

In this book, Dr. Brown combats understandings of Europe’s “natural” borders by emphasizing the extracontinental contours of the early union. The unification vision was never spatially limited, suggesting that contemporary arguments for geographic boundaries excluding Turkey and areas of Eastern Europe from the European Union must be seen as ahistorical.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michael Geheran, "Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler" (Cornell UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 8 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness intersect to shape attitudes and behaviors of Jewish veterans?

Michael Geheran's wonderful new book Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Cornell UP, 2020) tries to understand how Jewish participation in World War I shaped their lives in 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. He uses a seemingly never-ending supply of diaries, letters, journals and other sources to paint a compelling picture of the ways in which German Jews understood their identities and influenced their interactions with Germans and with the restrictions imposed by the Nazi Government. It raises new questions about how to periodize the Holocaust and how to think about the role of Germans--both civilian and military--in the persecution and elimination of German Jews.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Giles Tremlett, "The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 4 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, tens of thousands of young men and women from across the world flocked there to fight against the Nationalist uprising. Though their history has been told before, Giles Tremlett’s The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2021) draws upon previously unavailable materials to tell the stories of the war they fought. Though these people came from a variety of backgrounds and held a range of different left-wing political views, what united them was their opposition to fascism. Despite their disorganization and lack of training, they made an impact on the battlefield soon after their deployment, and became a highly visible presence in the war against Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces. While the Spanish Republic they fought for was ultimately defeated, Tremlett explains how many of those who served in the Brigades continued their struggle against fascism during the Second World War, reflecting the lasting legacy of their service for their cause.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Robert Morstein-Marx, "Julius Caesar and the Roman People" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 4 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic's traditions and its greatest heroes of the past. Catastrophe befell Rome not because Caesar (or anyone else) turned against the Republic, its norms, and institutions, but because Caesar's extraordinary success mobilized a determined opposition that ultimately preferred to precipitate civil war rather than accept its political defeat. Based on painstaking re-analysis of the ancient sources in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the participatory role of the People in the republican political system, a strong emphasis on agents' choices rather than structural causation, and profound skepticism toward the facile determinism that often substitutes for historical explanation, Julius Caesar and the Roman People (Cambridge University Press, 2021) offers a radical reinterpretation of a figure of profound historical importance who stands at the turning point of Roman history from Republic to Empire.

Robert Morstein-Marx is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Margaret C. Jacob, "The Secular Enlightenment" (Princeton UP, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 4 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives. It’s a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers.

Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and some began to spend their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions and their failures as the result of blind economic forces.

A wonderful work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.

Margaret Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her many books include The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans and The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Julia Sneeringer, "A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69" (Bloomsbury, 2018)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 3 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Beatles’ sojourn in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg during the early 1960s is part of music legend. As Julia Sneeringer reveals in A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69 (Bloomsbury, 2018), though, this was just the most famous episode in the neighborhood’s momentous engagement with rock ‘n’ roll during that period, one of importance not just to music history but to the history of modern Germany. Located as it was outside the walls of the medieval city, St. Pauli was known for centuries as the entertainment quarter of Hamburg. The neighborhood had only recently recovered from the hardships of the postwar era when German club owners began booking English bands to play the new style of music that had just been introduced in Europe. The performances quickly proved a hit among teenage Germans, who flocked to out-of-the-way venues to watch the acts perform. As Sneeringer details, the encounters changed everyone involved, giving the musicians the chance to hone their skills and develop their style while through their participation the young men and women in the audience pushed against the conservative social boundaries imposed on them by their families and their society.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Y. Kokosalakis and F. J. Leira-Castiñeira, "Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 2 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars explores the complex interplay between violence and propaganda during the continent's major civil conflicts in the first half of the 20th century. The book, edited by Yiannis Kokosalakis and Francisco J. Leira Castiñeira, uses a multidisciplinary approach to analyze how propaganda both reflected and fueled violence in conflicts like those in Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Greece. In essence, the book argues that violence during European civil wars was not solely a result of ideological clashes but was also deeply intertwined with and shaped by propaganda, which manipulated perceptions and fueled brutality.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hannah Charnock, "Teenage intimacies: Young Women, Sex and Social Life in England, 1950-80" (Manchester UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 2 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Teenage Intimacies offers a new account of the ‘sexual revolution’ in mid-twentieth century England. Rather than focusing on ‘Swinging London’, the book reveals the transformations in social life that took place in school playgrounds, local cinemas, and suburban bedrooms. Based on over 300 personal testimonies, Teenage Intimacies traces the everyday experiences of teenage girls, illuminating how romance, sex and intimacy shaped their young lives. The book shows how sex became embedded in ideas about ‘growing up’ and explores how heterosexuality influenced young women’s social lives and vice versa. It offers new explanations of why sexual mores shifted in this period, revealing the pivotal role that young women played in changing sexual values, cultures and practices in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sasha D. Pack, "The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border" (Stanford UP, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 1 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated.

Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere.

In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco.

Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Murad Idris, "War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought" (Oxford UP, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and analyzed in western and Islamic political thought. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the concept of peace, and the way it is often insinuated with other words and concepts, over more than 2000 years of political thought. Idris begins with Plato’s Laws as one of the early sources to consider the tension that seems to be constant in terms of the pursuit of violence in order to attain peace.

War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice). We are urged to think about peace and the valence that is given to the word and the ideal—since the moral and the political understandings of peace are often entangled and part of what Idris is doing in his careful and thoughtful research is to tease out the political concept, apart from the often religious and moral ideal. This rich and complex analysis integrates a broad group of theorists—Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb)—all of whom were examining the role of peace within politics and political thought. And Idris structures these thinkers into chronological and theoretical groupings, to explore the ways in which they were responding to each other, across time, but also to understand how different thinkers were connecting peace to other concepts. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought may leave the reader anxious but also enlightened in considering this idea and its perplexing place within the history of political thought.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremy DeWaal, "Geographies of Renewal: Heimat and Democracy in West Germany, 1945-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The term “Heimat,” referring to a local sense of home and belonging, has been the subject of much scholarly and popular debate following the fall of the Third Reich. Countering the persistent myth that Heimat was a taboo and unusable term immediately after 1945, Geographies of Renewal uncovers overlooked efforts in the aftermath of the Second World War to conceive of Heimat in more democratic, inclusive, and pro-European modes. It revises persistent misconceptions of Heimat as either tainted or as a largely reactionary idea, revealing some surprisingly early identifications between home and democracy. Jeremy DeWaal further traces the history of efforts to eliminate the concept, which first emerged during the Cold War crisis of the early 1960s, and reassesses why so many on the political left sought to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s. This revisionist history intervenes in larger contemporary debates, asking compelling questions surrounding the role of the local in democracy, the value of community, and the politics of place attachments.

Guest: Jeremy DeWaal (he/him), is Lecturer in European History at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on German cultural history, spatial history, memory, and the history of emotions. DeWaal’s work on Heimat and democracy has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Central European History Society, and the Berlin Programme at the Free University of Berlin.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marion Bower, "The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality" (Routledge, 2018)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earliest and most loyal supporter.

In her new book The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality (Routledge, 2018), Marion Bower puts Joan Riviere herself, the woman and the psychoanalyst, in the spotlight. She shows how Riviere made use of the latest psychoanalytic ideas in a highly creative and original way, expressing herself with clarity and emotional depth in seminal works about the inner life of female sexuality and treatment impasses. She was able to draw from a lifetime of challenging and fruitful experiences. After a childhood rife with emotional neglect, she stepped into the rich ferment of the dying Victorian era and came in touch with major progressive forces of the time like the suffragettes and the Society for Psychical Research. As a dressmaker’s apprentice, she was among the first wave of women entering the work force. When the shifting soil of her childhood proved unstable, she entered analysis with Ernest Jones and, after becoming an analyst, with Freud himself. This personal connection proved fortuitous to the newly formed British Psychoanalytic Society, as it provided a solid anchor against the dividing drift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.

Bower paints an intimate portrait of a woman with a stern and sometimes vitriolic public persona and a shy and fragile personality that was saved by her involvement in psychoanalysis. In her best moments she was able to bridge that gap in her psychoanalytic writing, revealing herself through her theoretical musings.

Marion Bower has trained as a teacher, social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked for many years in the child mental health services, including the Tavistock Clinic, and has edited and co-edited four books on various applications of psychoanalysis. She is currently co-editing a book on sexual exploitation.

Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Victoria de Grazia, "The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy" (Harvard UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In her new book, The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy (Belknap Press), Dr. Victoria de Grazia takes the story of Attilio Teruzzi and explores the social history of fascism.

When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a rising young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, after being promoted to commander of the Black Shirts, Teruzzi renounced his wife.

In fascist Italy, a Catholic country with no divorce law, he could only dissolve the marriage by filing for an annulment through the medieval procedures of the Church Court. The proceedings took an ominous turn when Mussolini joined Hitler: Lilliana Teruzzi was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws.

The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous seduction and inconvenient marriage―brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records―to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, loyal, lecherous, and impetuous Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer, an exemplar of fascism’s New Man.

Why did he abruptly discard the woman he had so eagerly courted? And why, when the time came to find another partner, did he choose another Jewish woman as his would-be wife? In Victoria de Grazia’s engrossing account, we see him vacillating between the will of his Duce and the dictates of his heart.

De Grazia’s landmark history captures the seductive appeal of fascism and shows us how, in his moral pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.

Victoria de Grazia is the Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christy Pichichero, "The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon" (Cornell UP, 2018)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Covering the pivotal period from the mid-seventeenth century through the era of the French Revolution, Christy Pichichero's The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell University Press, 2018; paperback ed. 2020) is a fascinating interdisciplinary study that pushes us to rethink our ideas about both the military and the Enlightenment in and beyond a France that was a global, as well as a continental European imperial power. As Pichichero shows, the (long) eighteenth century holds the key to our understanding historical concepts and transformations that we tend to associate with later developments in military thought and practice, from conventions around "good" and "humane" conflict to ideas about community and civility between soldiers fighting together and on opposing sides.

The book's five chapters explore a broad range of compelling events and sources, from the work of well known Enlightenment thinkers and authors such as Voltaire and Choderlos de Laclos, to military manuals and debates regarding how wars would and should be waged, how soldiers should be trained to think and act in battle. Now available in a new paperback edition, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in the longue durée of military culture and warfare, as well as those with an interest in all that the Enlightenment did and could mean.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire.She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christopher Ocker, "Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther stress his personality, his ideas, and his ambitions as a church reformer. In Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge UP, 2018), Christopher Ocker brings a new perspective to this topic, arguing that the different ways people thought about Luther mattered far more than who he really was. Providing an accessible, highly contextual, and non-partisan introduction, Ocker says that religious conflict itself served as the engine of religious change. He shows that the Luther affair had a complex political anatomy which extended far beyond the borders of Germany, making the debate an international one from the very start. His study links the Reformation to pluralism within western religion and to the coexistence of religions and secularism in today's world.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London, where he took to the radio to address his compatriots back home. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered history.

For the rest of the war, de Gaulle insisted he and his Free French movement were the true embodiment of France. Through sheer force of his personality and the grandeur of his vision of France, he inspired French men and women to risk their lives to resist the Nazi occupation. Usually proud and aloof, but almost always confident in his own leadership, he quarreled violently with Churchill, Roosevelt and many of his own countrymen. Yet they knew they would need his help to rebuild a shattered France. Thanks to de Gaulle, France was recognized as one of the victorious Allies when Germany was finally defeated. Then, as President of the Fifth Republic, he brought France back from the brink of a civil war over the war in Algeria. And, made the difficult decision to end the self-same war. Thereafter he challenged American hegemony, took France out of NATO, and twice vetoed British entry into the European Community in his pursuit of what he called “a certain idea of France.”

Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary College, University of London, past winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the winner in 2018 of the Paris Book Award for his book on De Gaulle--De Gaulle (Harvard University Press, 2018)--has written a magnificent biography, the first major reconsideration in over twenty years. Drawing on the extensive resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archives, Jackson reveals the conservative roots of de Gaulle’s intellectual formation and upbringing, sheds new light on his relationship with Churchill, and shows how de Gaulle confronted riots at home and violent independence movements abroad from the Middle East to Vietnam. No previous biography has so vividly depicted this towering figure whose legacy remains evident in present-day France. In short Professor Jackson has written a superb book, which in every way possible is a glittering ornament in the biographical art.

Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, "Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe" (Indiana UP, 2018)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude.

Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Indiana UP, 2018) argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memorialization and a comparison of Soviet and Nazi mass crimes. While it has been over 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, the full extent of the ways violence was used against prisoners of war and civilians is only now coming to be fully understood. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe provides new insight into the scale of the violence suffered and brings fresh urgency to the need for a deeper understanding of this horrific moment in history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Meegan Kennedy, "Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Meegan Kennedy examines a revolutionary period in microscopical technology and practice. At first considered a mere toy, by 1900 the microscope rivaled the railway and telegraph as an emblem of modernity and enjoyed an astonishing diversity of applications. This technology could drive scientific debates on subjects like cell theory, vitalism, and bacteriology; guide workers in classrooms, laboratories, and businesses; and inspire a personal hobby or a mass entertainment. Victorian microscopy productively cuts across the ostensibly separate domains of science, religion, commerce, art, education, entertainment, and domestic life.
Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy reads nineteenth-century microscopy across scientific, literary, religious, and popular texts. It argues that Victorian microscopists saw their vision and cognition as fully embodied experiences, the images emerging through a material entanglement of bodies (observer, instrument, apparatus, object) in a dynamic, unstable system. These ideas echo the work of physiological psychologists, who proposed mind as a system of embodied, distributed, and dynamic processes shaped by automatic or unconscious reflex action, attention, mental training, and fatigue. Striving to regulate this complex system, microscopists circulated tropes of embodiment through the varied forms of nineteenth-century print culture. They adapted existing concepts (such as beauty, the sublime, natural theology, and fairylands), or coined new phrases (such as many-sided comprehension), to promote favored forms of embodiment and enculturate microscopy as a difficult but valuable pursuit. Writing Embodiment draws on important work in book history and periodical studies by emphasizing the circulation of these tropes in intermedial conversations across diverse print forms.
Victorians understood wonder and skepticism not as incommensurate approaches to scientific observation but rather as complementary forms of embodiment. Romantic tropes of wonder solicit affective flows from observer to wriggling animalcule and back; while skeptical, realist tropes offer to train the reader's eye, hand, body, and judgment and to formalize microscopical practice. Microscopical narratives may manipulate wonder and skepticism in productive tension or create virtual storyspaces that enlist the reader in virtual witnessing. These tropes shape every level of microscopical interest and proficiency. By analyzing their use and circulation, Writing Embodiment illuminates wider patterns of Victorian thought on embodiment, scientific practice, and community.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anastasios Karababas, "In the Footsteps of the Jews of Greece: From Ancient Times to the Present Day" (Vallentine Mitchell & Co, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

“To live, a people must always be able to know its past, to judge it, to accept it.”
— Simone Veil, French politician and Shoah survivor

When I sat down with historian Anastasios Karababas to discuss his new book, In the Footsteps of the Jews of Greece: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Paperback, published January 30, 2024), I was struck by the depth and complexity of the story he tells—a story that spans over 2,500 years and is still unfolding today.

Karababas in the book and the conversation guided me through the origins and evolution of Jewish life in Greece from ancient times to today. We discussed the four major Jewish groups whose histories are intertwined with the Greek landscape:

Romaniots, the ancient Greek Jews whose presence predates the Romans.
Ashkenazi Jews, who arrived between the 11th and 13th centuries, bringing their Central European traditions.
Sephardic Jews, who found refuge in Greece after their expulsion from Spain in the 15th century, especially revitalizing the community in Thessaloniki.
Italian Jews, who settled in the 16th century, further enriching the community’s diversity.

Thessaloniki, once known as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," stood out in our conversation as a beacon of Jewish life, with Jews making up 30–40% of the city’s population at its height.

Karababas’s account of the 20th century was both inspiring and heartbreaking. Before World War II, there were about 75,000 Jews in Greece. He shared the stories of Jews who served in the Greek army against Mussolini, a testament to their deep sense of belonging. But the Holocaust cast a long shadow, with 85% of the community deported and wiping out around 90% of the community leaving a profound void.

Today, as Karababas explained, the Jewish population in Greece numbers only about 5,000, spread across nine communities—a stark contrast to the more than thirty that once existed. Only Athens, Thessaloniki, and Larissa still have resident rabbis. These communities survive through private funding and the interest of Jewish heritage tourism, striving to keep their unique traditions alive.

Our discussion also touched on the complexities of Judeophobia in Greece. Karababas described Judeophobia as a blend of anti-semitism, anti-zionism, and anti-Judaism, with roots in the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church. He characterized current anti-semitism as “superficial,” with few violent incidents. Despite the rise in anti-zionist sentiment, he pointed out that Greece maintains strong governmental ties with Israel, reflecting the nuanced relationship between Greek society, its Jewish citizens, and the broader region.

Reading In the Footsteps of the Jews of Greece: From Ancient Times to the Present Day and speaking with Karababas reminded me how vital it is to know, judge, and accept our past as a means of ensuring a safer future. The story of Greek Jewry is one of migration, tragedy, and renewal—a testament to resilience and the enduring spirit of a people determined to remember and to live.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ian Stewart, "The Celts: A Modern History" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Before the Greeks and Romans, the Celts ruled the ancient world. They sacked Rome, invaded Greece, and conquered much of Europe, from Ireland to Turkey. Celts registered deeply on the classical imagination for a thousand years and were variously described by writers like Caesar and Livy as unruly barbarians, fearless warriors, and gracious hosts. But then, in the early Middle Ages, they vanished. In The Celts, Ian Stewart tells the story of their rediscovery during the Renaissance and their transformation over the next few centuries into one of the most popular European ancestral peoples.
The Celts shows how the idea of this ancient people was recovered by scholars, honed by intellectuals, politicians, and other thinkers of various stripes, and adopted by cultural revivalists and activists as they tried to build European nations and nationalisms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Long-forgotten, the Celts improbably came to be seen as the ancestors of most western Europeans—and as a pillar of modern national identity in Britain, Ireland, and France.
Based on new research conducted across Europe and in the United States, The Celts reveals when and how we came to call much of Europe “Celtic,” why this idea mattered in the past, and why it still matters today, as the tide of nationalism is once again on the rise.

Ian Stewart is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His work has focused particularly on ideas of language, nation, and race in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and Europe. He has also written at length on the late Scottish Enlightenment and is the co-editor of Adam Ferguson's Later Writings: New Letters and an Essay on the French Revolution (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

Book Recomendations:

Modern Ireland 1600-1972 by Roy Foster

British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 by Colin Kidd

The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress by Silvia Sebastiani

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Juliet Rix, "London's Statues of Women" (SafeHaven Books, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

No-one can fail to notice how many statues of Great Men there are around London: stern politicians, military generals, imperial adventurers . . . But what about women?

As shown by Juliet Rix in London's Statues of Women (SafeHaven Books, 2025), women are surprisingly well represented amongst London’s statues. Recent years have seen new statues of Virginia Woolf in Richmond, Mary Wollstonecraft in Stoke Newington, even boxer Nicola Adams in Brent.

But there are also groundbreaking statues commemorating the Black community, notably the two of Brixton resident Joy Battick on its railway station platforms. And you’ll find historical figures from Florence Nightingale to Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell – as well as Twiggy.

And how many ballet dancers are commemorated, and where? And which famous tennis player was the unlikely model for the young girl with dolphin by Tower Bridge? This is a book that really will make you see London in a new way.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

John McGahern, "The Dark: A Critical Edition" (Syracuse UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Bringing John McGahern's 1965 masterpiece back into print in the United States after years of inaccessibility, this new sixtieth-anniversary critical edition includes an introduction aimed at first-time readers, explanatory footnotes, McGahern's own glossary, and four scholarly essays aimed at guiding readers through the novel's famously controversial history. While the text was initially banned in Ireland for obscenity, this edition demonstrates that McGahern's novel of adolescence is not obscene, but revelatory, exposing the corruption underlying authority structures in mid-century Ireland--from the family to the church, to the government's willingness to ignore national and communal trauma. The Dark follows a promising young boy's struggles to break free from the economic and social forces trapping him in a lifestyle that is both familiar and suffocating. At the heart of the novel is the boy's complex and stormy relationship with his abusive, widowed father, who is left to raise a family with little outside aid. The Dark is a story of alarming brutality, surprising tenderness, and poetic lyricism; a reflection of Irish society that maintains historical significance as contemporary Ireland continues to build its national identity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Neil Gregor, "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A new history of how the musical worlds of German towns and cities were transformed during the Nazi era.

In the years after the Nazis came to power in January 1933 and through the war years all aspects of life in Germany changed. However, despite the social and political upheaval, gentile citizens were able to continue leisure activities such as attending concerts. In this book, historian Neil Gregor surveys the classical concert scene in Nazi Germany from the perspective of the audience, rather than institutions or performers. Gregor delves into the cultural lives of ordinary Germans under conditions of dictatorship. Did the ways in which Germans heard music in the period change? Did a Nazi way of listening emerge?

For audiences, Gregor shows, changes to the concert experience were small and often took place around the edges. This, combined with the preserved idea of the concert hall as a space of imagined civility and cultivation, led many concertgoers and music lovers to claim after the war that their field and their practice had been innocent--a place to retreat from the vicious violence and racism of the Nazi regime. Drawing on untapped archival sources, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany reveals that the true history was one of disruption but also of near effortless adaptation. Through countless small acts, the symphony concert was reframed within the languages of strident nationalism, racism, and militarism to ensure its place inside the cultural cosmos of National Socialist Germany.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rosemary Goring, "Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots" (Berlinn, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

From the moment Mary, Queen of Scots set foot on English soil in 1568 until her execution at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587, she was the prisoner of her cousin, Elizabeth I. Unlike Mary’s time on the Scottish throne, the dramatic events of these years – almost half her life – took place while she was a captive. But while trouble was perpetually simmering beyond her prison walls, within them Mary was constantly plotting. Only towards the end did she lose faith in returning to her homeland as rightful ruler.

Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots (Birlinn, 2025) by Rosemary Goring is the story of Mary’s tumultuous later years, told through the many atmospheric locations where she was confined. Drawing on the latest research, including a treasure trove of recently decoded letters, Exile sheds fascinating new light on her captivity and the charged political climate of the period. Reading like a 16th-century thriller, this account of treachery, deceit, hope and despair is a penetrating and enthralling psychological portrait of one of history’s endlessly fascinating queens.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Samuel Kline Cohn, "Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy" (Oxford UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Samuel K Cohn, Jr. joins Jana Byars to talk about Popular Protest and the Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford University Press, 2025). This work, now out in paper, is the first study to analyse popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. Drawing on over 100 contemporary chronicles and diaries, the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo's diplomatic dispatches, mercantile letters, and commentary, and 586 collective supplications scattered through archival sources from towns and villages in the Grand duchy of Milan, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. places these incidents and their patterns in comparative perspectives, first with the late medieval heyday of popular revolt and then with regions north of the Alps. Cohn finds new developments during the early modern period such as an increase in women rebels, mutinies of soldiers, and new tactics of revolts such as shop closures, peaceful demonstrations of strength, and use of religious processions for discussions of tactics and strategies for obtaining logistic advantage. At the same time, these protests show convergences with the medieval Italian past, with leaders coming almost exclusively from the ranks of nonelites, religious ideology playing a surprisingly minor role, and the majority of revolts centring overwhelming in towns and cities. Finally, this study demonstrates that democracies do not just die under the duress of military occupation and growing powers of autocratic regimes. Ideals of representation and equality not only persisted; they could emerge in new forms and with greater sophistication.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joseph Valente, "Irish Shame: A Literary Reckoning" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 04:00:00 +0000

The first edited collection dedicated to the historical specifics of Irish shame

Offers an anatomy of Irish shame as a cultural predicament
Combines theoretical reading with historical and institutional context
Includes essays by some of Ireland’s leading researchers on trauma and sexuality studies

Shame has haunted Ireland since the inception of Irishness itself. As such, it has come to seem an ineluctable modality of Irish life. In fact, the contours of Irish shame have evolved over time, shifting with alterations in their colonial predicament, and in their response, whether complicit or resistant, to economic, political, and cultural dispossession. Irish Shame offers an anatomy of that condition. In twelve essays, it traces the ethnic, religious, biopolitical, psychosocial and neurodiverse parameters of shame as a force in Irish life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Robert G. Morrison, "Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe" (Stanford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and the courts of Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II greatly benefitted from knowledge coming out of Europe, merchants of knowledge—multilingual and transregional Jewish scholars—became an important bridge among the powers.

With this book, Robert Morrison is the first to track the network of scholars who mediated exchanges in astronomy, astrology, Qabbalah, and philosophy. Their books, manuscripts, and acts of translation all held economic value, thus commercial and intellectual exchange commingled—knowledge became transactional as these merchants exchanged texts for more intellectual material and social capital. While parallels between medieval Islamic astronomy and the famous heliocentric arrangement posited by Copernicus are already known, Morrison reveals far deeper networks of intellectual exchange that extended well beyond theoretical astronomy and shows how religion, science, and philosophy, areas that will eventually develop into separate fields, were once interwoven. The Renaissance portrayed in Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe (Stanford UP, 2025) is not, from the perspective of the Ottoman Muslim contacts of the Jewish merchants of knowledge, hegemonic. It's a Renaissance permeated by diversity, the cultural and political implications of which the West is only now waking up to.

Robert G. Morrison is a professor at Bowdoin College. He is the author of The Light of the World: Astronomy in al-Andalus (2016).

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michael Green and Ineke Huysman eds., "Private Life and Privacy in the Early Modern Low Countries" (Brepols Publishers, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Michael Green joins Jana Byars to talk about his volume with co-editor Ineke Huysman, Private Life and Privacy in the Early Modern Low Countries (Brepols, 2023). This volume investigates the origins of one of the most important notions of the contemporary society: privacy. Based on case studies from the early modern Low Countries, privacy is tackled from various historical perspectives: social and cultural history, and the history of art and architecture.00The Dutch Republic is well-known for its financial success, which went hand in hand with the development of a distinguished bourgeois culture and religious toleration. The accumulation of wealth among the urban population led to changes in various spheres, from daily life to art. Privacy, as a concept, start to develop in this period. Indeed, new ideas about housing with the invention of corridors, separate rooms that could be locked, and the separation of the "common" and the "private" space, all illustrate the growing importance of privacy in this geographical area. In this volume, we trace perspectives on early modern privacy and private life based on primary sources in several domains: letters, diaries, and poems; genre painting in art; communal life as illustrated by the Jewish community; and finally, the homes of the Dutch elite.00The essays in this volume make a key contribution to the emergence of early modern privacy studies as a research field, and to the ongoing discussion of privacy in the Low Countries. Equally, these case studies can serve as models for the analysis of privacy in other European contexts

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 5 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.
In historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.
After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.

Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 5 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature.
Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?
Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life’s deepest wonderings.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Enrique Fernández and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, "Death and Gender in the Early Modern Period" (Brill, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 4 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Enrique Fernández and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, eds. Death and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2024). In premodern Europe, the gender identity of those waiting for Doomsday in their tombs could be reaffirmed, readjusted, or even neutralized. Testimonies of this renegotiation of gender at the encounter with death is detectable in wills, letters envisioning oneself as dead, literary narratives, provisions for burial and memorialization, the laws for the disposal of those executed for heinous crimes and the treatment of human remains as relics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elisabeth Åsbrink, "1947: Where Now Begins" (Other Press, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 1 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

An award-winning writer captures a year that defined the modern world, intertwining historical events around the globe with key moments from her personal history.
The year 1947 marks a turning point in the twentieth century. Peace with Germany becomes a tool to fortify the West against the threats of the Cold War. The CIA is created, Israel is about to be born, Simone de Beauvoir experiences the love of her life, an ill George Orwell is writing his last book, and Christian Dior creates the hyper-feminine New Look as women are forced out of jobs and back into the home.
In the midst of it all, a ten-year-old Hungarian-Jewish boy resides in a refugee camp for children of parents murdered by the Nazis. This year he has to make the decision of a lifetime, one that will determine his own fate and that of his daughter yet to be born, Elisabeth.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jonathan Teubner, "Charity After Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Teubner, Charity After Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West (Oxford UP, 2025)

Through a unique blend of the personal and historiographical, Charity after Augustine is an exploration of why the Augustinian tradition’s attempts to build solidarity or social cohesion in the societies of the Latin West have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice. The conceit at the heart of the book is that the concrete practices of love or charity—almsgiving, works of mercy, good works—can tell us much about how religious leaders attempted to bind and hold communities together while also, in fits and starts with some startling reversions, attempting to expand the community and incorporate others. The first part probes the ways Augustine’s understanding of love is put into practice and how this understanding informs a tradition of political action inspired by Christian concepts of love and enacted through practices of charity. In a second, more expansive part, the book turns to the ways in which the Benedictine tradition as illustrated by Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux receives this vision, invigorates it with new visions of care and leadership, and puts it into practice in radically different contexts from those of Augustine’s age. At the heart of Charity after Augustine is an attempt to find a non-idealized vision of love that can inform thick, meaningful relations within a community that are not diluted by the inclusion of others

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Jonathan D. Teubner is a Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. This book is something of a sequel to his first, Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition.

Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bernd Roeck, "The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Today I’m speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025). Bernd is professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and director of the German Centre for Venetian Studies in Venice. Translated by Patrick Baker, The World at First Light is a truly magisterial work. Much ink and paint has been spilled illuminating and interpreting the cultural flourishing known as Europe’s rebirth. The Renaissance was chiefly marked by a revival in classical literature and philosophy, artistic and scientific innovations embodied by polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, and William Shakespeare. In exploring this historical period, Bernd offers the most authoritative and up-to-date treatment of the Renaissance.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alice Hunt, "Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade, 1649–1660" (Faber and Faber, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Alice Hunt’s Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade 1649-1650 (Faber and Faber, 2024) takes a chronological look at the current events, personalities, political struggles and cultural highlights of Britain’s short-lived but intense experiment in republicanism. From the deeply controversial execution of Charles I in January 1649 to the similarly contentious restoration of his son in 1660, Professor Hunt explores a complex and unique decade in English, Scottish and Irish history, when the unexpected truly reigned.

Alice Hunt is Professor of Early Modern Literature and History at the University of Southampton, UK. She is currently co-investigator on a major AHRC research project, ‘The Visible Crown: Elizabeth II and the Caribbean, 1952-present’ (visiblecrown.com).

Host: Matt Fraser is a freelance writer and podcaster based in Berlin, Germany. He is currently working on a blogcast project aimed at empowering readers to discover and discuss great fiction creatively and confidently.

Email: illreadmillennial@gmail.com

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Violet Moller, "Inside the Stargazer's Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Europe" (OneWorld, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic.

But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory. Charms and potions could still be found nestled between glistening brass instruments and leather-bound tomes. The line between the natural and supernatural remained porous, yet to be defined.

From the icy Danish observatory of Tycho Brahe, to the smoky, sulphur-stained workshop of John Dee, in Inside the Stargazer’s Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe (OneWorld, 2024) Dr. Violet Moller tours the intellectual heart of early European science. Exploring its rich, multidisciplinary culture, Inside the Stargazer’s Palace reveals a dazzling forgotten world, where all knowledge, no matter how arcane, could be pursued in good faith.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Carolin Duttlinger, "Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture" (Oxford UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Carolin Duttlinger is Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford (UK) and Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, where she is currently leading a three-year UKRI-funded research project,Kafka's Transformative Communities. She has published widely on German literature from the eighteenth century to the present; on Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School; the history of psychology; and on photography and visual culture. Selected publications: Kafka and Photography (Oxford University Press, 2007); ed., with Ben Morgan and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012); The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge University Press, 2013); ed., Franz Kafka in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Attention and Distraction in German Literature, Thought, and Culture (Oxford University Press 2022). She is also the editor of the book series Visual Culture with Legenda.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elise Franklin "Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France" (University of Nebraska Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Elise Franklin whose first book, Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France, was published by the University of Nebraska Press (2024). Distintegrating Empire examines the processes of decolonization through the intersecting histories of the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria to France, and the French social workers who mediated between the state and their Algerian clients. Franklin argues for the importance of connecting these threads before, through and after formal decolonization, allowing us to see not only the colonial origins of French welfare but the ways in which the French welfare state always winnowed down who could access its benefits, making a “golden age” of welfare only out of the purposeful exclusion of Algerian workers and their families. In our conversation, we cover Franklin’s main arguments and how she came to this analysis through the winding path of archival research and intellectual development. Distintegrating Empire blends intimate social histories of Algerian families in the Nord, diplomatic and institutional histories of French and Algerian policy before and after 1962, and political and cultural histories of integration and citizenship as part of the ongoing conversation about who “deserved” welfare and under what conditions.

Elise Franklin is an assistant professor at the University of Louisville where she researches modern French history with a particular focus on gender, colonialism, and decolonization.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Julia Sneeringer, "West Germany: A Society in Motion, 1949-89" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 8 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Julia Sneeringer's book provides a concise overview of developments in the Federal Republic of Germany from the end of the Second World War and Germany's division, to the unification of East and West Germany in 1990. Within the framework of key political and economic moments, it illuminates how West Germans experienced social, economic, and cultural change across four decades.

Chronologically structured and supplemented with timelines, each chapter in the book presents the major themes, events and developments occurring during the period. A focused bibliography is also included to offer guidance on further reading. Among the notable topics covered are:

- The redefining of German identity after Nazism
- Democratization
- The explosion of consumer culture
- The protest movements of 1968
- Changing gender and sexual roles
- Immigration and multiculturalism
- Pop culture
- Environmentalism
- Terrorism
- The return of the right in politics

West Germany in Focus is a peerless introduction to West Germany for anyone looking to understand the complexities of German history since 1945.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Charles J Esdaile, "The Spanish Civil War: A Military History" (Routledge, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 8 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Spanish Civil War: A Military History takes a new, military approach to the conflict that tore Spain apart from 1936 to 1939.

In many histories, the war has been treated as a primarily political event with the military narrative subsumed into a much broader picture of the Spain of 1936–9 in which the chief themes are revolution and counter-revolution. While remaining conscious of the politics of the struggle, this book looks at the war as above all a military event, and as one in whose outbreak specifically military issues – particularly the split in the armed forces produced by the long struggle in Morocco (1909–27) – were fundamental. Across nine chapters that consider the war from beginning to endgame, Charles J. Esdaile revisits traditional themes from a new perspective, deconstructs many epics and puts received ideas to the test, as well as introducing readers to foreign-language historiography that has previously been largely inaccessible to an anglophone audience.

In taking this new approach, The Spanish Civil War: A Military History is essential reading for all students of twentieth-century Spain.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David de Boer and Geert H. Janssen eds.,"Refugee Politics in Early Modern Europe" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 7 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

David de Boer and Geert H. Janssen, eds. Refugee Politics in Early Modern Europe (Bloomsbury, 2024). This book is available as an open source publication here. Refugees have existed since ancient times but it was in the early modern era that they first became a distinct social and political category. This open access book maps the early modern 'invention of the refugee' and in the process uncovers their impact on local, regional, and transnational politics. With case studies ranging from Scandinavia to the Maghreb, Refugee Politics in Early Modern Europe traces how refugees transformed Europe. Topics explored include: the development of refugees as a political group in early modern societies; the role of displaced minorities in forging humanitarian networks; and the impact of refugees on migration management and imperialism. Most notably, this collection of essays moves beyond discussions of expulsion and flight to shine a spotlight on how states responded critically and constitutionally to refugees – as a means of galvanizing social groups, reinforcing identities, promoting activities, and expanding bureaucratic reach. The result is a sophisticated comparative study of migration, identity, power and politics which will be vital reading to all scholars of early modern Europe. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stephan Kieninger, "Dynamic Détente: The United States and Europe, 1964-1975" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 7 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

This book examines the dynamic evolution of Western détente policies which sought to transform Europe and overcome its Cold War division through more communication and engagement. Kieninger challenges the traditional Cold War narrative that détente prolonged the division of Europe and precipitated America’s decline in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Rather, he argues that policymakers in the U.S. Department of State and in Western Europe envisaged the stability enabled by détente as a precondition for change, as Communist regimes saw a sense of security as a prerequisite for opening up their societies to Western influence over time. Kieninger identifies the Helsinki Accords, Lyndon Johnson’s bridge building, and Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik as efforts aimed at constructive changes in Eastern Europe through a multiplication of contacts, communication, and cooperation on all societal levels. This study also illuminates the longevity of America’s policy of peaceful change against the background of the nuclear stalemate and the military status quo.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Questions: A Discussion with Leslie Butler and Holly Case

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 6 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

BOOKS UNDER DISCUSSION:

Leslie Butler, Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Holly Case, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond by Holly Case (Princeton University Press, 2018)

Civilizations have faced challenges and debated how to manage them probably as long as civilization has existed. In our era we talk about these challenges as issues, or crises when perceived as more urgent. In the nineteenth century, what we now call issues or problems tended to be spoken of as questions. In this sprawling conversation, ranging from nineteenth-century “trolls” to the scalability of democracy in a various media ecosystems, Leslie Butler and Holly Case talk not only about the 19th-century questions that have captivated them as scholars, but also how, where, by whom, and to what ends these questions were discussed. When did posing questions serve to bring rationality and even-handedness to debates and when was it a rhetorical strategy intended to steer towards a particular end? Butler’s analysis of the “Woman Question” in America’s pursuit of “consistent democracy” distinguished between public opinion and published opinion while Case implicates the internationalization of the public sphere in the emergence of an “Age of Questions.” Have a listen as these erudite scholars contemplate the ways historians might navigate between the Scylla of cynicism and Charybdis of overly earnest naiveté in analyzing the past as well as in our current moment.

Leslie Butler is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. She is an American intellectual and cultural historian, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century.

Holly Case is a historian of modern Europe at Brown University in Providence, RI. Her work focuses on the relationship between foreign policy, social policy, science, and literature in the European state system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sabrin Hasbun, "Crossing: A Love Story Between Italy and Palestine" (Footnote Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 6 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A beautiful and compelling family memoir retracing the love story between Sabrin Hasbun’s Palestinian father and Italian mother, and the life of her half-Italian, half-Palestinian family from the 1960s to 2020. After the loss of her mother, Sabrin tries to renegotiate her mixed identity and understand her mother’s choices which led her from an oppressive childhood in a village in Tuscany to finding love and community activism in Palestine.

This is a story about overcoming grief and what it means to lose not only loved ones, but also a place in the world and a sense of belonging.

Sabrin Hasbun was born in Palestine, spent her childhood in Palestine and Italy, and now lives in the UK. She holds a PHD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and lectures in Creative Writing at Cardiff Met University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elisabeth Åsbrink "And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War" (Other Press, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 4 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Notable Translated Book of the Year by World Literature Today

Winner of the August Prize, the story of the complicated long-distance relationship between a Jewish child and his forlorn Viennese parents after he was sent to Sweden in 1939, and the unexpected friendship the boy developed with the future founder of IKEA, a Nazi activist.

And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War⁠ (Other Press, 2020). Otto Ullmann, a Jewish boy, was sent from Austria to Sweden right before the outbreak of World War II. Despite the huge Swedish resistance to Jewish refugees, thirteen-year-old Otto was granted permission to enter the country—all in accordance with the Swedish archbishop’s secret plan to save Jews on condition that they convert to Christianity. Otto found work at the Kamprad family’s farm in the province of Småland and there became close friends with Ingvar Kamprad, who would grow up to be the founder of IKEA. At the same time, however, Ingvar was actively engaged in Nazi organizations and a great supporter of the fascist Per Engdahl. Meanwhile, Otto’s parents remained trapped in Vienna, and the last letters he received were sent from Theresienstadt.
With thorough research, including personal files initiated by the predecessor to today’s Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) and more than 500 letters, Elisabeth Åsbrink illustrates how Swedish society was infused with anti-Semitism, and how families are shattered by war and asylum politics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Roger Chickering, "The German Empire, 1871–1918" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 4 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in Imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unification to the close of the First World War. Throughout this time, national unity remained an acute issue. It appeared to be resolved momentarily in the summer of 1914, only to dissolve in the war that followed. This volume examines the impact of rapid industrialization and urban growth on Catholics and Protestants, farmers and city dwellers, industrial workers and the middle classes. Focusing on its religious, regional, and ethnic reverberations, Chickering also examines the social, cultural, and political dimensions of domestic conflict. Providing multiple lenses with which to view the German Empire, Chickering's survey examines local and domestic experiences as well as global ramifications. The German Empire, 1871-1918 provides the most comprehensive survey of this restless era available in the English language.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Simon Stjernholm, "Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity" (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 3 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Simon Stjernholm's new book Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity (Bloomsbury Press, 2025) considers specific case studies of embodiment and oratory productions by Muslims in Denmark, Sweden, and Cyprus. In the chapter on approaching God, we learn how rituals such as du‘a (intercessory prayers) or dhikr (remembrance of God) informs sensorial experiences of the divine, particularly intimate ones, while the discussion on meditating on Muhammad considers the bodily aspects of Prophet Muhammad, such as his saliva, urine, and sweat that influence mawlid literatures and ritual performance of them within Sufi communities like the Naqshbandi-Haqqanis. Though rituals emerging from embodied understandings of holy figures are not without some tension, as we learn throughout the book but especially during the discussion on graves. Here the interred bodies of Sufi saints are caught up in debates around the permissibility of shrine visitation, a topic that comes up amongst lectures given by Swedish Muslim leaders. Overall, then, through analysis of Danish and Swedish podcast materials, ritual practices, such as devotion to the Prophet Muhammad and Sufi saints, we understand more about the sonic and pious dimensions of Islam and the Muslim authorial voices and listening that shapes them. This book will be of interest to those who work on sound studies, material culture, Sufism and Islam in Europe.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Keir Giles, "Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent" (Hurst & Co., 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 28 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Who will defend Europe? The answer should be obvious: Europe should be able to defend itself. Yet, for decades, most of the continent enjoyed a defence holiday, outsourcing protection to the United States while banking an increasingly illusory ‘peace dividend’. Now, after three decades of reducing armed forces and drawing down defence industries, Europe finds itself close to unprotected—while Russia is intent on continuing its war of expansion, and the US is distracted and divided. In Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent (Hurst & Co., 2024), Keir Giles lays out the stark choices facing leaders and societies as they confront the return of war in Europe. He explains how the West’s unwillingness to confront Russia has nurtured the threat, and that Putin’s ambition puts the whole continent at risk. He assesses the role and deficiencies of NATO as a guarantor of hard security, and whether the EU or coalitions of the willing can fill the gap. Above all, Giles emphasises the need for new leadership in defence of the free world after the US has stepped aside— and warns that the UK’s brief moment of setting the pace for Europe has already been squandered.

Keir Giles has advised governments worldwide on the Russian threat. A senior fellow with Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme, and Director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, he is a regular commentator for the BBC and international media. His prescient books include What Deters Russia and Moscow Rules.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard D. Oram, "A Land Won from Waste: Scotland AD 400-1400" (Birlinn, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with land, waters, forests and wildlife.

A Land Won From Waste: Scotland AD 400–1400 (John Donald/Birlinn, 2025) by Professor Richard Oram takes the reader from the climatic highs of the Late Iron Age to the depths of the war-torn and plague-ravaged fourteenth century. Departing from traditional frameworks that divide Scotland’s history into periods based on kings’ reigns or major political events, discussion instead follows the major shifts in climate that divide these fourteen centuries into epochs, each with its own distinct characteristics. Starting amidst the fields and forests shaped across the eight millennia of Scotland’s prehistory, where we encounter the imprint of past generations of hunters and gatherers, farmers and fishermen, as well as the legacies of climate impacts and pathogens, the book explores the depths of the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the long climb back to the ‘Golden Age’ of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Medieval Climate Anomaly, to end with the slide through crop-failure, famine, war and disease of what is reputed to be the ‘worst century in human history’.

Also listen to Dr. Oram’s previous New Books Network interview on the “sequel” to this book, covering the period 1400-1850: Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Camilla Annerfeldt, "Clothing and Identity in Early Modern Rome" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Camilla Annerfeldt joins to discuss Clothing and Identity in Early Modern Rome (Bloomsbury, 2025).

This is the first book-length exploration of the clothes worn in early modern Rome and provides novel insights into the city of Rome during one of its most fascinating periods. It also challenges the notion – well-established in dress historical research on the early modern period – that one was supposed to dress solely according to one's social station; as Camilla Annerfeldt explores in great depth, this notion does not always seem to have been applicable to early modern Rome because of its very constitution. Using a range of primary sources from the Roman archives as well as texts of early modern writers, Clothing and Identity in Early Modern Rome presents a vivid account of the history of an early modern society, which will be helpful to historians of fashion, society, politics, material culture, and art, as well as everyone interested in the period when Rome was one of the dominant centres of Europe – culturally, socially, and politically.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dan Sperrin, "State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 23 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime’s perception of itself. Although satire has always been a primary literature of state affairs, and although it has always been used to intervene in ongoing discussions about political theory and practice, there has been no attempt to examine this fascinating and unusual literature across the full chronological horizon. In State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Dan Sperrin provides the first ever longue durée history of political satire in British literature. He traces satire’s many extended and discontinuous trajectories through time while also chronicling some of the most inflamed and challenging political contexts within which it has been written.
Dr. Sperrin begins by describing the Roman foundations and substructures of British satire, paying particularly close attention to the core Roman canon: Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. He then proceeds chronologically, populating the branches of satire’s family tree with such figures as Chaucer, Jonson, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Dickens, as well as a whole series of writers who are now largely forgotten. Satire, Dr. Sperrin shows, can be a literature of explicit statements and overt provocation—but it can also be notoriously indirect, oblique, suggestive, and covert, complicated by an author’s anonymity or pseudonymity. Dr. Sperrin meticulously analyses the references to transient political events that may mystify the contemporary reader. He also presents vivid and intriguing pen portraits of the satirists themselves along the way. Dr. Sperrin argues that if satire is to be contended with and reflected upon in all its provocative complexity—and if it is to be seen as anything more than a literature of political vandalism—then we must explore the full depth and intrigue of its past. This book offers a new starting point for our intellectual and imaginative contact with an important and fascinating kind of literature.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 22 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.

In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism. Uncovering the disaster’s roots in Britain’s deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.

Our guest is: Dr. Padraic X. Scanlan, who is an associate professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Inquiry. The author of two previous books, he lives in Toronto.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance editor. She the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Quentin Skinner, "Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 20 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences?

Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence.

Illustrates the connections between philosophical debates surrounding liberty and the sociopolitical contexts in which they took place
Provides a comprehensive analysis and bibliography of rival ways of thinking about liberty
Explores the contribution of the American Revolution to discussions on the idea of liberty

Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History, and the recipient of many awards including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. Previous publications include the two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and, most recently, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir, "Ghosts, Trolls, and the Hidden People: An Anthology of Icelandic Folk Legends" (Reaktion, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 19 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ghosts, Trolls, and Hidden People: An Anthology of Icelandic Folk Legends (Reaktion, 2025). This unique and enchanting book opens the door to a captivating world of Icelandic folk legends. The six chapters of this anthology are each based on a different setting: farm, wilderness, darkness, church, ocean and shore. It provides translated tales from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as introductions by the editor which place these often-supernatural happenings in the context of Icelandic society. The legends include stories of hidden people, trolls, ghosts, sea monsters and even polar bears, exploring themes of love, revenge and conflict. The book highlights the tension between Christianity and paganism, past and present, nature and humanity, and divides within society. Drawing from a wide variety of Icelandic sources, this book makes these colourful, entertaining, lively folk legends available to non-Icelandic speakers, many for the first time.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Aviva Briefel, "Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism" (Cornell UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 18 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Aviva Briefel argues that Victorians turned to the dead to understand the material culture of their present. With the rise of spiritualism in Britain in the early 1850s, séances invited participants to contact ghosts using material things, from ordinary household furniture to specialized technologies invented to register the presence of spirits. In its supernatural object lessons, Victorian spiritualism was not just a mystical movement centered on the dead but also a practical resource for learning how to negotiate the uncanniness of life under capitalism.

Dr. Briefel explores how spiritualism compelled séance participants to speculate on the manufacture of spectral clothing; ponder the hidden histories and energies of parlor furniture; confront the humiliations of consumerism as summoned spirits pelted them with exotic fruits; and comprehend modes of mechanical reproduction, like photography and electrotyping, that had the power to shape identities. Dr. Briefel argues that spiritualist practices and the objects they employed offered both believers and skeptics unexpected frameworks for grappling with the often-invisible forces of labor, consumption, exploitation, and exchange that haunted their everyday lives.

Ghosts and Things reveals how spiritualism's explorations of the borderland between life and death, matter and spirit, produced a strange and seductive combination of wonder and discomfort that allowed participants to experience the possibilities and precarities of industrial modernity in novel ways.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ben Jackson, "Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England" (Manchester UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 17 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Ben Jackson examines the material and consumer practices of over 1000 men from the middling and upper ranks of eighteenth-century society, c.1650-1850. It draws upon evidence from over 35 archives and museum collections to detail how material objects were integral for men in forming identities and shaping experiences. For men of all social ranks, ages, and geographic locations, material knowledge was imperative for masculine social identities to operate in a commercial society. Before the centralised factory and widespread mass-produced goods, men personalised and repaired their goods; products were shaped by men's attitudes and concerns. Objects were tools in men's identity formation and the exercise of social and gendered power. There was a reciprocal relationship between men and goods in this period; men were active agents of material and commercial change driving product and aesthetic innovation.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rochelle Rojas, "Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Crafting in Northern Spain, 1525–1675" (Cornell UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Crafting in Northern Spain, 1525–1675 (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Rochelle Rojas tells riveting stories of witchcraft in everyday life in early modern Navarra. Belief in witchcraft not only emerged in moments of mass panic but was woven into the fabric of village life. Some villagers believed witches sickened crops and cows with poisonous powders, others thought they engaged in diabolism and perverted sex, and still others believed they lovingly raised toads used to commit evil deeds. Most villagers, however, simply saw witches as those with reputations of being mala cristianas—bad Christians. Dr. Rojas illuminates the social webs of accusations and the pathways of village gossip that created the conditions for the witch beliefs and trials of the period.

While studies of witchcraft in Spain tend to focus on the inquisitorial trials and witch panic of 1609–14, Bad Christians and Hanging Toads turns to witch trials conducted by the region's secular judiciary, Navarra's royal tribunals, tracing the prosecution of accused witches over 150 years. Using detailed evidence from trial records and neighbors' testimonies, Dr. Rojas vividly brings to life the women and men crafted as witches by their neighbors and the authorities and guides readers through the judicial process, from accusations and the examination of the evidence to sentencing and punishment.

By privileging the voices of villagers throughout, Bad Christians and Hanging Toads demonstrates that the inner logic of early modern European witchcraft trials can be understood only by examining of the local, everyday aspects of witch belief.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Claire McNulty, "Edinburgh's Unruly Women: Gender, Discipline, and Power, 1560-1660" (Routledge, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 15 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Edinburgh's Unruly Women: Gender, Discipline, and Power, 1560-1660 (Routledge, 2024) examines experiences of church discipline across parish communities through Edinburgh and its environs. The book argues that experiences of discipline were not universal, varying according to any number of factors such as age, gender, marital status, and social rank.

Adopting a case study approach, the book illuminates the voices of ordinary women as they appeared before their local kirk session (church court) where they navigated the church court system to settle neighbourly disputes, negotiate marriage contracts, or free their husbands from allegations of adultery. Edinburgh's Unruly Women argues that in the context of a deeply patriarchal society, experiences of discipline could not have been universal, but that in creating this strict culture of self-monitoring, the Church created opportunities for women to express power over one another, and indeed, over their male contemporaries.

By placing female parishioners at the heart of the book, filled with individual case studies, Edinburgh's Unruly Women appeals to students and scholars of early modern women, religion, and gender more broadly, and to those with more specialist interest in both ecclesiastical discipline and the history of early modern Scotland in the localities.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Beaty Rubens, "Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home" (Bodleian Library, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 14 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the Radio Craze. Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home (Bodleian Library, 2025) expresses what the radio's arrival signified at a personal level. This narrative history recounts the perspective of listeners who adopted the then radical form of communication technology, invested in their first-ever gadgets, and tuned in by their firesides to outside voices, music, SOS calls, the Pips, news, sports, royalty, and innovative radiogenic comedy. Listen In also traces how radio affected family life by exploring whether it altered dynamics between children and adults, changed relationships between women and men, as well as affected class and a wider sense of nationhood.

Packed with touching stories and anecdotes, Listen In comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting, and the experience of how people consume audio is once again transforming.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anna Wainwright, "Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance" (U Delaware Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 13 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy (University of Delaware Press, 2025) investigates the ever-evolving role of the widow in medieval and early modern Italian literature, from canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the numerous widowed writers who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century—including Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Francesca Turina—and radically changed the conversation on public mourning. Engaging with broader intellectual discussions around gender, the history of emotions, the politics of mourning, and the construction of community, Widow City argues that widows served as key models demonstrating to readers not just how to mourn, but how to live well after devastating loss. At the same time, widows were figures of great anxiety: their status as unattached women, and the public performance of their grief, were viewed as very real threats to the stability of the social order. They are thus key to broader intellectual understandings of community and civic life in the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Griebeler, "Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 12 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past.

Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean.

Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean. The author reveals that many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations began in premodern manuscript culture. Consequently, he demonstrates that the distinctions between pre- and early modern botanical illustration center more on the advent of print, the expansion of collections and documentation, and the narrowing of the range of accepted forms of illustration than on the invention of critical and observational practices exclusive to modernity.

Griebeler’s emphasis on continuity, intercultural collaboration, and the gradual transformation of Mediterranean traditions of critical botanical illustration persuasively counters previously prevalent narratives of rupture and Western European exceptionalism in the histories of art and science.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Andrew Griebeler is assistant professor in the depart of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. With students and other faculty at Duke, he is also helping to document the legacy of the Duke Herbarium on Instagram (@bluedevil.herbarium) before its closure by the university.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Make Britain Great Again? The MAGA-Style Rise of Reform UK

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 9 May 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Britain's Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most successful political parties in history. Local elections in the UK have signalled that they are facing the prospect of being wiped out, imperilled by the rise of the right-wing Reform Party, headed by one of the most pervasive and divisive figures in British politics: Nigel Farage. Reform’s success is also coming at the expense of Labour, whose voters are underwhelmed and unconvinced by the performance so far of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government.

Hosts Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones explore what makes Reform such a potent political threat that they could upend 100 years of Labour and Conservative rule, charting the party's rise from UKIP to Brexit to now.

They speak to Gawain Towler, former Reform spokesperson and close political confidant of Nigel Farage, and Ben Habib, formerly deputy leader of Reform two men who understand the soul of the movement and the man who leads and embodies the party: Nigel Farage.

Producer, Pearse Lynch

Executive Producer, Lucinda Knight

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marc Jaffré, "The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610-1643" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 7 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Marc Jaffré joins Jana Byars for a lively conversation about The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610- 1643 (Oxford University Press, 2025). Louis XIII's court has long been a feature of the popular imaginary, thanks in part to the many movie and TV adaptations of Alexandre Dumas' novel The Three Musketeers. Yet it remains misunderstood, commonly mischaracterised as weak, unimportant, or wholly subservient to the whims of Louis XIII. Seeking to correct this narrative, Marc Jaffré here offers a comprehensive analysis of the court's institutional, political, social, cultural, ceremonial, and financial development, across its very wide range of active participants, from courtiers, financiers, merchants, to lower-ranking household members.

The close study engages with the key issues of Louis' reign: the delegitimizing role of Cardinal Richelieu minister-favourite; the turbulent family dynamics that led Louis to wage wars against his mother, his brother, and his cousins; the backdrop of war, both with the Huguenots and within the context of the Thirty Years War; and the transformative rise of salon culture. In so doing, the court is shown to be a central, vibrant, and misunderstood element of early modern and pre-Louis XIV French history and culture. Courtiers, artisans, merchants, and financiers, among others, are shown to have played key roles in shaping the institutional, political, cultural, economic, and military framework of the court, and Louis XIII's reign more generally. In challenging the top-down paradigm prevalent in court studies, this monograph provides crucial correctives to the existing narrative that Louis XIII's court was weak or unimportant and simultaneously revises how early modern courts and their development have been understood historiographically.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

"I have not Finished...": Rokahya Diallo on being Black, Muslim, and frequently interrupted (Emilie Diouf, JP)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 6 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Emilie Diouf of Brandeis English, whose monograph on genocide and trauma is forthcoming, joins John to speak with the celebrated French journalist and activist Rokahya Diallo. Diouf places Diallo within a transnational black intellectual tradition, founded in the interwar period in the Negritude movement; it was then that Paulette, Jeanne, and Anne Nardal’s literary salon became a meeting ground for African, Antillean, and African-American intellectuals, in the Parisian suburb of Clamart.

The three discuss the slowly changing racial climate in France and globally; how to counter ethnonationalism; as well as the currents of dissent or disdain that threaten to disrupt even leftwing political solidarity.

Mentioned in the Episode

Diallo has directed 8 documentaries among which her 2013 award winning film, Les Marches de la Liberté (Steps to Freedom) . She is also the author of many books, including most recently, La France tu l’aimes ou tu la fermes or France, Love it or Shut it, a collection of her major articles on the “struggle against oppression in France and globally.”
Ne reste pas à ta place, or Don’t try to fit in, (2016) and forthcoming book Le dictionnaire amoureux du féminisme or A Feminist Lover’s Dictionary (Editions Plon, March 2025)
Les Indivisibles: humor watchdog organization. Parody ceremony Y’a Bon Awards given to the “most racist sentences” every year.
Rokahya Diallo
Coordination des Femmes Noir
Awa Thiam, La Parole aux Négresses
Afrofeminism
2005 Clichy-sous-bois, a Paris banlieue, was the site of major unrest. Zyed Benna, 17, of Tunisian descent, and Bouna Traoré, 15, of Mauritanian descent, died tragically in a substation while trying to avoid detention.
The leading French TV station, TF1, made waves (and history) by hiring Harry Roselmack in 2016
Diallo’s own strong X/Twitter presence allows her to talk about being harassed—on Twitter/X itself!--and she has a podcast with Grace Ly, Kiffe Ta Race
Diallo’s film Les Marches de la Liberté 2013
From Paris to Ferguson ( De Paris à Ferguson : coupables d'être noirs) 2016
African Americans in Paris: James Baldwin and Josephine Baker in the 1930s, but also Angela Davis in the 1960s being perceived as an Algerian
Faiza Guene Just Like Tomorrow (Kif kif demain)

Read and Listen to the episode here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremy Black, "British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1727-44" (Routledge, 2014)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 5 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Covering the period from the end of the Anglo-French alliance in 1731 to the declaration of war between the two powers in 1744, British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1727-44 (Routledge, 2014) charts a turbulent period in British politics that witnessed the last decade of the Walpole ministry, the attempt to replace it by a Patriot government, and the return of the Old Corps Whigs to a process of dominance. In particular it reveals how ministerial change and political fortunes were closely linked to foreign policy, with foreign policy both affecting, and being affected by, political developments. The book draws upon a great range of foreign and domestic sources, but makes particular use of foreign diplomatic records. These are important as many negotiations were handled, at least in part, through envoys in London. Moreover, these diplomats regularly spoke with George II and his ministers, and some were personal friends of envoys and could be used for secret negotiations outside normal channels.

The range of sources consulted ensures that the book offers more than any previous book to cover the period as a whole, whilst not simply becoming a detailed study of a number of episodes. Instead it retains the strong structural aspects of the relationship between foreign policy and politics necessary to examine questions about political stability, motivation and effectiveness. Following on from Jeremy Black's previous studies on eighteenth-century foreign policy, 'Politics and Foreign Policy under George I' (covering the period 1714-27) this new book takes the story up to 1744 and continues to illuminate the complex and often opaque workings of the British state at a turbulent period of European history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ipek A. Celik Rappas, "Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location" (Cornell UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 4 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the effort behind creating screen production locations. Dr. Ipek A. Celik Rappas accounts the rising demand for original and affordable locations for screen projects due to the growth of streaming platforms. As a result, screen professionals are repeatedly tasked with chores such as transforming a former factory in Istanbul to resemble a war zone in Aleppo, or finding a London street that evokes Barcelona.

Dr. Celik Rappas highlights the pivotal role crew members play in transforming cities and locations into functional screen settings. Examining five European media capitals—Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris—the book delves into the overlooked aspects of location-related screen labor and its ability to generate production value. Filming in European Cities demonstrates that in its perpetual quest for authentic filming locations, the screen industry extracts value from cities and neighborhoods, their marginalized residents, and screen labor, enriching itself through this triple exploitation.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Miles Pattenden, "Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700" (Oxford UP, 2017)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 3 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Jana Byars talks to Miles Pattenden about his book, Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700 (Oxford UP, 2017), just about to be released in paperback. This study offers a radical reassessment of the history of early modern papacy, constructed through the first major analytical treatment of papal elections in English. Papal elections, with their ceremonial pomp and high drama, are compelling theater, but, until now, no one has analyzed them on the basis of the problems they created for cardinals: how were they to agree rules and enforce them? How should they manage the interregnum? How did they decide for whom to vote? How was the new pope to assert himself over a group of men who, until just moments before, had been his equals and peers? This study traces how the cardinals' responses to these problems evolved over the period from Martin V's return to Rome in 1420 to Pius VI's departure from it in 1798, placing them in the context of the papacy's wider institutional developments. Miles Pattenden argues not only that the elective nature of the papal office was crucial to how papal history unfolded but also that the cardinals of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries present us with a unique case study for observing the approaches to decision-making and problem-solving within an elite political group. We also talk about the process in light of the upcoming Conclave and the election of a new pope.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremy Black, "Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714-1727" (Routledge, 2016)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 2 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Through its focus on the relationship between foreign and domestic politics, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714-1727 (Routledge, 2016) provides a new perspective on the often fractious and tangled events of George I's reign (1714-27). This was a period of transition for Britain, as royal authority gave way to cabinet government, and as the country began to exercise increased influence upon the world stage. It was a reign that witnessed the trauma of the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion, saw Britain fighting Spain as part of the Quadruple Alliance, and in which Britain confronted the rise of Russia under Peter the Great.

There has been relatively little new detailed work on this subject since Hatton's biography of George I appeared in 1978, and that book, while impressive, devoted relatively little attention to the domestic political dimension of foreign policy. In contrast, Black links diplomacy to domestic politics to show that foreign policy was a key aspect of government as well as the leading battleground both for domestic politics and for ministerial rivalries. As a result he demonstrates how party identities in foreign policy were not marginal, to either policy or party, but, instead, central to both. The research is based upon a wealth of both British and foreign archive material, including State Papers Domestic, Scotland, Ireland and Regencies, as well as Foreign. Extensive use is also made of parliamentary and ministerial papers, as well as the private papers of numerous diplomats. Foreign archives consulted include papers from Hanover, Osnabruck, Darmstadt, Marburg, Munich, Paris, The Hague, Vienna and Turin. By drawing upon such a wide ranging array of sources, this book offers a rich and nuanced view of politics and foreign policy under George I.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Timothy Twining, "The Limits of Erudition: The Old Testament in Post-Reformation Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 1 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The history of early modern biblical scholarship has often been told as a teleological narrative in which a succession of radical thinkers dethroned the authority of the sacred word. The Limits of Erudition: The Old Testament in Post-Reformation Europe (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a very different story.

Drawing on a mass of archival sources, Timothy Twining reconstructs the religious, cultural, and institutional contexts in which the text of the Old Testament was considered and contested throughout post-Reformation Europe. In so doing, this book brings to light a vast array of figures from across the confessional spectrum who invested immense energy in studying the Bible. Their efforts, it shows, were not disinterested, but responded to pressing contemporary concerns. The Limits of Erudition employs a novel conceptual framework to resurrect a world where learning mattered to inquisitors and archbishops as much as to antiquaries, and in which the pursuit of erudition was too important to be left to scholars.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Donald S. Prudlo, "Stimulus Pastorum: A Charge to Pastors" (St. Augustine's Press, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The work of St. Bartholomew of Braga, O.P. (1514-1590) appears here in English for the first time despite its long and enduring influence in ecclesiastical circles. His meditations on the office of pastor have provided critical insight bishops since their initial circulation and have helped form the most famous among them, including Bartholomew's proteges Charles Borromeo. Pope Paul VI ordered a copy of Bartholomew's work to be distributed among the Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council. Donald Prudlo's translation--Stimulus Pastorum: A Charge to Pastors (St. Augustine's Press, 2022)--situates St. Bartholomew of the Martyrs in his historical context as a lynchpin of Catholic Reform and affirms him as a figurehead of pastoral administration even in our own times.

A beautiful read, and Don discusses why every new bishop should have a copy, and every cardinal entering the conclave should keep Bartholomew's counsel in his discernment.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fernando Collantes, "Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In barely three generations the Spanish diet has changed beyond recognition. The traditional concerns around nutritional health and scarcity have been mostly left behind, but they have given way to new problems linked to excess. In Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption since 1950 (Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Fernando Collantes shows how the dairy industry has been central to this societal shift. From widespread calcium deficiency in the 1950s to the more recent, and controversial, turn to highly processed foods, it provides a recent history of diet change in Spain. Probing the reasons behind why this shift has occurred, and how, it shows that when it comes to food society, politics, economics and the law are intrinsically linked.
Taking the reader beyond the world of food, Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change combines qualitative and quantitative methods to position diet change within the broader debate on consumer society and 'the good life'. Contrasting two models of food consumption, it shows that unless public policy takes the challenge of affluence seriously, the food system can become an obstacle to a better society.

Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word.

Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Annalisa Marzano, "Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome" (Cambridge UP. 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Annalisa Marzano investigates the cultural and political dimension of Roman arboriculture and the associated movement of plants from one corner of the empire to the other. It uses the convergent perspectives offered by textual and archaeological sources to sketch a picture of large-scale arboriculture as a phenomenon primarily driven by elite activity and imperialism. Arboriculture had a clear cultural role in the Roman world: it was used to construct the public persona of many elite Romans, with the introduction of new plants from far away regions or the development of new cultivars contributing to the elite competitive display. Exotic plants from conquered regions were also displayed as trophies in military triumphs, making plants an element of the language of imperialism. Dr. Marzano argues that the Augustan era was a key moment for the development of arboriculture and identifies colonists and soldiers as important agents contributing to plant dispersal and diversity.

Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there aredumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative tostudents. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to makeacademic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New BooksNetwork with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word.

Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn,or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here toreceive our weekly newsletter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lorna Gibb, "Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

An enthralling tour of the world’s rarest and most endangered languages Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life.

Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the stories of the world’s rare and vanishing languages, revealing how each is a living testament to human resilience, adaptability, and the perennial quest for identity. Taking readers on a captivating journey of discovery, Lorna Gibb explores the histories of languages under threat or already extinct as well as those in resurgence, shedding light on their origins, development, and distinctive voices. She travels the globe—from Australia and Finland to India, the Canary Islands, Namibia, Scotland, and Paraguay—showing how these languages are not mere words and syntax but keepers of diverse worldviews, sites of ethnic conflict, and a means for finding surprising commonalities. Readers learn the basics of how various language systems work—with vowels and consonants, whistles and clicks, tonal inflections, or hand signs—and how this kaleidoscope of self-expression carries vital information about our planet, indigenous cultures and tradition, and the history and evolution of humankind. Rare Tongues is essential reading for anyone concerned about the preservation of endangered languages and an eloquent and disarmingly personal meditation on why the world’s linguistic heritage is so fundamental to our shared experience—and why its loss should worry us all.

Lorna Gibb is associate professor of creative writing and linguistics at the University of Stirling.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Eleanor Paynter, "Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present" (U California Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Paynter responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary open-access study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights.

Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Dr. Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Udi Greenberg, "The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s" (Harvard UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Reconciliation between Europe's Protestants and Catholics led to a new era of Christian collaboration.

Why did these erstwhile foes end their schism and begin to make peace?

In this riveting study, Udi Greenberg shows that ecumenism grew out of a shared desire to protect against perceived threats to Christian life.

The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s (Harvard UP, 2025) overturns conventional wisdom about this revolutionary change by showing that the cause was not growing mutual tolerance but solidarity against the threats of socialism, feminism, and liberation movements.

By working together Christians could defend their dominance in European life by maintaining and reinforcing the inequality inherent in Christian hierarchical order.

Peacemaking between the confessions was accelerated by the rise of the Nazis, when Christian denominations debated their relations to each other and to nationalism, and was further pressed by the Cold War and decolonization, when Catholic and Protestant authorities formally declared each other "brethren in faith".

Working together, Catholics and Protestants designed Europe's economic policies, regulated its sexual practices, and shaped postwar relationships with the Global South. This coalition of Christians has grown more cohesive over time as they leveraged their alliance to maintain influence across a politically fractured Europe.

Listen to the New Books Network interview with Udi Greenberg about The Weimar Century: German Emigres and the Ideological Foundation of the Cold War

Author recommended reading: The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany's Twentieth Century by Dagmar Herzog

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christopher Harding, "The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East" (Allen Lane, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Christopher Harding’s The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) is a fascinating survey of two millennia of Western encounters with Eastern culture, thought and religions. From Herodotus to Alan Watts, Harding profiles a range of engaging figures who have had a sometimes-overlooked impact on the way we in the West engage with and understand Asia. From the myths of antiquity through to the impact of the hippie movement, the book asks; ‘What is real? Who says? How should I live?’, and provides a wealth of historical analysis, anecdotal sketches and philosophical insight to explore how the Western and Eastern ways of thinking about these fundamental questions have intersected, conflicted with and complemented each other.

Guest: Christopher Harding is Senior Lecturer in Asian History at The University of Edinburgh. His previous books include The Japanese: A History in 20 Lives (2020) and Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present (2018). A frequent contributor to BBC Radio, he also writes the Illuminasia Substack.

Host: Matt Fraser writes and podcasts for the Ill-Read Millennial. He lives in Berlin.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Asa Simon Mittman, "Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England" (Penn State UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

From the battles over Jerusalem to the emergence of the “Holy Land,” from legally mandated ghettos to the Edict of Expulsion, geography has long been a component of Christian-Jewish relations. Attending to world maps drawn by medieval Christian mapmakers, Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England (Penn State University Press, 2024) by Dr. Asa Simon Mittman brings us to the literal drawing board of “Christendom” and shows the creation, in real time, of a mythic state intended to dehumanize the non-Christian people it ultimately sought to displace.

In his close analyses of English maps from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Asa Simon Mittman makes a valuable contribution to conversations about medieval Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Grounding his arguments in the history of anti-Jewish sentiment and actions rampant in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, Dr. Mittman shows how English world maps of the period successfully Othered Jewish people by means of four primary strategies: conflating Jews with other groups; spreading libels about Jewish bodies, beliefs, and practices; associating Jews with Satan; and, most importantly, cartographically “mislocating” Jews in time and space. On maps, Jews were banished to locations and historical moments with no actual connection to Jewish populations or histories.

Medieval Christian anti-Semitism is the foundation upon which modern anti-Semitism rests, and the medieval mapping of Jews was crucial to that foundation. Dr. Mittman’s thinking offers essential insights for any scholar interested in the interface of cartography, politics, and religion in premodern Europe.

Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Reider Payne, "War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-brother Sir Charles Stewart has received far less attention despite his own prominent part in the politics and diplomacy of those years. In War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era: Sir Charles Stewart, Castlereagh and the Balance of Power in Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Reider Payne describes the adventurous life of the third Marquess of Londonderry and the roles he played in the events of his time.

As a young man Charles Stewart initially pursued a career in the military rather than one in politics, and served in the cavalry during Great Britain’s war against revolutionary France in the 1790s. After a brief period in the War Office he resumed his military career and served with the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War. His record as an officer and his relationship with his half-brother led to his appointment as an ambassador – first to Prussia, then to Austria – in which roles he represented Britain at the courts of her most prominent allies during the final stages of the Napoleonic Wars. Though Charles was often better known for his social escapades, he served ably as Britain’s ambassador to Austria until his brother’s suicide in 1822, during which time he was active in both post-Napoleonic diplomacy and the efforts to collect incriminating evidence against Princess Caroline of Brunswick in aid of the Prince Regent’s effort to divorce her.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maurizio Ferrera, "Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.

Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU (Oxford UP, 2024) explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fernanda Gallo, "Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel’s philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo’s project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel’s thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers.

Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel’s ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel’s considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation.

Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state’s monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel’s concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Agnieszka Pasieka, "Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences.

In this eye-opening book, Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. Providing an in-depth account of radical nationalist communities and networks that are taking root across Europe, she shows how the simultaneous orientation of these groups toward the local and the transnational is a key to their success. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications.

Required reading for anthropologists and anyone concerned about the resurgence of far-right militancy today, Living Right sheds necessary light on the forces that have made the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people one of the most alarming trends of our time.

Agnieszka Pasieka is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal.

* This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Faith Tibble, "Crown of Thorns: Humble Gods and Humiliated Kings" (T&T Clark, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Jesus' Crown of Thorns has become one of the most ubiquitous features of Christian religious art, but was the original crown anything like the crown of popular medieval art and piety? The image conjured by art history is that of a bloodied, beaten Jesus, wearing a cruelly fashioned, woven crown made of sharp thorns. But this image is deeply misleading, based on a fundamental misunderstanding and possible mistranslation.

In The Crown of Thorns: Humble Gods and Humiliated Kings (Bloomsbury, 2025) Dr. Faith Tibble rectifies this misunderstanding, showing how The Crown of Thorns underwent a yet unrecognized artistic evolution. Dr. Tibble tracks the artistic progression of the Crown of Thorns from its first depiction in the 4th century, until the 11th century, when it begins to exhibit the artistic trends that are still recognizable today. In doing so, Dr. Tibble adds new perspective to our understanding of the ideologies associated with medieval Christianity - victory, humility, perseverance - and how those ideologies are exemplified in depictions of the Crown of Thorns. Dr. Tibble demonstrates the profound and unintended consequences of a simple misunderstanding of the Gospels, and examines an unexpected trajectory in European art.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mary Bosworth, "Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanises those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control (Princeton UP, 2024), Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged.

Told by a senior manager that “this is a logistics business,” Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people’s humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units. Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it. The contract does not seek to eradicate risk but rather to manage it, determining responsibility and apportioning a financial value to such “failures” as delay, escape, aborted flight or death in custody. Front-line workers and managers depoliticise and normalise their efforts by casting their duties in familiar bureaucratic terms, with targets, “service level agreements” and “key performance indicators.” Focusing on first-hand accounts from workers and lengthy observation and document analysis, Bosworth explores the impact of border logistics in order to ask what it would take to build inclusive infrastructures rather than those designed to exclude.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity: A Study in Resilience" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The city was one of the central and defining features of the world of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Challenging the idea that the ancient city 'declined and fell', Andrew Wallace-Hadrill argues that memories of the past enabled cities to adapt and remain relevant in the changing post-Roman world. In the new kingdoms in Italy, France and Spain cities remained a key part of the structure of control, while to contemporary authors, such as Cassiodorus in Ostrogothic Italy, Gregory of Tours in Merovingian Gaul, and Isidore in Visigothic Spain, they remained as crucial as in antiquity. The archaeological evidence of New Cities founded in this period, from Constantinople to Reccopolis in Spain, also shows the deep influence of past models. The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity: A Study in Resilience (Cambridge UP, 2025) reveals the adaptability of cities and the endurance of the Greek and Roman world.

Sheds fresh light on one of the most important social and cultural developments in the transition from classical antiquity to the world of the Middle Ages
Explores developments through the eyes of contemporary writers and documents as well as the archaeological record
Of interest to all those concerned with how cities can adapt in a radically changing world

ANDREW WALLACE-HADRILL is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He is a Roman cultural historian and his books include Suetonius: The Scholar and His Caesars (1983), Augustan Rome (1993), Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (1994), Rome's Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2008) and Herculaneum: Past and Future (2011). Former Director of the British School at Rome, he has directed archaeological projects at Pompeii and Herculaneum. This book is the result of his project on the Impact of the Ancient City, which received funding from the European Research Council.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Margaret Urwin, "A State in Denial: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries" (Mercier Press, 2016)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A State in Denial: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries (Mercier Press, 2016) uses previously secret official documents to explore the tangled web of relationships between the top echelons of the British establishment, incl Cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, police/military officers and intelligence services with loyalist paramilitaries of the UDA & UVF throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Covert British Army units, mass sectarian screening, propaganda 'dirty tricks, ' arming sectarian killers and a point-blank refusal over the worst two decades of the conflict, to outlaw the largest loyalist killer gang in Northern Ireland. It shows how tactics such as curfew and internment were imposed on the nationalist population in Northern Ireland and how London misled the European Commission over internment's one-sided nature. It focuses particularly on the British Government's refusal to proscribe the UDA for two decades - probably the most serious abdication of the rule of law in the entire conflict. Previously classified documents show a clear pattern of official denial, at the highest levels of government, of the extent and impact of the loyalist assassination campaign.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sam Wetherell, "Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

What does the history of Liverpool tell us about the future of Britain? In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Bloomsbury, 2025), Sam Wetherall, a Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain and the World at the University of York, tells the story of the city through the lens of ‘obsolesce’. This powerful framework structures a narrative that sees the story of Liverpool as both one of state ineffectiveness, indifference, and brutality, and one of solidarity and alternative forms of community and organising. The analysis is rich with details, ranging widely across the city’s rich social, cultural and economic story. Offering Liverpool as a blueprint for pessimism and optimism, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social scientists, and anyone interested in politics, culture and society today.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stephen J. Campbell, "Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 9 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, in Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (Princeton University Press, 2025) Dr. Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo’s life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value.

In this original and provocative book, Dr. Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo’s contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Dr. Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo’s life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stefanie Fischer and Kim Wünschmann, "Oberbrechen: a German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 8 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly.

Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) .

Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard Alfred Muller, "Predestination in Early Modern Reformed Theology" (Reformation Heritage Books, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 7 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In Predestination in Early Modern Reformed Theology (Reformation Heritage Books, 2024), Dr. Richard A. Muller delves into one of the most controversial doctrines of Reformed Theology: predestination. Muller carefully investigates key incidents that illustrate the doctrine's complexity and development by surveying Reformed thought on predestination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Along the way, Muller challenges distorted ideas about the placement of predestination in theological systems, naïve readings of Calvin based solely on his Institutes, simplistic representations of supra- and infralapsarian debates, and uncharitable views of Reformed theologians as hyper-dogmatists obsessed with their own tradition.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bruno Leipold, "Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 6 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2024), Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism. One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.

Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. First, Marx began his political life as a republican committed to a democratic republic in which citizens held active popular sovereignty. Second, he transitioned to communism, criticizing republicanism but incorporating the republican opposition to arbitrary power into his social critiques. He argued that although a democratic republic was not sufficient for emancipation, it was necessary for it. Third, spurred by the events of the Paris Commune of 1871, he came to view popular control in representation and public administration as essential to the realization of communism. Leipold shows how Marx positioned his republican communism to displace both antipolitical socialism and anticommunist republicanism. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold suggests, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.

Bruno Leipold is a fellow in political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the coeditor of Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Patrick Wallis, "The Market for Skill: Apprenticeship and Economic Growth in Early Modern England" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 5 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Apprenticeship dominated training and skill formation in early modern Europe. Years spent learning from a skilled master were a nearly universal experience for young workers in crafts and trade. In England, when apprenticeship reached its peak, as many as a third of all teenage males would serve and learn as apprentices. In The Market for Skill: Apprenticeship and Economic Growth in Early Modern England (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Patrick Wallis shows how apprenticeship helped reshape the English economy.

Some historians see apprenticeship as a key ingredient in the industrial revolution; others agree with Adam Smith in seeing it as wasteful and conservative. Dr. Wallis shows that neither of these perspectives is entirely accurate. He offers a new account of apprenticeship and the market for skill in England, analyzing the records of hundreds of thousands of individual apprentices to tell the story of how apprenticeship worked and how it contributed to the transformation of England. Wallis details the activities of apprentices and masters, the strategies of ambitious parents, the interventions of guilds and the decisions of town officials. He shows how the system of early modern apprenticeship contributed to the growth of cities, the movement of workers from farms to manufacturing and the spread of new technologies and productive knowledge.

In this groundbreaking study, Dr. Wallis argues that apprenticeship succeeded precisely because it was a flexible institution which allowed apprentices to change their minds and exit contracts early. Apprenticeship provided a vital channel for training that families could trust and that was accessible to most young people, whatever their background.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Liz William, "Rough Music: Folk Customs, Transgression and Alternative Britain" (Reaktion, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Rough Music: Folk Customs, Transgression and Alternative Britain (Reaktion, 2025) by Liz Williams explores transgression and shame in British folklore and customs from ancient Britain to the present day. From Bonfire Night to Wassail, Morris dancing, Mari Lwyd and Twelfth Night, along with events like street football and the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake, Liz Williams reveals the roots and roles of violence, mockery, protest and public shaming. She also looks at alternative culture and modern protests, such as the Battle of the Beanfield and the Stonehenge Free Festival, as well as interaction between racism and traditions involving blackface, alongside the emergence of all-female Morris sides.This engaging book offers an entertaining and revealing look at British folklore and culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hannan Hever, "Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism: Chapters in Literary Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) reveals how political and literary dialogues and conflicts between the Hebrew literature of the Hasidism, the Jewish Enlightenment, and Zionism interacted with each other in the nineteenth century. Hannan Hever uses postcolonial theories and theories of nationality to analyze how Jews used literature to make sense of hostility directed toward Jews from their European “host” countries and to set forth their own ideas and preferences regarding their status, control, and treatment. In doing so, Hever theorizes the Enlightenment’s intellectual aims and cultural influences, tracking how the models of integration crucial to Haskalah gave way to Jewish nationalism in the twentieth century.

The readings in this book are theoretically informed, setting forward novel claims based on detailed textual analyses of hasidic tales, Haskalah satires, and Zionist narratives. Thus, this book tackles a major interpretative problem visible at the core of modern Hebrew literature—its radical difficulty in distinguishing between the theological components of modern Jewish discourse and its national identity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

William Max Nelson, "Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In Enlightenment Biopolitics (U Chicago Press, 2024), historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals.

In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.

William Max Nelson is associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One and a coeditor of The French Revolution in Global Perspective.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bruce L. Vernarde, "The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Murder in a cathedral, horrific illnesses and deformities, narrow escapes from injury and death, a vengeful dragon, a wandering eyeball, a bawdy monk and other sinners redeemed—the accounts of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary gathered and translated in The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2024) provide vivid glimpses into medieval life and beliefs. Bruce L. Venarde provides fluent translations of the first five collections of Marian miracle narratives from France, written in the second quarter of the twelfth century and never before available in English.

The stories recorded in these collections—by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne—offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between and among lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important in Western Europe. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremy Black, "A History of Britain's Transport" (Pen and Sword, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

An accessible book to draw on popular interest in transport history, routes, vehicles and experiences. Transport history is social and industrial national history. Passengers and freight will be covered including all types of transport from walking and packhorses, that predominated for much of national history, both of which tend to be underrated, to changes brought by improvements to road transport from the Romans to medieval bridgebuilders and eighteenth-century turnpikes, and, in parallel, river, coastal and canal travel, again from the Romans to the eighteenth century. The story moves to the age of rail, motoring and lastly air. All forms overlap. as well as being sequential.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kiran Mehta, "To Detain or to Punish: Magistrates and the Making of the London Prison System, 1750–1840" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Imprisonment was rarely used as punishment in Britain before 1800. The criminal justice system was based on terror and deterrence, sentencing convicts to the gallows at home and transportation overseas, with prisons serving primarily as holding spaces for the accused until the case against them was resolved. A major shift began in the late eighteenth century when imprisonment became an end in itself: a means to reform as well as to discipline criminal offenders.

To Detain or to Punish: Magistrates and the Making of the London Prison System, 1750–1840 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) by Dr. Kiran Mehta revisits this revolutionary moment as it played out in the metropolis of London. Dr. Mehta charts how Londoners, through their interactions with police, magistrates, and judges, became prisoners, and then follows them into the prison, revealing how these institutions were managed and experienced. Local authorities’ increased use of imprisonment, for punishment as well as for detention, sparked the wholesale reconstruction and redesign of London’s prison estate. It also spurred the consolidation of the modern notion that prisoners who had not yet been convicted of a crime, or who had not been sentenced to imprisonment, should be held separately from and treated differently to those incarcerated for punishment. Most notably, the requirement to labour became a distinguishing feature of punitive confinement.

Challenging traditional ideas about who and what prisons were for and how they operated, To Detain or to Punish offers a radical reappraisal of London’s prison system between 1750 and 1840.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ben Bowles, "Boaters of London: Alternative Living on the Water" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Boaters of London is an ethnography that delves into the process of becoming a boater, adopting an alternative lifestyle on the water and the political impact that this travelling population has on the state.

London and the Southeast of England in general is home to many people and families who live on narrowboats, cruisers and barges, along a network of canals and rivers. Many of these 'boaters' move from place to place every two weeks and form itinerant communities in the heart of some of the UK’s most crowded urban spaces. Boaters of London delves into the process of becoming a boater and the political impact of this travelling population on the state, the volume examines an alternative style of living and the potential of a life spent afloat.

Ben Bowles is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He is also Course Lecturer at Fordham University, London Campus, and Research Fellow at the Open University’s Centre for Policing Research and Learning. His research interests include economic and political anthropology, and the anthropology of the UK.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Holly Grout, "Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France" (LSU Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Questions about the meaning of womanhood and femininity loomed large in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture. In Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France (LSU Press, 2024), Dr. Holly Grout uses the theater—specifically, Parisian stage performances of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra by Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker—to explore these cultural and political debates. How and why did portrayals of Cleopatra influence French attitudes regarding race, sexuality, and gender? To what extent did Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker manipulate the image of Cleopatra to challenge social norms and to generate new models of womanhood? Why was Cleopatra—an ancient, mythologized queen—the chosen vehicle for these spectacular expressions of modern womanhood?

In the context of late nineteenth-century Egyptomania, Cleopatra’s eroticized image—as well as her controversial legacy of female empowerment—resonated in new ways with a French public engaged in reassessing feminine sexuality, racialized beauty, and national identity. By playing Cleopatra, Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker did more than personify a character; they embodied the myriad ways in which celebrity was racialized, gendered, and commoditized, and they generated a model of female stardom that set the stage for twentieth-century celebrity long before the Hollywood machine’s mass manufacture of “stars.” At the same time, these women engaged with broader debates regarding the meaning of womanhood, celebrity, and Frenchness in the tumultuous decades before World War II.

Drawing on plays, periodicals, autobiographies, personal letters, memoirs, novels, works of art, and legislation, Playing Cleopatra contributes to a growing body of literature that examines how individuals subverted the prevailing gender norms that governed relations between the sexes in liberal democratic regimes. By offering employment, visibility, and notoriety, the theater provided an especially empowering world for women, in which the roles they played both reflected and challenged contemporary cultural currents. Through the various iterations in which Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker played Cleopatra, they not only resurrected an ancient queen but also appropriated her mystique to construct new narratives of womanhood.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Clive Bloom, "London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

From Kensington to the East End, under candlelight, gas lamp and then neon signs, London is both a bustling physical metropolis and a stirring psychic encounter. The most depraved depictions of London in fiction, film, poetry, television and theatre have irrevocably merged with the reality of its dark history, creating a phantasmagoria defined by murder, vice and the unnatural. In this panoptic look at the capital at its most eerie and macabre, Dr. Clive Bloom takes a tour of Gothic London's uncanny literature, arcane events and its infamous and imagined geographies.

From David Bowie to T S Eliot, Thomas de Quincey to Aleister Crowley, the prophetess Joanna Southcott to the 'ghosts' of Abba and the worlds of Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker, these are the figures that populate a city lost in fog and blind alleys, where the dead can be raised, the living sacrificed and the clandestine thrive.

Suturing together fact and fantasy, London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2025) presents the urban landscape of the capital as a space of wonder and madness, haunted by its past and haunting the present. Stalking through disease and degeneracy, death and murder, spiritualism, lunacy and the occult, Bloom crafts a singular, integrated concept of a London where dreams and nightmares meet.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mick Brown, "The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Mick Brown’s The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Oxford UP, 2023) is a riveting account about the West's engagement with Eastern spirituality across a century. It traces the life of multiple characters that intersected across time and space to create a network of interlinking stories about saints, salesmen and scoundrels all involved in spirituality.

From Edwin Arnold, whose epic poem about the life of the Buddha became a best-seller in Victorian Britain, to the occultist and magician Aleister Crowley; and from spiritual teachers Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meher Baba and Ramana Maharshi to the controversial guru Rajneesh, The Nirvana Express is an exhilarating, sometimes troubling journey through the West's search for enlightenment.

Archit Nanda is PhD scholar in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Janiak, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2024) introduces the work and legacy of philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet. As the Enlightenment gained momentum throughout Europe, Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Due to her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker rather than a disciple of some supposedly great man like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, Châtelet posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman highlights the exclusion of women from colleges and academies in Europe and the fear of rupturing the gender-based order.

Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alexandra Verini, "English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) uncovers a tradition of women’s utopianism that extends back to medieval women’s monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures.

The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. Convent-based utopianism further acted as an unrecognized influence on the first English women’s literary utopias by authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Collectively, these female communities forged a mode of utopia that drew on the past to imagine new possibilities for themselves as well as for their larger religious and political communities. Tracking utopianism from the convent to the literary page over a period of 300 years, New Kingdoms writes a new history of medieval and early modern women’s intellectual work and expands the concept of utopia itself.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anna Nilsson Hammar and Svante Norrhem, "Serving Aristocracy: Negotiation, Learning, and Mobility in an Early Modern Knowledge Community" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Serving Aristocracy: Negotiation, Learning, and Mobility in an Early Modern Knowledge Community (Routledge, 2025) by Dr. Anna Nilsson Hammar & Dr. Svante Norrhem is the history of social negotiation and mobility in an early modern knowledge community, centred on the aristocratic De la Gardie family and their sphere of manors and estates in seventeenth-century Sweden.

Focusing on underprivileged women and men and the knowledge community that shaped their interactions, social negotiations, and mobility, this book documents ordinary people’s lives and work in an aristocratic sphere. It uses the De la Gardie bureaucracy’s meticulous records to full effect, charting servants’ experiences, learning, and agency. The unique collection of petitions provides an invaluable insight into how servants viewed their own backgrounds, personal predicaments, and hopes for the future, and how they negotiated their work and wage. It reveals the aristocratic estate organization not only as a workplace, but also as a training ground where knowledge circulation was as fundamental as socialization, social negotiation, and networking. At the same time, Serving Aristocracy exposes the flaws in the aristocratic mindset: the De la Gardies’ organization was hierarchical, paternalistic, and feudal, and employees were forced to live at the mercy of their masters.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Martin Spychal, "Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act" (U London Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The 1832 Reform Act was a landmark moment in the development of modern British politics. By overhauling the country’s ancient representative system, the legislation reshaped constitutional arrangements at Westminster, reinvigorated political relationships between the center and the provinces, and established the political structures and precedents that both shaped and hindered Britain’s slow lurch towards democracy by 1928.

Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act (U London Press, 2024) leads to a fundamental rethinking of the 1832 Reform Act by demonstrating how boundary reform and the reconstruction of England’s electoral map by the little-known 1831–1832 boundary commission underpinned this turning point in the development of the British political nation. Eschewing traditional approaches to the 1832 Reform Act, it draws from a significant new archival discovery—the working papers of the boundary commission—and a range of innovative quantitative techniques to provide a major reassessment of why and how the 1832 Reform Act passed, its impact on reformed politics both at Westminster and in the constituencies, and its significance to the expansion of the modern British state.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chiara Faggella, "Becoming Couture: The Italian Fashion Industry after the Second World War" (Manchester UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Becoming couture: The Italian fashion industry after the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Chiara Faggella is the first book to examine the history of the Italian fashion industry during the global transition brought about by the Second World War. It draws on a wide range of primary sources, some of them newly unearthed, to demonstrate that the Italian fashion industry in the Republican era continued to rely on business practices and professionals established during Fascism. Analysing changes in promotional discourses and press coverage, the book traces the shift that occurred when manufacturers were encouraged to expand their exports of accessories to include sportswear, knitwear and moda boutique. This ultimately led to the legitimisation of Italian dressmaking as creatively independent of French influences and therefore worthy of the label 'couture'.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Harriet Atkinson, "Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist Exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53" (Manchester UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

How did exhibitions become a vital tool for public communication in early twentieth century Britain? Showing resistance reveals how exhibitions were taken up by activists and politicians from 1933 to 1953, becoming manifestos, weapons of war and a means of signalling political solidarities.

Drawing on dozens of examples mounted in empty shops, workers’ canteens, station ticket halls and beyond, this richly illustrated book shows how this overlooked form was created by significant makers including artists Paul Nash, John Heartfield and Oskar Kokoschka, architect Erno Goldfinger and photographer Edith Tudor-Hart.

Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist Exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (Manchester UP, 2024) is the first study of exhibitions as communications in mid-twentieth century Britain

Harriet Atkinson is AHRC Leadership Fellow and Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at University of Brighton

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gregory Soderberg, "John Brown of Haddington on Frequent Communion" (Wipf & Stock, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Shallow and quickly outdated Christian worship practices have left many searching for something with deeper roots. Many churches have rediscovered the importance of the sacraments, particularly the Lord's Supper. The number of churches that are observing more frequent communion continues to grow. What's lacking is guidance from the past on this issue. How did infrequent communion become a "tradition" in so many churches? What historical, political, and theological factors were involved? As one of the leading evangelical pastors and scholars of the late eighteenth century, John Brown of Haddington has much to teach. Not satisfied with the practice of his own Scottish Reformed tradition, Brown left a manuscript advocating more frequent communion among his papers after his death. It was published in 1804 but has remained inaccessible to a large audience until now.

Dr. Gregory Soderberg used Brown as one of his sources in his doctoral study of communion frequency in the Reformed tradition, which was the first full-length, scholarly treatment of the subject. Although Brown wrote for his own time, his arguments are still relevant. In John Brown of Haddington on Frequent Communion (Wipf & Stock, 2024), readers will find a brilliant mind engaging the issue of communion frequency with wit and erudition.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Abby Innes, "Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 9 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.

Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 8 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP, 2022) inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state-formation for almost a millennium.

The 'crisis of church and state' that began in the second half of the eleventh century is argued here as having fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies - sacral monarchy - and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivised and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards.

Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000-1500.

Jørgen Møller, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 8 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Harvard UP, 2023) is a revelatory new account of the magus―the learned magician―and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.

In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus―a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.

Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired―often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos.

Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 8 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importance of Levinas's Talmudic lessons.

Pairing each chapter with a related Talmudic lecture, Kleinberg uses the distinction Levinas presents between "God on Our Side" and "God on God's Side" to provide two discrete and at times conflicting approaches to Levinas's Talmudic readings. One is historically situated and argued from "our side" while the other uses Levinas's Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from "God on God's own side." In Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Stanford UP, 2021), Kleinberg asks whether the ethical message and moral urgency of Levinas's Talmudic lectures can be extended beyond the texts and beliefs of a chosen people, religion, or even the seemingly primary unit of the self.

Touching on Western philosophy, French Enlightenment universalism, and the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition, Kleinberg provides readers with a boundary-pushing investigation into the origins, influences, and causes of Levinas's turn to and use of Talmud.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Deborah Reed-Donahay, "Sideways Migration: Being French in London" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 3 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Sideways Migration: Being French in London (Routledge, 2025) examines the relationship between migration and socioeconomic status. In particular, it charts a set of middle-class aspirations that lead people to move to a nearby nation that is similar in wealth and social indicators - a type of horizontal relocation that it terms "sideways migration." It chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of French middle-class citizens who moved to London during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork over a ten-year period, this book engages at length with their strategies of emplacement through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social space. Against a backdrop of heightened anxieties about immigration, the disruptions of the Brexit process and, more recently, a pandemic, it shows how middle-class migration is affected by processes of dislocation and relocation, settling and unsettling, and the search for belonging. This book points to new directions for understanding transnationalism among middle-class migrants through its consideration of the French emigration apparatus and the role of the multisite French nation in the lives of its citizens living abroad. It will be key reading for scholars and students interested in emigration and migration from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, history, and international studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ellen Fenzel Arnold, "Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, C. 300-1100" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 1 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen, monks, saints, and dragons met in medieval riverscapes; their interactions reveal a rich and complex world. Using religious narrative sources to evaluate the environmental mentalities of medieval communities, Ellen F. Arnold explores the cultural meanings applied to rivers over a broad span of time, ca. 300-1100 CE. Hagiographical material, poetry, charters, chronicles, and historiographical works are explored to examine the medieval environmental imaginations about rivers, and how storytelling and memory are connected to lived experiences in riverscapes. She argues that rivers provided unique opportunities for medieval communities to understand and respond to ecological and socio-cultural transformations, and to connect their ideas about the shared religious past to hopes about the future.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Megan Moran, "Gender and Family Networks in Early Modern Italy" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Women from the Ricasoli and Spinelli families formed a wide variety of social networks within and beyond Florence through their letters as they negotiated interpersonal relationships and lineage concerns to actively contribute to their families in early modern Italy. Women were located at the center of social networks through their work in bridging their natal and marital families, cultivating commercial contacts, negotiating family obligations and the demands of religious institutions, facilitating introductions for family and friends, and forming political patronage ties.

Gender and Family Networks in Early Modern Italy (Amsterdam UP, 2025) argues that a network model offers a framework of analysis in which to deconstruct patriarchy as a single system of institutionalized dominance in early modern Italy. Networks account for female agency as an interactive force that shaped the kinships ties, affective relationships, material connections, and political positions of these elite families as women constructed their own narratives and negotiated their own positions in family life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter Ramey, "The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary" (Angelico Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Beowulf is the product of a profoundly religious imagination, but the significance of the poem’s Christianity has been downplayed or denied altogether. The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary (Angelico Press, 2023) is the first translation and popular commentary to take seriously the religious dimension of this venerable text. While generations of students know that Beowulf represents a confluence of Christianity and paganism, this version—informed by J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of language as the repository of myth—opens the hood to track the poem’s inner religious workings. It brings to light the essential Old English vocabulary, incorporating into the translation the divine titles used for God, specific names for evil and nonhuman creatures, and the precise language employed for providence and fate, along with terminology for kinship and heroism. Such features are not found in any other modern English translation, including Tolkien’s, whose text was never intended for publication. The Word-Hoard Beowulf draws upon Tolkien’s ideas and commentaries, however, to render a poem whose metaphysical vision takes front and center, delivering a richly restorative version of this early medieval masterpiece. The text is preceded by an introduction detailing the poem’s religious motivations and cultural context, and is accompanied by an expansive commentary. In short, this version allows readers to perceive precisely how in Beowulf (as Tolkien puts it) “the new Scripture and the old tradition touched and ignited” to produce the earliest English epic.

Peter Ramey is Associate Professor of English at Northern State University, where he teaches courses on medieval English literature, Latin, and linguistics. He has published articles on Beowulf and on Old and Middle English in Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, and other scholarly journals, while also writing for a broader audience in his essays in Public Discourse and Front Porch Republic.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mary Flannery, "Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

For over six centuries, Chaucer has epitomized poetic greatness, though more recent treatments of The Canterbury Tales’ lively and often risqué style have made his name more synonymous with bawdy humor. But beyond his poetic achievements, Chaucer assumed various roles including those of royal attendant, soldier, customs official, justice of the peace, and more. In this book, Mary Flannery chronicles Chaucer’s life during one of the most turbulent periods of English history, illuminating how he came to be known not only as the father of English poetry but also as England’s “merry bard.”

Mary Flannery is the Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellow at the University of Bern. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, her publications include Practising Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kathryn Taylor, "Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice" (U Delaware Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice (University of Delaware Press, 2023) explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of human difference in a period characterized by increasing global contact and a rapid acceleration of the circulation of information. Venice was at the center of both these developments. The book traces the emergence of a distinctive tradition of ethnographic writing that served as the basis for defining religious and cultural difference in new ways.

Taylor draws on a trove of unpublished sources-diplomatic correspondence, court records, diaries, and inventories-to show that the study of customs, rituals, and ways of life not only became central in how Venetians sought to apprehend other peoples, but also had a very real impact at the level of policy, shaping how the Venetian state governed minority populations in the city and its empire. In contrast with the familiar image of ethnography as the product of overseas imperial and missionary encounters, the book points to a more complicated set of origins.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shane Bobrycki, "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton UP, 2024), Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilization, collective behavior retained its social importance even when crowds were scarce.

Most historians have seen early medieval Europe as a world without crowds. In fact, Bobrycki argues, early medieval European sources are full of crowds—although perhaps not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for. Harvests, markets, festivals, religious rites, and political assemblies were among the gatherings used to regulate resources and demonstrate legitimacy. Indeed, the refusal to assemble and other forms of “slantwise” assembly became a weapon of the powerless. Bobrycki investigates what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past. The history of crowds during the five hundred years between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, Bobrycki shows, tells an important story—one of systemic and scalar change in economic and social life and of reorganization in the world of ideas and norms.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Shane Bobrycki is assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa

Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ruby Lowe on John Milton’s Definition of Free Speech

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous pamphlet Areopagitca (1644) to Paradise Lost (1667), Milton participated in debates regarding censorship and the right of the public to access the inner workings of Parliamentary politics. I spoke with Ruby Lowe about how today’s conception of free of speech emerged during the English Civil Wars, the intimacies between political adversaries in these debates, and how Milton’s crucial role in this media revolution informs his most seductive literary characters, including the devil, God, Adam, and Eve.

Dr. Ruby Lowe is a Lecturer in the History of Ideas at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne and the John Emmerson Research Fellow at the State Library of Victoria, in Australia. Her forthcoming book is The Speech Without Doors: John Milton and the Tradition of Print Oratory.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marcel Elias, "English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291-1453" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus of Middle English crusade romances. In English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Marcel Elias places these romances in dialogue with multifarious European writings to offer a novel account of late medieval crusade culture: as ambivalent and self-critical, animated by tensions and debates, and fraught with anxiety. These romances uphold ideals of holy war while expressing anxieties about issues as diverse as God's endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of Christians to Islam, the sinfulness of crusaders, and the morality of violence.

Reinvigorating debates in medieval postcolonialism, drawing on emotion studies, and excavating a rich multilingual archive, this book is a major contribution to the cultural history of the crusades. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jacqueline M. Burek, "Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century" (York Medieval Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing?

Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Adam Pennington, "Henry VIII and the Plantagenet Poles: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty" (Pen and Sword History, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The story of King Henry VIII, a man who married six times only to execute two of those wives, is part of Great Britain’s national and international identity. Each year, millions of people walk around the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace and Hever Castle, plus many other historical sites, taking in and hoping to glean some sense of the man and the myth, and yet there is a period from Henry VIII’s life which remains largely overlooked, a period in which he chose not to execute wives, servants or ministers, but instead turned on another group entirely - his own family.

Like practically all members of the nobility of the time, Henry VIII descended from King Edward III, which ensured a ready-made crop of royal cousins were in abundance at his court, and awkwardly for the king, these cousins often possessed much greater claims to the throne than he did. The house of Tudor was one which should never have been, let alone taken the throne. Upstarts in every sense of the word, their ancestry, whilst (almost) noble, was by no means as grand as many a family in England, and it is against this backdrop that Henry VIII and the Plantagenet Poles: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty (Pen & Sword, 2024) by Dr. Adam Pennington was created.

The Pole family, the subjects of the story, were royalty in secret. Lady Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the family matriarch, was a niece of King Edward IV and Richard III, making her a first cousin of Elizabeth of York, the first Tudor queen consort, and thus a first cousin once removed of Henry VIII. Margaret Pole was, therefore, one of the most senior members of the nobility at the Tudor court, and through her, her sons, her daughter, and her grandchildren possessed a dangerous name and dangerous bloodline, which put them on a collision course with the most volatile man ever to sit the throne of England. They were the old guard, the house of Plantagenet, the greatest ruling dynasty in English history, the true royal family, and this, coupled with the monumental shifts which England underwent during the reign of Henry VIII, all but ensured their destruction. For centuries, their story has been overlooked, or at best, fleetingly covered, but when one digs deep, a story as audacious and juicy as it’s possible to be soon emerges.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Trevor Wilson, "Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Trevor Wilson about his new book, Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Their conversation delves into the intellectual currents of interwar Europe, placing the enigmatic figure of Alexandre Kojève into this unique cultural landscape. The conversation touches on how key philosophical concepts shift in translation, the influence of émigré culture, and the broader currents of Russian philosophy, including the philosophy of Sophia and Kojève’s vision of the "end of history." Dr. Wilson also reflects on the challenges of translating philosophical texts written in multiple languages (and Kojève’s notoriously illegible Russian handwriting).

Beyond philosophy, the conversation explores writing routines and the often-overlooked infrastructures that make academic work possible.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Erika Graham-Goering et al., "Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Jana Byars talks to Erika Graham-Goering of the University of Oslo about Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which was edited by Graham-Goering, Jim van der Meulen, and Frederik Buylaert. The origins of modern European states are often traced back to the expansion of royal and princely authority in the late Middle Ages, transforming scattered power structures into centralised governments.

Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe rethinks state formation as a process of decentralisation, exploring how these governments willingly left power to lesser political players. It challenges the assumption that the rise of states made lordship obsolete, showing instead how distributing authority among local lords reinforced the development of new political systems.

The contributors tackle this fresh perspective on lordship and state formation from two complementary angles. Detailed snapshots of lordship in France and the Low Countries assess the political significance of different aspects of lordly power. Historiographical essays discuss frameworks for understanding relationships between lordship and the state in contexts across Europe. These comparative perspectives establish an innovative approach to a key question in political history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Pamela Allen Brown, "The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata" (Oxford UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Pamela Allen Brown joins Jana Byars to talk about The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford University Press, 2022), which traces the transnational connections between Shakespeare's all-male stage and the first female stars in the West. The book is the first to use Italian and English plays and other sources to explore this relationship, focusing on the gifted actress who radically altered female roles and expanded the horizons of drama just as the English were building their first paying theaters.

By the time Shakespeare began to write plays, women had been acting professionally in Italian troupes for two decades, traveling across the Continent and acting in all genres, including tragicomedy and tragedy. Some women became the first truly international stars, winning royal and noble patrons and literary admirers beyond Italy, with repeat tours in France and Spain.Elizabeth and her court caught wind of the Italians' success, and soon troupes with actresses came to London to perform. Through contacts direct and indirect, English professionals grew keenly aware of the mimetic revolution wrought by the skilled diva, who expanded the innamorata and made the type more engaging, outspoken, and autonomous. Some English writers pushed back, treating the actress as a whorish threat to the all-male stage, which had long minimized female roles. Others saw a vital new model full of promise.

Faced with rising demand for Italian-style plays, Lyly, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare used Italian models from scripted and improvised drama to turn out stellar female parts in the mode of the actress, altering them in significant ways while continuing to use boys to play them. Writers seized on the comici's materials and methods to piece together pastoral, comic, and tragicomic plays from mobile theatergrams - plot elements, roles, stories, speeches, and star scenes, such as cross-dressing, the mad scene, and the sung lament. Shakespeare and his peers gave new prominence to female characters, marked their passions as un-English, and devised plots that figured them as self-aware agents, not counters traded between men. Playing up the skills and charisma of the boy player, they produced stunning roles charged with the diva's prodigious theatricality and alien glamour. Rightly perceived, the diva's celebrity and her acclaimed skills posed a radical challenge that pushed English playwrights to break with the past in enormously generative and provocative ways.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Ada Palmer joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Inventing the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2025) and the ways history is written and used.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Magdalena Buchczyk, "Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, History and Ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, history and ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Magdalena Buchczyk delves into the history and the changing material culture in Europe through the stories of a basket, a carpet, a waistcoat, a uniform, and a dress. The focus on the objects from the collection of the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin offers an innovative and challenging way of understanding textile culture and museums. The book shows that textiles can be simultaneously used as the material object of research, and as a lens through which we can view museums. In doing so, the book fills a major gap by placing textile knowledge back into the museum.

Each chapter focuses on one object story and can be read individually. Swooping from 19th-century wax figure cabinets, Nazi-era collections, Cold War exhibitions in East and West Berlin, and institutional reshuffling after German unification, it reveals the dramatically changing story of the museum and its collection. Based on research with museum curators, makers and users of the textiles in Italy and Germany, Poland and Romania, the book provides intimate insights into how objects are mobilised to very different social and political effects. It sheds new light on movements across borders, political uses of textiles by fascist and communist regimes, the objects' fall into oblivion, as well as their heritage and tourist afterlives. Addressing this complex museum legacy, the book suggests new pathways to prefigure the future.

Featuring new archival and ethnographic research, evocative examples and images, it is an essential read for students of textile and material culture, museum and curatorial studies as well as anyone interested in history, heritage and craft.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sophia Rosenfeld, "The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 5 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best to select. There are social costs too. How did all this happen? The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton UP, 2025) tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.

Taking readers from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change. She concludes with an exploration of how reproductive rights have become a symbolic flashpoint in our contemporary struggles over the association of liberty with choice.

Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from novels and restaurant menus to the latest scientific findings about choice in psychology and economics, The Age of Choice urges us to rethink the meaning of choice and its promise and limitations in modern life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ann Schmiesing, "The Brothers Grimm: A Biography" (Yale UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 4 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Ann Schmiesing, Ph.D. is Professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, with research interests spanning 18th and 19th-century German and Norwegian literature and culture. In our interview we discuss her new book, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale UP, 2024), their first biography in over half a century. We talk about what led her to Germanic studies and fairy tales in particular. We discuss the revelations in her book dealing with their lives and work, their antisemitism as reflected in their correspondence and the stories they published and its long-ranging consequences. We talk about some of her favorite fairy tales and what makes them special.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Whitney Dirks, "Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 3 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Whitney Dirks joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Curiosity to See and Behold (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). In 1680, the poor cottager Mary Herring gave birth to conjoined twins. At two weeks of age, they were kidnapped to be shown for money, and their deaths shortly thereafter gave rise to a four-year legal battle over ownership and income. The Herring twins' microhistory weaves throughout this book, as the chapter structure alternates between the family's ordeal and the broader cultural context of how so-called 'monstrous births' (a contemporary term for deformed humans and animals) were discussed in cheap print, exhibited in London's pubs and coffeehouses, examined by the Royal Society, portrayed in visual culture, and litigated in London's legal courts. This book ties together social and medical history, Disability Studies, and Monster Studies to argue that people discussed unusual bodies in early modern England because they provided newsworthy entertainment, revealed the will of God, and demonstrated the internal workings of Nature.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Blessin Adams, "Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain" (HarperCollins, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 2 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Early Modern Britain was awash with pamphlets, ballads, woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning female poisoning lacing the supper with deadly substances; of child killers and spiteful witches, stories of women wholly and unnaturally wicked. These were printed or sung, tacked the walls of alehouses, sold in the streets for pennies and read voraciously to thrill all. But why? When the vast majority of murders then (and now) are committed by men.

In this bold, page-turning new history Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain (HarperCollins, 2025), former police officer and historian Dr. Blessin Adams tells stories of women whose violent crimes shattered the narrow confines of their gender – and whose notoriety revealed a society that was at once repulsed by and attracted to murderous female rebellion. Based on detailed research in court archives, each chapter explores murders that thrilled and terrified the British public; the crimes that caused the most concern and provoked the most debate. Women in this period killed rarely, and when they did it was usually within the context of extreme provocation or domestic violence. Adams has the ability of the best crime novelists in recreating the setting in which each case occurred as well as the motivations of each perpetrator.

Thou Savage Woman reminds us that women in the past had voices, that they sought to control their bodies and their environments and that they also had the capacity for committing acts of unspeakable violence.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Adam Franklin-Lyons, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" (Penn State Press, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam Franklin-Lyons applies contemporary understandings of complex human disasters, vulnerability, and resilience to explain how these famines occurred and to describe more accurately who suffered and why.

Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon details the social causes and responses to three events of varying magnitude that struck the western Mediterranean: the minor food shortage of 1372, the serious but short-lived crisis of 1384–85, and the major famine of 1374–76, the worst famine of the century in the region. Shifts in military action, international competition, and violent attempts to control trade routes created systemic panic and widespread starvation—which in turn influenced decades of economic policy, social practices, and even the course of geopolitical conflicts, such as the War of the Two Pedros and the papal schism in Italy. Providing new insights into the intersecting factors that led to famine in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean, this deeply researched, convincingly argued book presents tools and models that are broadly applicable to any historical study of vulnerabilities in the human food supply. It will be of interest to scholars of medieval Iberia and the medieval Mediterranean as well as to historians of food and of economics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elizabeth Campbell, "Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?

In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, postwar governments appropriated the most coveted unclaimed works for display in museums, embassies, ministries, and other public buildings. Following cultural property norms of the time, the governments created custodianships over the unclaimed pieces, without using archives in their possession to carry out thorough provenance (ownership) research. This policy extended the dispossession of Jewish owners wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators well into the twenty-first century.

The custodianships included more than six hundred works in Belgium, five thousand works in the Netherlands, and some two thousand in France. They included paintings by traditional and modern masters, such as Rembrandt, Cranach, Rubens, Van der Weyden, Tiepolo, Picasso, and Matisse. This appropriation of plundered assets endured without controversy until the mid-1990s, when activists and journalists began challenging the governments' right to hold these items, ushering in a period of cultural property litigation that endures to this day. Including interviews that have never before been published, Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Elizabeth Campbell deftly examines the appropriation of Nazi art plunder by postwar governments and highlights the increasingly successful postwar art recovery and restitution process.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Roland Erne et al., "Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Year 2008 marked the introduction of a new economic governance regime in the European Union (EU) in response to the global financial crisis. Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency (Cambridge UP, 2024), authored by leading scholars in the field and also available open access, uses a approach to capture the EU formulation of prescriptions and their uneven deployment across member states (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), policy areas (employment relations, public services), and sectors (transport, water, and healthcare). The regime led to a much more vertical mode of EU integration, and its commodification agenda unleashed a plethora of union and social-movement protests, including transnationally. Listen to this engaging interview with the leading author, Prof. Roland Erne, to find out what inspired this book, how the team worked together, and which conclusions they arrived at.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Philip Rathgeb, "How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford UP, 2024) shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and the USA. In doing so, it argues that the radical right's core ideology of nativism and authoritarianism informs their socio-economic policy preferences. However, diverse welfare state contexts mediate their socio-economic policy impacts along regime-specific lines, leading to variations of trade protectionism, economic nationalism, traditional familialism, labour market dualism, and welfare chauvinism.

The radical right has used the diverse policy instruments available within their political-economic arrangements to protect threatened labour market insiders and male breadwinners from decline, while creating a racialized and gendered precariat at the same time. This socio-economic agenda of selective status protection restores horizontal inequalities in terms of gender and ethnicity, without addressing vertical inequalities between the rich and the poor.

Combining insights from comparative politics, party politics, comparative political economy, and welfare state research, the book provides novel insights into how the radical right manufactures consent for authoritarian rule by taming the socially corrosive effects of globalised capitalism for key electoral groups, while aiming to exclude the rest from democratic participation.

Philip Rathgeb is an associate professor in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Philip holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI) and held visiting positions at Harvard University, Lund University, University of Southern Denmark, and the EUI. His research interests are in comparative political economy and comparative politics, with a particular focus on welfare states, industrial relations, and party politics. His first book Strong Governments, Precarious Workers was published with Cornell University Press in 2018.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the career of German polymath Johann Daniel Major (1634–93), Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Vera Keller uncovers how late seventeenth-century scholars crafted the research university as a haven for critical inquiry in defiance of political and economic pressures. Abandoning the surety of established intellectual practice, this 'experimental century' saw Major and his peers reshaping fragments of knowledge into new perspectives. Across new disciplines, from experimental philosophy to archaeology and museology, they reexamined what knowledge was, who it was for, and how it was to be stored, managed, accessed, judged, and transformed. Although later typecast as Baroque obstacles to be overcome by the Enlightenment, these academics arranged knowledge in dynamic infrastructures that encouraged its further advancement in later generations, including our own. This study examines these seventeenth-century practices as part of a continuous intellectual tradition and reconceptualizes our understanding of the Enlightenment.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michael Sonenscher, "After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge between three successive sets of arguments: between the supporters of the ancients and moderns, the classics and romantics, and the Romans and the Germans. Sonenscher argues that the genealogy of modern political ideologies—from liberalism to nationalism to communism—can be connected to the resulting discussions of time, history, and values, mainly in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, in the period straddling the French and Industrial revolutions.

What is the genuinely human content of human history? Everything begins somewhere—democracy with the Greeks, or the idea of a res publica with the Romans—but these local arrangements have become vectors of values that are, apparently, universal. The intellectual upheaval that Sonenscher describes involved a struggle to close the gap, highlighted by Kant, between individual lives and human history. After Kant is an examination of that struggle’s enduring impact on the history and the historiography of political thought.

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Before the Deluge (Princeton), Sans-Culottes (Princeton), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matthew McCormack, "Shoes and the Georgian Man" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Shoes are everyday objects but they are loaded with meaning. Shoes and the Georgian Man (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Matthew McCormack reveals how shoes played a powerful role in the wider story of shifts in gender relations in 18th-century Britain. It focuses on the relationship of shoes with the body and its movements, and therefore how what we wear on our feet relates closely to social, occupational and gender roles. It also uses footwear to explore topics such as politics, war, dance and disability.

Thinking about shoes as material objects, Dr. McCormack studied historic shoes first-hand in museums, in order to ascertain their physical properties and what they would have been like to wear. Worn shoes preserve traces of the wearer's body in their indentations, stretches and scuffs, providing a unique primary source about their wearer. This approach forges new connections between the histories or material culture, gender and the body, and sheds new light on what it meant to be a man in the 18th century.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hélène Tessier, "Laplanche's Vocabulary" (PUF, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In Vocabulaire de Laplanche (PUF, 2024), edited by the renowned scholar and analyst, Hélène Tessier, several of the key readers of Jean Laplanche's work propose what is nothing short of a revelation for Laplanche studies. Theirs is a vocabulary that provides a concise and accessible dictionary of key Laplanchian terms, inviting readers of Laplanche's work to engage with the French psychoanalyst's work.

In a wide-ranging conversation, professor Tessier delves into Laplanche's work, highlighting the importance of linking/dellinking to his thinking, establishing connections with sublimation and questions of culture and the drives. Tessier embarks on a real tour de force, reconstructing Laplanche's work with the utmost of passion. It was a wonderful conversation that has me ever convinced in stating that this book is a must-have for any Francophone psychoanalyst or scholar of psychonalysis.

Interview conducted by Myriam Sauer.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Terrence C. Petty, "Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were hired to work for newly formed government agencies to get the new republic quickly on its feet. But there was an enormous flaw in the plan: no serious vetting system was put in place to keep war criminals out of government positions.

As discussed in Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) by Terrence Petty, ex-Nazis—people who had been involved in mass murder, drafting antisemitic laws, and the persecution of Hitler’s opponents, as well as other depravities—resumed their careers without consequence in the newly created Federal Republic of Germany. Former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These “Persil Certificates,” named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi’s recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, and a whole generation of German government officials with Nazi pasts was never brought to account.

Ex-Nazis were given preference for government jobs even over victims of Nazi policies and anti-Hitler resisters. They swapped Nazi uniforms for suits, Hitler salutes for handshakes. And with help from the highest levels of West German government and even the CIA, they swept their crimes under the carpet and resurrected their careers. Nazis at the Watercooler illuminates the network of ex–Third Reich loyalists and the U.S. government’s complicity that enabled this mass impunity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Mckinney, "Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction: A Comparative Study" (Routledge, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction: A Comparative Study (Routledge, 2025) considers Samuel Beckett's fiction and drama as major aesthetic and thematic influences on the work of Irish authors Eimear McBride, Keith Ridgway, Emma Donoghue, and Kevin Barry in the post-crash period of 2009-2015. Through cross-comparisons between the aesthetics and form of Beckett's Trilogy, Mercier and Camier, Footfalls and Not I, and those of a range of post-crash Irish novels including Beatlebone, Hawthorn and Child, Room, and A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, this book establishes Beckett's continuing influence on Irish fiction. With particular reference to these newer authors' treatment of scarcity, trauma, indeterminism, gender and sexuality, and confinement in the context of major societal changes and traumas in Irish society since 2009, topics include the imposition of austerity, collapse of faith in institutions, and the increasing recognition of LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andy Wightman, "The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got it" (Birlinn, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Who owns Scotland? How did they get it? What happened to all the common land in Scotland? Has the Scottish Parliament made any difference? Can we get our common good land back? In this updated edition of The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got it (Birlinn, 2024), Andy Wightman updates the statistics of landownership in Scotland and explores how and why landowners got their hands on the millions of acres of land that were once held in common.

He tells the untold story of how Scotland's legal establishment and politicians managed to appropriate land through legal fixes. Have attempts to redistribute this power more equitably made any difference, and what are the full implications of the recent debt-fuelled housing bubble, the Smith Commission and the new Scottish Government's proposals on land reform? For all those with an interest in urban and rural land in Scotland, this updated edition of The Poor Had No Lawyers provides a fascinating analysis of one the most important political questions in Scotland.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michelle D. Brock, "Plagues of the Heart: Crisis and Covenanting in a Seventeenth-Century Scottish Town" (Manchester UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Using a wide range of archival material and a microhistorical approach, Plagues of the Heart: Crisis and Covenanting in a Seventeenth-Century Scottish Town (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Michelle Brock explores the formation, practice and performance of protestant identity amid the interlocking crises of the seventeenth century. Taking the southwestern port city of Ayr as a remarkable but revealing case study, this book argues that under the stewardship of a generation of radical clergy, Scotland developed a distinct and durable 'culture of covenanting'. This culture was created not simply by swearing the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, but through reimagining the post-Reformation program of discipline and worship around hard-line interpretations of those covenants.

This compelling story of one Scottish town and its long-serving minister offers a fresh understanding of how protestant communities across the early modern world grappled with religion and identity during a remarkably tumultuous age.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bianca M. Lopez, "Queen of Sorrows: Plague, Piety, and Power in Late Medieval Italy" (Cornell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Queen of Sorrows: Plague, Piety, and Power in Late Medieval Italy (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Bianca Lopez takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Dr. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory.

Dr. Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The testaments also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. As Queen of Sorrows details, however, the popularity and growing wealth of Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

April-Louise Pennant, "Babygirl, You've Got This!: Experiences of Black Girls and Women in the English Education System" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

How do Black women experience education in Britain?

Within British educational research about Black students, gender distinctions have been largely absent, male-dominated or American-centric. Due to the lack of attention paid to Black female students, relatively little is known about how they understand and engage with the education system, or the influences which shape their long-term strategies and decision-making in order to gain educational 'success'.

Babygirl, You've Got This! Experiences of Black Girls and Women in the English Education System (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. April-Louise Pennant will illustrate the educational experiences and journeys of Black British women graduates and considers the influence of the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, culture and social class on their educational journeys. Dr. Pennant uniquely documents the entire educational journey - from primary school to university - within both predominantly white (PW) and predominantly global majority (PGM) educational institutions in order to examine the various accessibility, financial and academic hurdles which face Black girls and women.

The book combines theoretical frameworks such as Critical Race Theory, Bourdieu's Theory of Practice and Black Feminist epistemology, alongside the personal accounts of the author and a range of Black British women graduates. Through analysis of the strategies, choices and decisions made by Black British women in their educational journeys, the book ultimately provides insights into how to navigate the education system effectively, and provides alternatives to normalised understandings of educational 'success'.

Find out more about Dr. April-Louise Pennant on her website!

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steven King, "Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present" (McGill Queen's UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistently occupy the centre of public policy discussions, even as official statistics suggest that relatively small amounts of money are lost to such schemes.

In Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) Dr. Steven King focuses on the British case in the first ever long-term analysis of the scale, meaning, and consequences of welfare fraud in Western nations. King argues that an expectation of dishonesty on the part of claimants was written into the basic fabric of the founding statutes of the British welfare state in 1601, and that nothing has subsequently changed. Efforts throughout history to detect and punish fraud have been superficial at best because, he argues, it has never been in the interests of the three main stakeholders – claimants, the general public, and officials and policymakers – to eliminate it.

Tracing a substantial underbelly of fraud from the seventeenth century to today, Dr. King finds remarkable continuities and historical parallels in public attitudes towards the honesty of welfare recipients – patterns that hold true across Western welfare states.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, "Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend" (Getty, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562.

In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.

Elizabeth King, a sculptor and writer, is professor emerita of sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond. W. David Todd is associate curator emeritus and former conservator of timekeeping at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a collections management intern in the public sector.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the information you found — just as ordinary 15th and 16th century English people would have sifted through information in their almanacs, medical recipe collections, and astrological tracts.

As Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (U Chicago Press, 2024) shows, ordinary English readers learned to assess and evaluate information through ordinary, everyday interactions with inexpensive and practical books. By tracing the creation, proliferation, and reading of such 'practical books,' Melissa Reynolds explores changing attitudes towards medicine and science as well as how readers navigated uncertainty and the unknowable. Through its focus on the production of practical books, Reading Practice also charts changing attitudes towards books, first as manuscripts became less expensive and then as print became imbued with authority.

Vivid and precise, Reading Practice should be read by those interested in the history of the book, the history of science, and anyone who has ever consulted Dr. Google (which, let's be honest, is probably everyone). In addition to centering the reading practices of ordinary people, Reading Practice also does a fabulous job explaining exactly what it looks like and takes to work with medieval manuscripts and early printed texts, making it perfect reading for graduate students and those heading into library research.

Listeners should also check out the companion website, which contains bibliographic information about the manuscripts and prints used in the project, network analysis of the relationship between printers and book, and data visualizations.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as it often appears in depictions of Provence. The legendary wind is central to the area’s regional identity and has inspired artists and writers near and far for centuries.

This force of nature is the focus of Dr. Catherine Dunlop’s The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024), a wonderfully written examination of the power of the mistral wind, and in particular, the ways it challenged central tenets of nineteenth-century European society: order, mastery, and predictability. As Dunlop shows, while the modernizing state sought liberation from environmental realities through scientific advances, land modification, and other technological solutions, the wind blew on, literally crushing attempts at control, and becoming increasingly integral to regional feelings of place and community.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Frank Trentmann, "Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022" (Knopf, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024) traces the moral concerns and clashes of a nation re-building, re-constituting, and re-imagining itself from the depths of World War II to Chancellor Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘new era’). Key elements of modern German identity, including the memory of the Holocaust, the nature of the Sozialstaat, the tensions between an energy-intensive export nation and a deep-rooted environmental consciousness, and the legacy of the East-West divide are explored through the contemporary experiences of a range of voices and the detailed tracing of trends and events over 80 years. Trentmann invites us to look closer at Germany’s postwar moral landscape and figures through the lens of ‘conscience, compassion and complicity’, the better to understand Europe’s most consequential nation.

Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an associate at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, Helsinki.

Matt Fraser is a freelance writer and podcaster based in Berlin, Germany.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Emily Murdoch Perkins, "Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been" (The History Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

What queens would England have had if firstborn daughters, not firstborn sons, had inherited the throne? In Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been (The History Press, 2024), Emily Murdoch Perkins investigates.

We may think of princesses as dutiful and elegant, wearing long flowing dresses, but the eldest daughters of England’s kings have been very different. Political intriguers. Abducted nuns who demanded divorces. Murderers.

It’s time we rediscovered the politicians we lost, the masterminds we see negotiating nunneries not armies, the personalities shining brilliantly even hundreds of years later: the queens who should have been.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Isaac Stanley-Becker, "Europe Without Borders: A History" (Princeton UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Forty years ago, Schengen - a wine-making village at the tripoint border of Luxembourg, France, and Germany - made European history when diplomats from these countries, Belgium, and the Netherlands struck a deal to scale back their mutual border checks.

"The event at Schengen went unnoticed by much of the European press," writes Isaac Stanley-Becker in Europe Without Borders: A History (Princeton University Press, 2025). Yet, as one of its signatories said much later, the Schengen agreement "changed everything" - accelerating the development of the European single market and currency area.

Today, however, Schengen is under threat as its now-29 members struggle to balance the free movement of people against the demands of cross-border policing, immigration control, and political consent. In September 2024, the German government - rattled by surging support for the nativist AFD in the run-up to a federal election - reinstated border controls with its four Schengen founders, prompting threats of retaliation. Could Schengen face, as Stanley-Becker warns, "death by a thousand cuts"?

Isaac Stanley-Becker is an investigative reporter at the Washington Post - part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for a series exploring the role of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in American life. A graduate of Yale, he went on to complete a PhD in History at Oxford in 2019. Europe Without Borders is his first book.

*The author's book recommendations were East West Street: On The Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) and The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, 2019).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yehudah Cohn, trans., "Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome" (Centro Primo Levi, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome (Centro Primo Levi, 2023) contains the first known sonnets written in Hebrew. Their author is Immanuel of Rome, an intensely studied yet little-known 14th-century poet, who adapted the quantitative meter of Arabic and Hebrew poetry from al-Andalous to the syllabic meter of romance poetry. These poems are part of Immanuel’s most studied book, Maḥbarot, a collection of poetic tales conceived between satire and allegory, which combine the Arabic maqama with the stilnovistic poetic form immortalized by Dante. Widely published during its author’s lifetime and in the following centuries, the Maḥbarot as a whole has never been translated into any language.

Immanuel lived in the Papal city during a period of great turmoil between the communal experience and the Papal exile to Avignon. He moved with ease in the Roman Jewish and non-Jewish worlds that were actively involved in translation. Writing in a milieu where Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Greek, and the vernaculars were concurrent languages, Immanuel left us brilliant verses in Hebrew and vernacular. He was an admired biblical commentator whose references spanned from the Talmud and Maimonides to Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophy.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nitzan Lebovic, "Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time" (Cornell UP, 2025)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time (Cornell UP, 2025) tells the story of a group of twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals who grappled ceaselessly with concepts of time and temporality. The project brings into dialogue key thinkers, including the philosopher of religion Martin Buber, the critical theorist Walter Benjamin, the political scientist Hannah Arendt, and the poet Paul Celan, who stand at the center of our contemporary understanding of religion, critical theory, politics, and literature. All four, and many colleagues around them who identified with their approaches saw time—not space—as the key to their individual and collective experience, rejecting definitions of self based on borders, territory, or geographic/national origin. Following their path teaches us about three “temporal turns”: In the early 1900s, between1933-1945, and ours, in the early 2000s.

Nitzan Lebovic is a professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan is the author of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013), Zionism and Melancholy: The short Life of Israel Zarchi (2019), and Homo Temporalis: Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan about Time (2025). Nitzan is the co-editor of Catastrophes: The History and Theory of an Operative Concept (2014) and Nihilism and the State of Israel: New Critical Perspectives (2014), and edited special issues about political theology, nihilism, and biopolitics. His new project is titled “The history of complicity, 1945- Present.”

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ciaran O'Neill, "Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Ciaran O’Neill is the Ussher Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century History at Trinity College Dublin. His work mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of Ireland and empire, the history of education and elites, colonial legacies, modern literature, and public history. In this interview, he discusses Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State (Oxford UP, 2024), a survey of the state in nineteenth-century Ireland.

Life in a Palliative State is an exploratory book that challenges assumptions about who might have been powerful, or powerless, in Union Ireland. It decenters sectarian division, popular and parliamentary politics, and the tradition of physical-force nationalism and emphasizes transnational phenomena, a settler colonial diaspora, and minority groups on the island. Departing from the conventional focus on political leaders like Parnell and De Valera, the book concentrates on the everyday dynamics of power and resistance during the Union. Structured as interlocking essays spanning the long nineteenth century, the book begins by defining the power structures that governed Ireland. Subsequent chapters examine the governance of Ireland, the development of infrastructure, and the mapping of its population and territory. Drawing on feminist theories of power, the book also explores marginalized groups and their agency within Irish society, debunking the myth of Irish ‘ungovernability.’ One is the Irish diaspora, positioned as both a resource and a threat within the wider context of European settler colonialism. By analyzing the diaspora’s influence and the phenomenon of remittances, the book challenges prevailing notions of powerlessness. By tracing a geographical journey from East to West, the book questions traditional representations of authenticity and colonization

Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State is published with Oxford University Press.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti, "Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

How should broadly liberal democratic societies stop illiberal and antidemocratic views from gaining influence while honouring liberal democratic values? This question has become particularly pressing after the recent successes of right-wing populist leaders and parties across Europe, in the US, and beyond. Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Alasia Nuti and Gabriele Badano develops a normative account of liberal democratic self-defence that denounces the failures of real-world societies without excusing those supporting illiberal and antidemocratic political actors. This account is innovative in focusing not only on the role of the state but also on the duties of nonstate actors including citizens, partisans, and municipalities. Consequently, it also addresses cases where the central government has at least been partly captured by illiberal and antidemocratic agents. Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti's approach builds on John Rawls's treatment of political liberalism and his awareness of the need to 'contain' unreasonable views, that is, views denying that society should treat every person as free and equal through a mutually acceptable system of social cooperation where pluralism is to be expected. The authors offer original solutions to vexed problems within political liberalism by putting forward a new account of the relation between ideal and non-ideal theory, explaining why it is justifiable to exclude unreasonable persons from the constituency of public reason, and showing that the strictures of public reason do not apply to those suffering from severe injustice. In doing so, the book further politicizes political liberalism and turns it into a framework that can insightfully respond to the challenges of real politics.

Alasia Nuti is senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of York. Her work is situated at the intersection of analytical political theory, critical theory, gender studies and critical race theory

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 9 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls.

Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751 (Bucknell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dayne Riley is an engaging and original study that explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Dr. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Caitlín Eilís Barrett, "Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens" (Oxford UP, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 8 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Adam Elliott-Cooper, "Black Resistance to British Policing" (Manchester UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 7 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Adam Elliott-Cooper analyses racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal - arguing that black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation and violence.

Imperial cultures and policies, as well as colonial war and policing highlight connections between these histories and contemporary racisms. But this is a book about resistance, considering black liberation movements in the 20th century while utilising a decade of activist research covering spontaneous rebellion, campaigns and protest in the 21st century. Drawing connections between histories of resistance and different kinds of black struggle against policing is vital, it is argued, if we are to challenge the cutting edge of police and prison power which harnesses new and dangerous forms of surveillance, violence and criminalisation.

Black Resistance to British Policing is a must read for all those who are interested in the history of the British Empire, its enduring legacies, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance.

Adam Elliot-Cooper is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public and Social Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021). He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.

Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter Mandler, "The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 6 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

How did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2020), Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, charts the history of schools, colleges, and universities. The book charts the tension between demands for democracy and the defence of meritocracy within both elite and public discourses, showing how this tension plays out in Britain’s complex and fragmented education system. Offering an alternative vision to the popular memory and perception of education, a note of caution about the power of education to cure social inequalities, and a celebration of public demand for high quality education for all, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in understanding education in contemporary society.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter Mandler, "The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 6 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Emily Marker, "Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era" (Cornell UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 5 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Thinking together the histories of European integration and African decolonization, Emily Marker's Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 2022) is a pathbreaking study of how the two continents continued to make another's histories in the years after the Second World War. Tracking the ways that young people and education figured in plans for the future of both the French empire and of an integrated Europe, the book pursues archival traces and arguments that illuminate continuing debates about race, religion, inclusion, national, and transnational identities.

Pursuing policies and programs aimed at French imperial reform and renewal alongside attempts to inculcate a sense of Europeanness in a new generation of transnational citizens, Marker's chapters examine the contours of a postwar vision of a united Europe understood as at once "colorblind" and white, secular and Christian. When African students made claims for greater equality, they faced a "postwar racial common sense" that pointed up the limits of French and African solidarity in an era of decolonization.

Drawing on an impressive body of research, Black France, White Europe will be of tremendous readers to scholars of France, Africa, and Europe. The book is a compelling history of the present that connects contemporary debates about race, religion, and belonging to a longer durée of national, transnational, imperial, and postcolonial worldmaking. I hope listeners will enjoy our conversation as much as I did!

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Adam Zucker, "Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 3 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity (Oxford UP, 2024) dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too silly to matter much for serious scholarship. Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge -- on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period -- when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or plotlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. Each suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. Words such as 'baffle' in Twelfth Night or 'twangling' and 'jingling' in The Tempest, and characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes the pedant, might in the past have been considered unworthy of critical attention -- too light or obvious to matter much for our understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Adam Zucker's meditation on the limits of learnedness and the opportunities presented by a philology of stupidity argues otherwise.

Adam Zucker is a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and other 16th and 17th Century authors. In addition to Shakespeare Unlearned (Oxford University Press, 2024), he is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of essay collections Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (Routledge, 2015); and Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Adam lives in Northampton, MA with his family, where he plays loud twangling instruments in the bands Outro, Bring It to Bear, The Young Old, and The Father Figures.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 3 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

What were the key ideas and influences on Michel Foucault’s early career? In The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, charts Foucault’s formative intellectual years leading up to the publication of the ground-breaking The History of Madness. The book uses a range of new archival material, much of which has been only recently accessible, to show the influence of teachers, mentors, and colleagues, as well as Foucault’s practice as an academic and writer during the 1950s and early 1960s. Telling the story of the possible intellectual trajectories, in psychology and philosophy, Foucault might have followed, along with a clear examination of the roots of his later work, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nicholas R. Jones, "Cervantine Blackness" (Penn State UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa.

In Cervantine Blackness (Penn State UP, 2024), Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls “Cervantine Blackness,” Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agency—and its analogues “presence” and “resistance”—as a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp critique, through a systematic deconstruction of deeply rooted prejudices, Jones establishes a solid foundation for the development of a new genre of literary and cultural criticism. A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Robert Darnton, "Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment" (Oxford UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland — pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of "copyright" very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged — tacitly or openly — that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild.

Darnton's book Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses principally on a publisher in Switzerland, one of the largest and whose archives are the most complete. Through the lens of this concern, he offers a sweeping view of the world of writing, publishing, and especially bookselling in pre-Revolutionary France--a vibrantly detailed inside look at a cut-throat industry that was struggling to keep up with the times and, if possible, make a profit off them. Featuring a fascinating cast of characters — lofty idealists and down-and-dirty opportunists — this new book expands upon on Darnton's celebrated work on book-publishing in France, most recently found in Literary Tour de France. Pirating and Publishing reveals how and why piracy brought the Enlightenment to every corner of France, feeding the ideas that would explode into revolution.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Harvey J. Kaye, "The British Marxist Historians" (Zero Book, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The British Marxist Historians, originally published in 1995, remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential contemporary academic traditions in history and social theory. In this classic text, Kaye looks at Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism; Rodney Hilton on feudalism and the English peasantry; Christopher Hill on the English Revolution; Eric Hobsbawm on workers, peasants and world history; and E.P. Thompson on the making of the English working class. Kaye compares their perspective on history with other approaches, such as that of the French Annales school, and concludes with a discussion of the British Marxist historians' contribution to the formation of a democratic historical consciousness. The British Marxist Historians is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the late twentieth century.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, an award-winning author of numerous books, including Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and a repeat guest on radio and television programs such as To the Best of Our Knowledge, the Thom Hartmann Show, and Bill Moyers' Journal.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sara Lodge, "The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective" (Yale UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale UP, 2024), Sara Lodge tells stories of women who brought 19th century criminals to justice, in real life and popular culture, as unacknowledged crime-fighters and feminist icons.

On stage and in fiction, women detectives were sensational figures who fascinated the public with cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroines who captured thieves, flushed out cheats, and solved murders.

Few people realize that these characters were based on real women who were active as detectives in private agencies and in the Victorian police force. Far from the mythology of an all-male world, women were a daily presence in police activity, although often underpaid and overlooked. They did important and dangerous work in a variety of roles both openly and as undercover agents.

While the fictional characters were heroic figures who always saved the day, these morally ambiguous real women were sometimes paid to betray, deceive, or entrap in the murky underworld of Victorian society.

Related resources:

The interest in Victorian women detectives continues into the present with dozens of contemporary novels, film, and tv featuring Victorian female detectives.

Miss Scarlet on PBS is an original series by Rachael New. The Enola Holmes and Enola Holmes 2 films on Netflix are based on the original Enola Holmes books written by Nancy Springer.

More Sherlock Holmes adjacent charaters are Mary Russell by Laurie R. King and Lady Sherlock by Sherry Thomas.

While many actual female detectives were working class, fictional portrayals often feature upper class heroines as private detectives such as Lady Darby by Anna Lee Huber, Lady Emily by Tasha Alexander, and both Veronica Speedwell and Lady Julia Grey by Deanna Raybourn.

Author recommended reading

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Emily Herring, "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" (Basic Books, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Basic Books, 2024) is the first English-language biography of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who defined individual creativity and transformed twentieth century thought.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson became the most famous philosopher on earth. Where prior thinkers sketched out a predictable universe, he asserted the transformative power of consciousness and creativity. An international celebrity, he made headlines around the world debating luminaries like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein about free will and time. The vision of creative evolution and freedom he presented was so disruptive that the New York Times branded him "the most dangerous man in the world."

In the first English-language biography of Bergson, Emily Herring traces how his celebration of the time-bending uniqueness of individual experience struck a chord with those shaken by modern technological and social change. Bergson captivated a society in flux like no other. Long after he faded from public view, his insights into memory, time, joy and creativity continue to shape our perceptions to this day. Herald of a Restless World is an electrifying portrait of a singular intellect.

Emily Herring is a writer based in Paris. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and received her PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. Her work has appeared in the TLS and Aeon.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kit Kowol, "Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

We think we know all there is to know about Britain's Second World War. We don't.

This radical re-interpretation of British history and British Conservatism between 1939 and 1945 reveals the bold, at times utopian, plans British Conservatives drew up for Britain and the post-war world.

From proposals for world government to a more united Empire via dreams of a new Christian elite and a move back-to-the-land, Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2024) reveals how Conservatives were every bit as imaginative and courageous as their Labour and left-wing opponents in their wartime plans for a post-war world.

Bringing these alternative visions of Britain's post-war future back to life, Blue Jerusalem restores politics to the centre of the story of Britain's war. It demonstrates how everything from the weapons Britain fought with, to the theatres in which the fighting took place and the allies Britain chose were the product of political decisions about the different futures Conservatives wanted to make.

Rejecting notions of a 'people's war' that continue to cloud how we think of World War II, it explores how the Tories used their control of the home and battle front to fight a deeply Conservative war and build the martial, imperial, and Christian nation of which many of a conservative disposition had long dreamed.

A study of political thinking as well as political manoeuvre, Blue Jerusalem goes beyond an examination of the usual suspects - such as Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain - to reveal a hitherto lost world of British Conservativism and a set of forgotten futures that continue to shape our world.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps (Verso, 2020), Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times.

Born in Algiers, the young Jackie was always an outsider. Despite his best efforts, he found it difficult to establish himself among the Paris intellectual milieu of the 1960s. However, in 1967, he changed the whole course of philosophy: outlining the central concepts of deconstruction. Immediately, his reputation as a complex and confounding thinker was established. Feted by some, abhorred by others, Derrida had an exhaustive breadth of interests but, as Salmon shows, was moved by a profound desire to understand how we engage with each other. It is a theme explored through Derrida’s intimate relationships with writers such even as Althusser, Genet, Lacan, Foucault, Cixous, and Kristeva. Accessible, provocative and beautifully written, An Event, Perhaps will introduce a new readership to the life and work of a philosopher whose influence over the way we think will continue long into the twenty-first century.

Peter Salmon is an Australian writer living in the UK. His first novel, The Coffee Story, was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He has written for the Guardian, the New Humanist, the Sydney Review of Books and Tablet, as well as Australian TV and radio. Formerly Centre Director of the Jon Osborne/The Hurst Arvon Centre, he also teaches creative writing.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

John Eglin, "The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

John Eglin talks with Jana Byars about The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency (Oxford UP, 2023). Gambling captures as nothing else the drama of the "long eighteenth century" between the age of religious wars and the age of revolutions. The society that was confronted with games of chance pursued as commercial ventures also came to grips with unprecedented social mobility, floated by new wealth from new sources created fortunes from trade in sugar, cotton, ivory, silk, tea, or enslaved human beings. Likewise, play for money was prominent in the public imagination as money itself, deployed through an ever expanding and ever more sophisticated range of mechanisms, increasingly invaded public awareness, as when prospective spouses in period fiction were rated in terms of annual income as if they were municipal bonds. Similarly, the archetypal figure of the gambler captured the imagination of the public in fiction, media, and politics. At the same time, new interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - encouraged and bankrolled by those in power - fostered a new and unprecedented appreciation for mathematical probability and its applications, opening the possibility that games of chance might be pursued as a profitable commercial venture.

The Gambling Century focuses like no previous work on those who enabled, facilitated, and profited from gambling, as well as on efforts to regulate or outlaw it. Using extensive archival material as well as printed sources, it follows its subjects from the Court to the coffeehouse, to private clubs and "at homes" in townhouses, all of which prefigure that quintessentially modern gambling space, the casino.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ben Highmore, "Playgrounds: The Experimental Years" (Reaktion, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

After World War II, a new kind of playground emerged in Northern Europe and North America. Rather than slides, swings, and roundabouts, these new playgrounds encouraged children to build shacks and invent their own entertainment.

Playgrounds: The Experimental Years (Reaktion, 2024) tells the story of how waste grounds and bombsites were transformed into hives of activity by children and progressive educators. It shows how a belief in the imaginative capacity of children shaped a new kind of playground and how designers reimagined what playgrounds could be. Ben Highmore tells a compelling story about pioneers, designers, and charities--and above all--about the value of play.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Giovanna Ceserani, "A World Made by Traval: A Digital Grand Tour" (Stanford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In the eighteenth century, tens of thousands of travelers journeyed to Italy on the Grand Tour. These travels in the age of Enlightenment contributed to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, of the market for culture, and of ideas about education and leisure.

A World Made by Traval: A Digital Grand Tour (Stanford UP, 2024) combines —in dynamic format— original research with data and visualizations about the lives and journeys of 6,007 travelers. It reveals the diverse experiences, elite and otherwise, that collectively constituted the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.

This digital publication transforms the foundational Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (published by the Paul Mellon Centre [PMC] and compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive held at the PMC) into an interactive and data-rich interface. It introduces more than a thousand new figures, including hundreds of women, servants, workers, and Italians not previously represented among the Dictionary's primary headings. This digital Grand Tour is more inclusive, and it addresses and invites vital questions about a historical phenomenon that has long been studied with a focus on the most elite and well-known travelers.

A World Made by Travel is framed by introductory chapters explaining its digital approach, contains exemplary essays by leading scholars who worked with its data, and offers resources to help teachers bring this wealth of material into the classroom. By opening up pressing questions of scale and representation through its Explorer, it models how digital approaches involving shareable data can facilitate original research and generate new knowledge about the past.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rebecca Ball, "A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

How do ordinary people write the stories of their lives? In A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), Rebecca Ball, a lecturer in history at Manchester Metropolitan University, presents the microhistory of a series of working-class autobiographies. Ranging from childhood experiences, through education, work, marriage and death, the book draws on the hundred voices to paint a rich and evocative picture of working-class life. These lives are lived against the backdrop of huge global events, not least of which are two world wars. Yet what comes through is the sense of continuity of everyday life even in the face of such huge social change. Offering theoretical reflection for historians as well as being accessible to general readers, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding life in the first half of the twentieth century.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Amy Helen Bell, "Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London" (Yale UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Fear was the unacknowledged spectre haunting the streets of London during the Second World War; fear not only of death from the German bombers circling above, but of violence at the hands of fellow Londoners in the streets below. Mass displacement, the anonymity of shelters, and the bomb-scarred landscape offered unprecedented opportunities for violent crime.

In this absorbing, sometimes shocking account, titled Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Amy Helen Bell uncovers the hidden stories of murder and violence that were rife in wartime London. Dr. Bell moves through the city, examining the crimes in their various locations, from domestic violence in the home to robberies in the blacked-out streets and fights in pubs and clubs. She reveals the experiences of women, children, and the elderly, and focuses on the lives of the victims, as well as their deaths.

This groundbreaking study transforms our understanding of the ways in which war made people vulnerable—not just to the enemy, but to each other.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Theresa Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence" (Brepols, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Famous today for the shops lining its sloped street, the Ponte Vecchio is the last premodern bridge spanning the Arno River at Florence and one of the few remaining examples of the once more prevalent urbanized bridge type.

Drawing from early Florentine chronicles and previously unpublished archival documents, The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence (Brepols, 2024) by Dr. Theresa Flanigan traces the history of the Ponte Vecchio, focusing on the current bridge’s construction after the flood of 1333. Much of the Ponte Vecchio’s original fourteenth-century appearance is now obscured beneath later accretions, often mistakenly interpreted as original to its medieval character. To the contrary, as argued in this book and illustrated by new reconstruction drawings, the mid-trecento Ponte Vecchio’s vaulted substructure was technically advanced, its urban superstructure was designed in accordance with contemporary Florentine urban planning strategies, and its "beautiful and honorable" appearance was maintained by government regulations. The documents also reveal new information about the commission and rental of its famous shops.

Relying on these sources, this study offers a more complete history of the Ponte Vecchio, adding significantly to what is currently known about the bridge’s patronage and construction, as well as the aims of civic architecture and urban planning in late medieval Florence.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christian Bailey, "German Jews in Love: A History" (Stanford UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

German Jews in Love: A History (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the dynamic role of love in German-Jewish lives, from the birth of the German Empire in the 1870s, to the 1970s, a generation after the Shoah. During a remarkably turbulent hundred-year period when German Jews experienced five political regimes, rapid urbanization, transformations in gender relations, and war and genocide, the romantic ideals of falling in love and marrying for love helped German Jews to develop a new sense of self. Appeals to romantic love were also significant in justifying relationships between Jews and non-Jews, even when those unions created conflict within and between communities.

By incorporating novel approaches from the history of emotions and life-cycle history, Christian Bailey moves beyond existing research into the sexual and racial politics of modern Germany and approaches a new frontier in the study of subjectivity and the self. German Jews in Love draws on a rich array of sources, from newspapers and love letters to state and other official records. Calling on this evidence, Bailey shows the ways German Jews' romantic relationships reveal an aspect of acculturation that has been overlooked: how deeply cultural scripts worked their way into emotions; those most intimate and seemingly pre-political aspects of German-Jewish subjectivity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jan Machielsen, "The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd. In four months, they executed up to 80 women and men for the crime of witchcraft, causing a wave of suspects to flee into Spain and sparking terror there. Witnesses, many of them children, described lurid tales of cannibalism, vampirism, and demonic sex. One of the judges, Pierre de Lancre, published a sensationalist account of this diabolical netherworld. With other accounts seemingly destroyed, this witch-hunt – France's largest – has always been seen through de Lancre's eyes. The narrative, re-told over the centuries, is that of a witch-hunt caused by a bigoted outsider.

Newly discovered evidence paints a very different, still darker picture, revealing a secret history underneath de Lancre's well-known tale. Far from an outside imposition, witchcraft was a home-grown problem. Panic had been building up over a number of years and the region was fractured by factionalism and a struggle over scarce resources. The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Jan Machielsen reveals that de Lancre was no outsider; he was a local partisan, married into the Basque nobility. Living at the Franco-Spanish border, the Basques were victims of geography. Geo-politics caused a local conflict which made the witch-hunt inevitable. The same forces eventually sent thousands of religious refugees from Spain to France where they, in turn, became new objects of popular fear and anger.

The Basque witch-hunt is justly infamous. This book shows that almost everything historians thought they knew about it is wrong.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard Davenport-Hines, "History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft" (William Collins, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Five hundred years ago, Thomas Wolsey endowed in Oxford a foundation he called Cardinal's College. Henry VIII, the monarch who dismissed and ruined him, re-established it as Christ Church later in his reign as an institution rich, spacious and imposing beyond any other.

It would help young men of Tudor England and beyond to study history, improve their minds, enlarge imaginations and broaden experience for the benefit of the realm - under the tutelage, of course, of some remarkable dons.

Generations of students had their intellects and world perspectives shaped by Oxford. It was believed that the study of history - touching the ancient world at one end and modern politics at the other - interlaced with geography, economics, political science, law and modern languages, would demonstrate the reasons for the success or failure of states. The student would be taught - in Sir Isaiah Berlin's memorable phrase - to 'spot the bunk!'

In History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft (William Collins, 2024), acclaimed historian Richard Davenport- Hines examines the intimate connections between British politics, statecraft and the Oxford University history course. He explores the temperaments, ideas, imagination, prejudices, intentions and influence of a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern history at Christ Church: Frederick York Powell, Arthur Hassall, Keith Feiling, J. C. Masterman, Roy Harrod, Patrick Gordon Walker, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Robert Blake; by turns an unruly Victorian radical, a staunch legitimist of the Protestant settlement, a Tory, a Whig, a Keynesian, a socialist, a rationalist who enjoyed mischief and a student of realpolitik.

These dons, with their challenging and sometimes contradictory opinions, explored with their pupils the wielding of power, the art of persuasion and the exercise of civil and political responsibility. Intelligent, strenuous and aware of the treachery and uncontrollability of things in the world, they studied the crimes, follies, misfortunes, incapacity, muddle and disloyalty of humankind in every generation. History in the House offers an unforgettable portrait of these men, their enduring influence and the significance of their arguments to public life today.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kenny Cupers, "The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design" (U Texas Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Kenny Cupers traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Dr. Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, this book interrogates the politics of life and earth underpinning this process. It demonstrates how approaches to modern housing, landscape design, and infrastructure planning are indebted to an understanding of planetary and human ecology fueled by settler colonialism and imperial ambition.

Dr. Cupers draws from both canonical and unknown sources and archives in Germany, Namibia, and Poland to situate Wilhelmine and Weimar design projects in an expansive discourse about the relationship between soil, settlement, and race. This reframing reveals connections between colonial officials planning agricultural hinterlands, garden designers proselytizing geopolitical theory, soil researchers turning to folklore, and Bauhaus architects designing modern communities according to functionalist principles. Ultimately, The Earth That Modernism Built shows how the conviction that we can design our way out of environmental crisis is bound to exploitative and divisive ways of inhabiting the earth.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Katya Motyl, "Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Dr. Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman.

Dr. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lucy Noakes, "Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain" (Manchester UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Death in war matters. It matters to the individual, threatened with their own death, or the death of loved ones. It matters to groups and communities who have to find ways to manage death, to support the bereaved and to dispose of bodies amidst the confusion of conflict. It matters to the state, which has to find ways of coping with mass death that convey a sense of gratitude and respect for the sacrifice of both the victims of war, and those that mourn in their wake.

Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (Manchester University Press, 2020) by Dr. Lucy Noakes is a social and cultural history of Britain in the Second World War places death at the heart of our understanding of the British experience of conflict. Drawing on a range of material, Dying for the Nation demonstrates just how much death matters in wartime and examines the experience, management and memory of death.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David J. Collins, SJ, "Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician" (Penn State UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, 2024). Albert the Great (1200–1280) was a prominent Dominican friar, a leading philosopher, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He also endorsed the use of magic.

Controversial though that stance would have been, Albert was never punished or repudiated for what he wrote. Albert’s reception followed instead a markedly different course, leading ultimately to his canonization by the Catholic Church in 1931. But his thoughts about magic have been debated for centuries. Disenchanting Albert the Great takes Albert’s contested reputation as a case study for the long and complex history surrounding the concept of magic and magic’s relationship to science and religion. Over the centuries, Albert was celebrated for his magic, or it was explained away—but he was never condemned. In the fifteenth century, members of learned circles first attempted to distance Albert from magic, with the goal of exonerating him of superstition, irrationality, and immorality. Disenchanting Albert the Great discusses the philosopher’s own understanding of magic; an early, adulatory phase of his reputation as a magician; and the three primary strategies used to exonerate Albert over the centuries.

In the end, Disenchanting Albert the Great tells the story of a thirteenth-century scholar who worked to disenchant the natural world with his ideas about magic but who himself would not be disenchanted until the modern era. This accessible and insightful history will appeal to those interested in Albert the Great, Catholic Church history, the history of magic, and Western understandings of the natural and the rational over time.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz, "Milton's Moving Bodies" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Today, I am excited to talk to Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz about the new collection of essays they have edited. Milton’s Moving Bodies (Northwestern University Press, 2024) gathers essays from Erin Webster, John Rumrich, Reginald Wilburn, Stephen Fallon, Achsah Guibbory, and Angelica Duran, among others. As our conversation will indicate, each essay has a unique and compelling approach to each of the title’s prompt “Milton’s” and “Moving” and “Bodies.”

Marissa Greenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press, 2015). She has served as a Fellow at UNM’s Division for Equity and Inclusion, where she advocates for academic communities of practice for faculty with disabilities.

Rachel Trubowtiz is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as the principal investigator in the NEH-funded “Milton and Mathematics” project.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Henri Colt, "Becoming Modigliani" (Rake Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 9 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Becoming Modigliani (Rake Press, 2024) is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.; Written by Dr. Henri Colt, an internationally recognized lung specialist, the book examines the artist's legend and Modigliani's creative journey from a medical perspective, from his birth in Livorno, Italy, to his tragic death in a paupers' hospital in Paris at the age of thirty-five, presumably from tuberculous meningitis.

Becoming Modigliani sheds light on the young man's chronic illnesses, addictions, and relationships with friends and lovers as he navigated the vibrant yet challenging world of early twentieth-century Bohemian Paris. Beginning with "Modi's" birth in 1884, the narrative is divided into five parts, seamlessly blending biographical elements with medical insights and a critical analysis of Modigliani's work among some of the greatest artists of the time. It also provides thoughtful descriptions of a changing society governed by the impact of infectious diseases, war, and a flourishing of other creative geniuses such as Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Guillaume Apollinaire.

With thirty-seven virtually standalone chapters, a preface and epilogue, three appendices, and a rich array of illustrations and references, this biography promises a profound and compassionate exploration of Modigliani's embattled world. In Becoming Modigliani, Dr. Colt's aim is to foster empathy and greater understanding by unraveling the intricate layers of Modigliani's existence. The result is a captivating and deeply researched tale that will resonate with a diverse audience of serious readers, art and medical history enthusiasts, sociologists, and anyone interested in the human spirit.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Pascal Lottaz and Ingemar Ottosson, "Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War: 1931-1945" (Routledge, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 8 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Lottaz and Ottosson explore the intricate relationship between neutral Sweden and Imperial Japan during the latter's 15 years of warfare in Asia and in the Pacific. While Sweden's relationship with European Axis powers took place under the premise of existential security concerns, the case of Japan was altogether different. Japan never was a threat to Sweden, militarily or economically. Nevertheless, Stockholm maintained a close relationship with Tokyo until Japan's surrender in 1945. This book explores the reasons for that and therefore provides a study on the rationale and the value of neutrality in the Long Second World War.

Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War: 1931-1945 (Routledge, 2021) is a valuable resource for scholars of the Second World War and of the history of neutrality.

Pascal Lottaz is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Waseda University, Japan.

Ingemar Ottosson is Associate Professor of History at Lund University, Sweden.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard J. Evans, "Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich" (Penguin, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 8 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Penguin Press, 2024), he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members.

Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist's eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies--like Goebbels, the regime's propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust's chief architect--to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten--like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler's People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions.

Nearly a century after Hitler's rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility--and even between pathological evil and rational choice--are never easily drawn.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Scott Anthony, "The Story of British Propaganda Film" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 7 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

'All art is propaganda,' wrote George Orwell, 'but not all propaganda is art.' Moving from World War I to the 'War on Terror' and beyond, The Story of British Propaganda Film (Bloomsbury, 2024) shows how the emergence of film as a global media phenomenon reshaped practices of propaganda, while new practices of propaganda in turn reshaped the use of the moving image. It explores classic examples of cinematic propaganda such as The Battle of the Somme (1916), Listen to Britain (1942) and Animal Farm (1954) alongside little-known newsreels, 'telemagazines' and digital media initiatives, in the process challenging our understanding of propaganda itself, and its many diverse manifestations.

Richly illustrated with unique material from the BFI National Archive, the book shows how central propaganda is to the development of British film, and how it has filtered our understanding of modern British history, from narratives of decolonisation to the celebration of pop culture and the meanings of the postwar consensus. In a contemporary moment so preoccupied with misinformation, malinformation and disinformation, Dr. Scott Anthony explains why the response to the ubiquity of the propaganda film has often turned out to be the production of ever more propaganda.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shannon Gayk, "Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 6 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard J. Golsan, "Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 6 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The trial of former SS lieutenant and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie was France's first trial for crimes against humanity. Known as the "Butcher of Lyon" during the Nazi occupation of that city from 1942 to 1944, Barbie tortured, deported, and murdered thousands of Jews and Resistance fighters. Following a lengthy investigation and the overcoming of numerous legal and other obstacles, the trial began in 1987 and attracted global attention.

Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity (U Toronto Press, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of the Barbie trial, including the investigation leading up to it, the legal background to the case, and the hurdles the prosecution had to clear in order to bring Barbie to justice. Richard J. Golsan examines the strategies used by the defence, the prosecution, and the lawyers who represented Barbie's many victims at the trial. The book draws from press coverage, articles, and books about Barbie and the trial published at the time, as well as recently released archival sources and the personal archives of lawyers at the trial.

Making the case that, despite the views of its many critics, the Barbie trial was a success in legal, historical, and pedagogical terms, Justice in Lyon details how the trial has had a positive impact on French and international law governing crimes against humanity.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

George Steinmetz, "The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 6 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

It is only in recent years that sociologists and historians of the social sciences have given empire the attention it deserves in histories of the discipline. In this context, George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press) is likely to be a touchstone text in these debates. Providing a new history of the French national discipline inspired by a ‘Neo-Bourdieusian Historical Sociology of Science’, Steinmetz highlights the centrality of ‘colonial sociology’, work centered on and/or created in the French overseas colonies and protectorates to the discipline’s development.

The French state, eager to consolidate its empire after World War II, were eager to draw on the expertise of sociologists in pursuing this goal; as Steinmetz shows therefore, during this period, a focus on ‘the colonial’ became central to French sociology to the extent that roughly half the French sociological field could be considered ‘colonial sociologists’. Despite this entanglement with the French state these colonial sociologists became strong critics of imperialism. Alongside the many stories he uncovers Steinmetz explores in depth the case of four such colonial sociologists: Raymond Aron, Jacque Berque, Georges Balandier and Pierre Bourdieu, seeking to show not just the centrality of colonialism to each writer but how their experiences of empire formed their basis for their future work; for example, how Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field can be traced to his experiences in colonial Algeria.

In our discussion, which also marks the imminent release of the text in paperback, George takes us through this hugely enlightening text, including reflections on why there may have been some ‘disciplinary amnesia’ in sociology’s unwillingness to confront empire, the relations between sociology and other imperial disciplines, how sociologists from the colonies developed their own work, the lessons from his text about how we should confront colonial sociologists and whether Durkheim had an ‘imperial gaze’.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and is the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), among other books.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alex Mayhew, "Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 4 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conﬂict on an industrial scale. In Belgium and France, the terrible capacity of modern weaponry destroyed the natural world and exposed previously held truths about military morale and tactics as falsehoods. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered some of the worst conditions that combatants have ever faced. How did they survive? What did it mean to them? How did they perceive these events?

Whilst the trenches of the Western Front have come to symbolise the futility and hopelessness of the Great War, in Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Alex Mayhew shows that English infantrymen rarely interpreted their experiences in this way. They sought to survive, navigated the crises that confronted them, and crafted meaningful narratives about their service. Making Sense of the Great War reveals the mechanisms that allowed them to do so.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Geneviève Rousselière, "Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 4 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed?

Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender.

Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß, "Antisemitism in the North: History and State of Research" (de Gruyter, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 4 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Is research on antisemitism even necessary in countries with a relatively small Jewish population? Absolutely, as Antisemitism in the North: History and State of Research (de Gruyter, 2019) shows. Compared to other countries, research on antisemitism in the Nordic countries (Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) is marginalized at an institutional and staffing level, especially as far as antisemitism beyond German fascism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust is concerned. Furthermore, compared to scholarship on other prejudices and minority groups, issues concerning Jews and anti-Jewish stereotypes remain relatively underresearched in Scandinavia - even though antisemitic stereotypes have been present and flourishing in the North ever since the arrival of Christianity, and long before the arrival of the first Jewish communities.This volume aims to help bring the study of antisemitism to the fore, from the medieval period to the present day. Contributors from all the Nordic countries describe the status of as well as the challenges and desiderata for the study of antisemitism in their respective countries.

Cordelia Heß, University of Greifswald, Germany and Jonathan Adams, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cindy Ermus, "The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 3 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

This episode features a conversation with Dr. Cindy Ermus on her recently published book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Published by Cambridge University Press, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 follows the Plague of Provence from 1720 to 1722 to understand new forms of contagion and its management. As one of the last major epidemics of the plague to strike Western Europe, the Plague of Provence generated a public health crisis that impacted the social, commercial, and diplomatic choices of France, which eventually spread the public health crisis to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and their overseas colonies. In this transnational, transoceanic study, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 reveals how crisis in one part of the globe transcends geographic boundaries and influences society, politics, and public health policy in regions far from the epicenter of disaster.

Cindy Ermus is the Charles and Linda Wilson Associate Professor in the History of Medicine, and Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She specializes in the history of medicine and the environment, especially catastrophe and public health crisis management, in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic World. In addition to The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), she is also the author of Urban Disasters (Cambridge UP, 2023). Currently, she is at work on a co-authored global history of epidemics (with Claire Edington). Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Verge, Stat News, and The Miami Herald, and she has been a guest on BBC World News, Univision, Al-Jazeera, and others. She is also co-series editor for France Overseas of the University of Nebraska Press, and co-founder and co-executive editor for the digital, open-access publication AgeofRevolutions.com.

Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Isidro Gonzalez (he/him) is a pre-doctoral fellow of History at Claremont McKenna College.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Adrian Tinniswood, "The Power and the Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War" (Basic Books, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 2 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour.

This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.

The Power and the Glory: the Country House Before the Great War (Basic Books, 2024) Dr. Adrian Tinniswood explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steven King et al., "In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 2 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions - from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse - has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary working people.

Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022) exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled collection of first-hand testimony - pauper letters and witness statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from poor law officials and advocates - the book reveals lives marked by hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for themselves and their communities.

Fascinating and compelling, the stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a new history of welfare from below.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Hui, "The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 1 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe's cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo--a "little studio"--and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.

Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own intimate studies. He looks at imaginary libraries in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and discusses how Renaissance painters depicted the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly bibliophiles. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to solitary reading. It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our own age of information surplus and charts the studiolo's influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.

Beautifully illustrated, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton UP, 2024) is at once a celebration of bibliophilia and a critique of bibliomania. Incorporating perspectives on Islamic, Mughal, and Chinese book cultures, it offers a timely and eloquent meditation on the ways we read and misread today.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Micah Alpaugh, "The People's Revolution of 1789" (Cornell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Micah Alpaugh argues that the forgotten actors in the French Revolution are the French people themselves. Sure, are numerous ways in which we today recall the French Revolution – Enlightened ideals, the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the Terror of 1794, the Directorate, the intrigues of Napoleon – but often forgotten are the people, their gripes, and their movement, especially in the formative years of 1788 and 1789.

In The People’s Revolution of 1789 (Cornell UP, 2024), Paris and the provincial France come alive. The Third Estate led the way, not the philosophes, not Court intrigues and empty treasury accounts, but a true desire for reform. Alpaugh’s work clearly shows the people’s desire to break the yoke of feudalism in the provinces, the hope of ending authoritarian decrees, the eagerness toward liberty, and the birth of a new France at home and in its colonial possessions.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Daniel Cowling, "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Germany, spring 1945. Hitler is dead and his armies crushed. Across the conquered Reich, cities lie devastated by Allied saturation bombing; their traumatised populations, exhausted and embittered by defeat, face a future of acute privation and hardship.

Such was the broken state of the nation in which a British civilian and military force arrived in the spring and summer of 1945 as explored in Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49 (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Daniel Cowling. Their zone of occupation was the northern and northwestern part of Germany, the country's former industrial heartland. Their task? To build democracy from the ruins of Hitler's Reich, and, having defeated Nazism on the battlefield, to 'win the peace' by eradicating Nazism from German hearts and minds.

As well as offering a vivid narrative of the British occupation in political and military terms, from the Potsdam Conference to the Berlin Airlift, Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans explores the day-to-day experiences of the ordinary Britons who worked for the Control Commission for Germany between 1945 and 1949. Some reconstructed bridges and schools, supervised the destruction of military matériel and brought fugitive Nazis to justice; while others became entangled in black marketeering, corruption and sexual scandal. In time, they would find themselves on the front line of the Cold War, as irreconcilable tensions divided Europe between East and West.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anne B. Rodrick, "Lecturing the Victorians: Knowledge-Based Culture and Participatory Citizenship" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

“We are a much-lectured people,” wrote Robert Spence Watson in 1897. Beginning at mid-century, cities and towns across England used the popular lecture for purposes ranging from serious education to effervescent entertainment and from regional pride to imperial belonging. Over time, the popular lecture became the quintessential embodiment of Victorian knowledge-based culture, which itself ranged from the production of new knowledge in the most elite of learned societies to the consumption of established knowledge in middle-class clubs and the hundreds of humble mechanics' institutions initially founded to provide scientific instruction to workers.

What did the “average” Victorian talk and think about? How did the knowledge-based culture of lecture and debate enable men and women to demonstrate both civic engagement and cultural competence? How does this knowledge-based culture and its changing expression give us ways to look at Victorian citizenship long before the extension of the franchise? With engaging and accessible prose Anne Rodrick draws from a variety of primary sources to provide fascinating answers to these pertinent questions.

Based on the analysis of several thousand lectures and debates delivered over more than 50 years, Lecturing the Victorians: Knowledge-Based Culture and Participatory Citizenship (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Anne Rodrick digs deeply into what those individuals below the most elite levels thought, heard, debated, and claimed as a badge of cultural competence. By the turn of the 20th century, the popular lecture was competing for attention with new institutions of leisure and of higher education, and the discourse surrounding its place in contemporary England helps illuminate important debates over access to and deployment of knowledge and culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denys Turner, "Dante the Theologian" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole.

That is the starting-point of Dante the Theologian (Cambridge UP, 2022). In giving theology fresh centrality, the author argues that theologians themselves should find, when they turn to Dante Alighieri, a compelling resource: whether they do so as historians of fourteenth-century Christian thought, or as interpreters of the religious issues of our own times. Expertly guiding his readers through the structure and content of the Commedia, Denys Turner reveals – in pacy and muscular prose – how Dante's aim for his masterpiece is to effect what it signifies. It is this quasi-sacramental character that renders it above all a theological treatise: whose meaning is intelligible only through poetry. Turner's Dante 'knows that both poetry and theology are necessary to the essential task and that each without the other is deficient.'

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrew Fleming, "The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda" (Birlinn, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

When the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, were evacuated in 1930, the archipelago at ‘the edge of the world’ lost its permanent population after five millennia.

It has long been accepted that the islanders’ failure to adapt to the modern world was its demise. Andrew Fleming overturns the traditional view. Unafraid of highlighting dark times, he shows how they sacrificed their reputation as an uncorrupted, ideal society to embrace and exploit the tourist trade. Creating a prestigious tweed, exporting the ancestors of today’s Hebridean sheep, the islanders gained access to consumer goods and learned how to play politics to their advantage.

The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda (Birlinn, 2024) by Dr. Andrew Fleming tells the absorbing and eventful story of St Kilda from earliest times, up to the evacuation and its aftermath. Previously untapped sources and fresh insights bring to life the personalities, feelings, attitudes and rich culture of the islanders themselves, as well as the numerous outsiders who engaged with the remote island community.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Leila K. Norako, "Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500" (Cornell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500 (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Leila Norako asks why medieval romances reimagining the crusades ending in a Christian victory circulated in England with such abundance after the 1291 Muslim reconquest of Acre, the last of the Latin crusader states in the Holy Land, and what these texts reveal about the cultural anxieties of late medieval England. Dr. Norako highlights the impact that the Ottoman victory and subsequent massacre of Christian prisoners at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 had on intensifying the popularity of what she calls recovery romance.

These two episodes inspired a sense of urgency over the fate of the Holy Land and of Latin Christendom itself, resulting in the proliferation of romances in which crusading English kings like Richard I and anachronistic legends like King Arthur not only reconquered Jerusalem but committed genocidal violence against the Muslims. These romances, which—as Norako argues—also influenced Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, conjure fantasies of an ascendant global Christendom by rehearsing acts of conquest and cultural annihilation that were impossible to realize in the late Middle Ages. Emphasizing the tension in these texts between nostalgia and anticipation that fuels their narrative momentum, Monstrous Fantasies also explores how the cultural desires for European and Christian hegemony that recovery romances versified were revived in the wake of the so-called wars on terror in the twenty-first century in such films as Kingdom of Heaven and American Sniper.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fiona Smyth, "Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century" (Manchester UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument?

Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Fiona Smyth tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians who set out to answer this question. Beginning at the turn of the century, their innovative experiments, which took place at sites ranging from Herbert Baker's Assembly Chamber in Delhi to Abbey Road Studios and a disused munitions factory near Perivale, would come to define the field of 'architectural acoustics'. They culminated in 1951 with the opening of the Royal Festival Hall - the first building to be designed for musical tone.

Deeply researched and richly illustrated, Pistols in St Paul's brings to light a scientific quest spanning half a century, one that demonstrates the power of international cooperation in the darkest of times.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Roberta Pergher, "Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922–1943" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

With Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922–1943 (Cambridge UP, 2017), Roberta Pergher transforms our understanding of Fascist rule. Examining Fascist Italy's efforts to control the antipodes of its realm - the regions annexed in northern Italy after the First World War, and Italy's North African colonies - she shows how the regime struggled to imagine and implement Italian sovereignty over alien territories and peoples.

Contrary to the claims of existing scholarship, Fascist settlement policy in these regions was not designed to solve an overpopulation problem, but to bolster Italian claims to rule in an era that prized self-determination and no longer saw imperial claims as self-evident. Professor Pergher explores the character and impact of Fascist settlement policy and the degree to which ordinary Italians participated in and challenged the regime's efforts to Italianize contested territory. Employing models and concepts from the historiography of empire, she shows how Fascist Italy rethought the boundaries between national and imperial rule.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jill Norman, "The English Table: Our Food Through the Ages" (Reaktion, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The English Table: Our Food through the Ages (Reaktion, 2024) by Jill Norman is a delectable journey through the culinary history of England, from ancient times to the present day. The book sheds light on the evolution of English cuisine, which essentially was the food of the rich – the poor had to manage as best they could until the 20th century. Unveiling the secrets hidden in period cookery books, from the earliest known scroll of recipes – the 14th-century Forme of Cury – to modern classics such as Jane Grigson’s English Food, each chapter is a culinary time capsule. Enriched with historical context, the book features carefully curated recipes from each era, offering a mouth-watering glimpse into the flavours that have shaped English culinary heritage.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dennis Romano, "Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, "another world." During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival. When the city fell on hard times following the collapse of the Republic in 1797, a darker vision of Venice as a place of decay, disease, and death took hold. Today tourists from around the globe flock to the world heritage site as rising sea levels threaten its very foundations.

Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City (Oxford UP, 2023) reveals the adaptations to its geographic setting that have been a constant feature of living on water from Venice's origins to the present. It examines the lives of the women and men, noble and common, rich and poor, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, who built not only the city but also its vast empire that stretched from Northern Italy to the eastern Mediterranean. It details the urban transformations that Venice underwent in response to environmental vulnerability, industrialization, and mass tourism. Alongside the city's commercial prominence has been its dramatically changing political role, including its power as a city-state, regional stronghold, and overseas empire, as well as its impact on the development of fascism. Throughout, Dennis Romano highlights the city's cultural achievements in architecture, painting, and music, particularly opera.

This richly illustrated volume offers a stunning portrait of this most singular of cities.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Owen Ware, "Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany" (Routledge, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Owen Ware (Routledge, 2024) takes the reader on a tour through the reception of Yoga philosophies in nineteenth-century German and the early twentieth century. European luminaries like Schlegel, Hegel, von Günderrode, Schelling, Humbolt, and Müller all engaged with works like the Bhagavad Gītā and Yogā Sūtras, though in very different ways, some reading yogic thought as entailing a threatening nihilism, others lauding it as superlatively philosophical. Ware shows how their responses to Indian thought illuminates our understanding of post-Kantian philosophy and its anxieties over pantheism indebted to Spinoza. He concludes with two chapters on a range of Indian scholars from Swami Vivekananda to K. C. Bhattacharyya, exploring how their work engages with this history of European readings, grappling with themes of freedom, morality, and devotion in yoga.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ramie Targoff, "Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance" (Knopf, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024) by Dr. Ramie Targoff, discover the lives and work of four ambitious Renaissance women who, against all odds, made themselves heard-and read-in the time of Shakespeare

In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Dr. Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist, who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England's most infamous inheritance battles.

These women had husbands and children to care for and little support for their art, yet against all odds they defined themselves as writers, finding rooms of their own where doors had been shut for centuries. Dr. Targoff flings them open to uncover the treasures left by these extraordinary women; in the process, she helps us see the Renaissance in a fresh light, creating a richer understanding of history and offering a much-needed female perspective on life in Shakespeare's day.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

George Severs, "Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.

But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nicholas Baer, "Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism" (U California Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Baer reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Dr. Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history.

Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tom Theuns, "Protecting Democracy in Europe: Pluralism, Autocracy and the Future of the EU" (Hurst, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The European Union has a big problem—a potentially fatal one. How should it deal with a member state or states that reject democracy and the rule of law?

So far, not even Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has turned full-blown authoritarian. However, his 14 unbroken years of “illiberal democracy”, his constitution rewriting, creeping media control, challenges to judicial independence, and calls for popular resistance against the EU are becoming less easy to ignore or accommodate.

Yet, the EU’s tools to address democratic backsliding are blunt and its institutions are reluctant to use them. Above all, while a member state can leave the union, the union itself has no power to expel a club member that breaks its core democratic rules.

In Protecting Democracy in Europe: Pluralism, Autocracy and the Future of the EU (Hurst, 2024), Tom Theuns looks back at the history of this design fault and how to put it right. He writes: "EU member states cannot both permit a frankly autocratic state to continue to be a member state of the Union and at the same tie pretend to be committed to democracy"

Tom Theuns is a Senior Assistant Professor of Political Theory and European Politics at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science and an Associate Researcher at Sciences Po in Paris.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at twenty4two on Substack.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lucian Staiano-Daniels, "The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (Cambridge UP, 2024), Lucian Staino-Daniles uses the transnational story of a single regiment to examine how ordinary soldiers, military women, and officers negotiated their lives within the chaos and uncertainty of the seventeenth century. Raised in Saxony by Wolf von Mansfeld in spring 1625 in the service of the King of Spain, the Mansfeld Regiment fought for one and a half years in northern Italy before collapsing, leaving behind a trail of dead civilians, murder, internal lawsuits...and copious amounts of paperwork. Their story reveals the intricate social world of seventeenth-century mercenaries and how this influenced how they lived and fought. Through this rich microhistorical case study, Lucian Staiano-Daniels sheds new light on key seventeenth-century developments like the military revolution and the fiscal-military state, which is supported by statistical analysis drawn from hundreds of records from the Thirty Years War. This pathbreaking book unifies the study of war and conflict with social history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Agustina Paglayan, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state's desire to control its citizens.

Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education (Princeton UP, 2024), Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or fueled by democratic ideals, or even aimed at eradicating illiteracy or improving skills. It was motivated instead by elites' fear of the masses--and the desire to turn the "savage," "unruly," and "morally flawed" children of the lower classes into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws.

Drawing on unparalleled evidence from two centuries of education provision in Europe and the Americas, and deploying rich data that capture the expansion of primary education and its characteristics, this sweeping book offers a political history of primary schools that is both broad and deep. Paglayan shows that governments invested in primary schools when internal threats heightened political elites' anxiety around mass violence and the breakdown of social order.

Two hundred years later, the original objective of disciplining children remains at the core of how most public schools around the world operate. The future of education systems--and their ability to reduce poverty and inequality--hinges on our ability to understand and come to terms with this troubling history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Laure Astourian, "The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema" (Indiana UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema (Indiana UP, 2024) traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze. Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Breathless and La Jetée, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema.

Here's the link to Astourian's essay on Jean Rouch's Moi, Un Noir discussed in the podcast.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alison Stone, "Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900 (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first study of women's philosophies of art in long nineteenth-century Britain. It looks at seven women spanning the time from the Enlightenment to the beginning of modernism. They are Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, Emilia Dilke, and Vernon Lee. The central issue that concerned them was how art related to morality and religion. Baillie and Martineau treated art as an agency of moral instruction, whereas Dilke and Lee argued that art must be made for beauty's sake. Barbauld, Jameson, and Cobbe thought that beauty and religion were linked, while other women believed that art and religion must be decoupled.

Other topics explored are gender and genius, tragedy, literary realism, why we enjoy the sufferings of fictional characters, the hierarchy of the art-forms, whether art can transcend its historical circumstances, and critical issues around the artistic canon. Examining the print culture that made these women's interventions possible, this book shows that these women were doing a particular kind of philosophy of art, which was interdisciplinary and closely tied to artistic criticism and practice. The book traces how these seven women influenced one another, as well as engaging with their male contemporaries. But unlike their male interlocutors, these women have been unjustly left out of narratives about the history of aesthetics. By including these women, we can enrich and broaden our understanding of the history of philosophy of art.

Alison Stone is a British philosopher. She is a Professor of European Philosophy in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Conor McCabe, "The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly, 1889-1898" (Iskra Books, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Dr. Conor McCabe is a research fellow with Queen’s Business School, Queens University Belfast. He is the author of numerous policy and research reports and is also the author of two Irish political economy books: Sins of the Father (2013), and Money (2018). He works mainly with grassroots political, trade union, artist, and community groups, exploring the dynamics of theory and action for societal change

In this interview he discusses his new edited collection of the early writings of James Connolly.

The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly, 1889-1898 (Iskra Books, 2024) unveils the formative years of one of the 20th century's most influential socialist thinkers and revolutionary leaders. In this groundbreaking collection, historian Conor McCabe brings together Connolly's earliest articles, letters, and speeches, many of which have remained unpublished or inaccessible for over a century. These writings offer a rare glimpse into Connolly's evolving political thought as he navigated the fight for workers' rights, socialism, and Irish independence. Through his sharp critiques of capitalism and imperialism, Connolly laid the intellectual groundwork for the radical movements that would later define his legacy.

This collection not only captures Connolly's intellectual rigor but also his deep personal commitment to the working class and the oppressed. From his early involvement in Scottish socialist circles to his growing leadership in Ireland, Connolly's writings reveal a thinker who was as much a man of action as of theory. His early works show the seeds of what would become his revolutionary strategy—a blend of Marxist analysis, Irish republicanism, and a fierce advocacy for international solidarity.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Islamophobia, France and Muslim Political Subjectivity

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 8 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In this interview, recorded for Islamophobia Awareness Month, Hizer Mir and Chella Ward talk to Kawtar Najib and Rayan Freschi about Islamophobia in France. They discuss why France is a special case and how its policies of ‘systematic obstruction’ hinder the lives of Muslims and contribute to global Islamophobia.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Filippo Gianferrari, "Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 6 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and for the democratization of citizenship.

In Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2024), Filippo Gianferrari demonstrate that Dante Alighieri's education and oeuvre sit squarely at the heart of this historical and cultural transition and provide an ideal case study for investigating the impact of Latin education on the consolidation of autonomous vernacular literature in the Middle Ages, a fascinating and still largely unexamined phenomenon. On the basis of manuscript and archival evidence, Gianferrari reconstructs the contents, practice, and readings of Latin instruction in the urban schools of fourteenth-century Florence. It also shows Dante's continuous engagement with this culture of teaching in his poetics, thus revealing his contribution to the expansion of vernacular literacy and education. The book argues that to achieve his unprecedented position of authority as a vernacular intellectual, Dante conceived his poetic works as an alternative educational program for laypeople, who could read and write in the vernacular but had little or no proficiency in Latin. By reconstructing the culture of literacy shared by Dante and his lay readers, Dante's Education shifts critical attention from his legacy as Italy's national poet, and a "great books" author in the Western canon, to his experience as a marginal intellectual engaged in advancing a marginal culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gareth Millward, "Sick Note: A History of the British Welfare State" (Oxford UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 5 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Sick Note: A History of the British Welfare State (Oxford UP, 2022) is a history of how the British state asked, 'who is really sick?' Tracing medical certification for absence from work from 1948 to 2010, Gareth Millward shows that doctors, employers, employees, politicians, media commentators, and citizens concerned themselves with measuring sickness. At various times, each understood that a signed note from a doctor was not enough to 'prove' whether someone was really sick. Yet, with no better alternative on offer, the sick note survived in practice and in the popular imagination - just like the welfare state itself.

Sick Note reveals the interplay between medical, employment, and social security policy. The physical note became an integral part of working and living in Britain, while the term 'sick note' was often deployed rhetorically as a mocking nickname or symbol of Britain's economic and political troubles. Using government policy documents, popular media, internet archives, and contemporary research, Millward covers the evolution of medical certification and the welfare state since the Second World War, demonstrating how sickness and disability policies responded to demographic and economic changes - though not always satisfactorily for administrators or claimants. Moreover, despite the creation of 'the fit note' in 2010, the idea of 'the sick note' has remained. With the specific challenges posed by the global pandemic in the early 2020s, Sick Note shows how the question of 'who is really sick?' has never been straightforward and will continue to perplex the British state.

This episode is hosted by Dr Dion Georgiou, an Associate Lecturer in History at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the writer of The Academic Bubble – a newsletter covering contemporary history, politics, and culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Graham Brady, "Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers" (Ithaka, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 4 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers (Ithaka, 2024) by Sir Graham Brady provides an insider’s look at the power struggles, leadership challenges, and inner workings of the UK’s Conservative Party, especially during the upheaval of Brexit. Brady, as Chairman of the influential 1922 Committee, reveals how the party’s leadership dynamics and strategic decisions have shaped British politics in recent years.

One of the central themes is leadership and power. Brady examines Conservative leaders like David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson, exploring their unique approaches to leadership and the challenges each faced, particularly around Brexit. The book highlights the role of the 1922 Committee, which often acts as a gatekeeper in leadership transitions and plays a critical role in maintaining—or challenging—party unity.

Brexit is a major focus, illustrating how the referendum and subsequent negotiations divided the party and redefined its priorities. Brady provides an inside look at the differing strategies of May and Johnson, from May’s struggles to secure a deal to Johnson’s assertive push to “Get Brexit Done.”

The book also explores party unity and division, revealing how internal conflicts, factionalism, and ideological rifts tested the party’s cohesion, especially during Brexit. Brady explains how these tensions influenced not only party policies but also public perception.

Additionally, Brady shares personal reflections from his time in a key leadership position, offering readers a behind-the-scenes view of critical decisions and events. He also discusses the impact of media and public opinion, emphasizing how they shape the strategies and images of political leaders.

Overall, Kingmaker provides a comprehensive view of the Conservative Party’s recent history, giving readers a unique perspective on political leadership, the challenges of Brexit, and the often-hidden forces influencing British politics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hannah Weaver, "Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past" (Cornell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 4 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Weaver examines the mediaeval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorised as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of mediaeval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in mediaeval historiography can be found in these altered narratives of the past.

For Weaver, historiographical interpolation constitutes the traces of active experimentation with how best to write history, particularly the history of Britain. Historians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain recognized the difficulty of enfolding complex events into a linear chronology and embraced innovative textual methods of creating history. Focusing on the Brut tradition but also analysing the long history of interpolated historiography, including the Bayeux Embroidery, Experimental Histories offers a new interpretation of generic remixing in mediaeval writing about the past. Drawing on both manuscript studies and the new formalism, it shows that the practice of inserting materials from romance and hagiography allowed creative revisers to explore how lived events relate to passing time. By embracing interpolation, Weaver provides lively insights into the ways that time becomes history and human actors experience time.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Simeon Koole, "Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 4 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present.

Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge.

With imagination and verve, Intimate Subjects offers a new way of theorizing the body and the senses, as well as a new way of thinking about embodiment and vulnerability today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Thomas J. Sojka, Lecturer in History at Southern New Hampshire University. He is currently writing a book about elite social life in interwar Britain. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as the Journal of British Studies, Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mark Stoyle, "A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549" (Yale UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 3 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Western Rising of 1549 was the most catastrophic event to occur in Devon and Cornwall between the Black Death and the Civil War. Beginning as an argument between two men and their vicar, the rebellion led to a siege of Exeter, savage battles with Crown forces, and the deaths of 4,000 local men and women. It represents the most determined attempt by ordinary English people to halt the religious reformation of the Tudor period.

In A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 (Yale UP, 2022) Mark Stoyle tells the story of the so-called “Prayer Book Rebellion” in full. Correcting the accepted narrative in a number of places, Stoyle shows that the government in London saw the rebels as a real threat. He demonstrates the importance of regional identity and emphasizes that religion was at the heart of the uprising. This definitive account brings to life the stories of the thousands of men and women who acted to defend their faith almost five hundred years ago.

Mark Stoyle is professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton. An expert on Tudor and Stuart Britain, he is the author of seven books, including Soldiers and Strangers and The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brian Groom, "Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World" (Harpernorth, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 2 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Long before Manchester gave the world titans of industry, comedy, music and sport, it was the cosmopolitan Roman fort of Mamucium. But it was as the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution that Manchester really made its mark on the world stage. A place built on hard work and innovation, it is no coincidence that the digital age began here too, with the world’s first stored-program computer, Baby.

A city as radical as it is revolutionary, Manchester has always been a political hotbed. The Peterloo Massacre is immortalised in British folklore and the city was a centre for pioneering movements such as Chartism. Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst hailed from here and the city still treasures its wilful independence.

Manchester’s spirited individuality has carried through into its artistic output too, bringing the world Anthony Burgess, L.S. Lowry, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Division and Oasis. Mention United or City almost anywhere and you’ll find fans, and opinions.

Until Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World (Harpernorth, 2024), this magnificent city did not have its definitive history. From Brian Groom, the author of the bestselling Northerners, this work of unrivalled authority and breadth tells the story of a changing place and its remarkable people.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Georgia Henley, "Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 1 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Georgia Henley considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages.

Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alistaire Tallent, "Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France" (U Delaware Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Alistaire Tallent joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France (University of Delaware Press, 2024). Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, domestic sphere. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use the desire they arouse, the professional skills they develop, and the network of female friends they create to exploit, humiliate, and financially ruin wealthy and powerful men. In pursuing their desires, the putains challenge contemporary notions of womanhood and expose the injustices of ancien-régime France. Until the French Revolution spelled the end of the genre, these novels proposed not only an appealing libertine utopia in which libertine women enjoy the same benefits as their male counterparts but also entirely new ways of looking at systems of power, gender, and sexuality.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Margarette Lincoln, "Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty" (Yale UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends.

Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in the 1880s promoted woollen underwear to keep colds at bay. Beautification and the pursuit of health may seem all-consuming today, but their history is long and fantastically varied.

Ranging across the last four hundred years, Margarette Lincoln examines women's health and beauty in fascinating detail. Through first-hand accounts and reports of physicians, quacks, and advertising, Lincoln captures women's lived experience of consuming beauty products, and the excitement--and trauma--of adopting the latest fashion trends.

Considering everything from body sculpture, diet, and exercise to skin, teeth, and hair, Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty (Yale UP, 2024) is a vibrant account of women's body-fashioning--and shows how intimately these practices are related to community and identity throughout history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Deborah Valenze, "The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History" (Yale UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics

With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production.

Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the varied ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, food studies, and animal studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus’s essay, where activities such as hunting, gathering, herding, and gardening were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus’s omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity.

By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History (Yale UP, 2023) invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing.

Deborah Valenze is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College. A recipient of numerous fellowships, she has written four previous books on British culture and economic life. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and New York City.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Seth Kimmel, "The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U Chicago Press, 2024) Seth Kimmel explores the material history of libraries to challenge debates about the practice and politics of information management in early modern Europe. Ancient bibliographers and medieval scholastics, Kimmel reminds us, imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but for early modern scholars, the world was likewise a projection of the library. This notion, at first glance, may seem counterintuitive, especially as reports from late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers in the New World slowly refined-but also destabilized-the Old World's cosmographic and historical consensus.

Yet the mapping and ethnographic projects commissioned by early modern rulers, like Spain's Charles V and Philip I, anxious to comprehend and inventory their far-flung territorial possessions in the Americas, nevertheless relied heavily on methods of information management honed in the library. Kimmel focuses on the period that marked the birth of both print and transatlantic exploration. Through close readings of a wide array of materials-library catalogues, marginal glosses, book indexes, biblical commentaries, dictionaries and thesauruses, natural histories, and maps-Kimmel shows how the book-lover's dream of total knowledge in an era of "too much information" helped to shape the early modern period's expanded sense of the world itself. The book should find its audience among scholars of early modern European history, specialists in the early modern cultures of the Mediterranean and Iberia, and a range of students interested in the history of the book and of maps.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Beatrice de Graaf, "Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. With the threat of war and revolutionary terror still looming large, the coalition launched an unprecedented experiment to re-establish European security. With over one million troops remaining in France, they established the Allied Council to mitigate the threat of war and terror and to design and consolidate a system of deterrence. The Council transformed the norm of interstate relations into the first, modern system of collective security in Europe. Drawing on the records of the Council and the correspondence of key figures such as Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington and Alexander I, Beatrice de Graaf tells the story of Europe's transition from concluding a war to consolidating a new order.

In her new book Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge UP, 2020), she reveals how, long before commercial interest and economic considerations on scale and productivity dictated and inspired the project of European integration, the common denominator behind this first impulse for a unification of Europe in norms and institutions was the collective fight against terror.

George Giannakopoulos is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. He has recently guest edited the special issue Britain, European Civilization and the idea of Liberty” for the History of European Ideas (2020)

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and coastal communities. The baseline for these measurements—sea level—may seem unremarkable, a long-familiar zero point for altitude. But as Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveals, the history of defining and measuring sea level is intertwined with national ambitions, commercial concerns, and shifting relationships between people and the ocean.

Sea Level: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg provides a detailed and innovative account of how mean sea level was first defined, how it became the prime reference point for surveying and cartography, and how it emerged as a powerful mark of humanity’s impact on the earth. With Dr. Hardenberg as our guide, we traverse the muddy spaces of Venice and Amsterdam, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Panama and Suez canals, and the Himalayan foothills. Born out of Enlightenment studies of physics and quantification, sea level became key to state-sponsored public works, colonial expansion, Cold War development of satellite technologies, and recognizing the climate crisis. Mean sea level, Hardenberg reveals, is not a natural occurrence—it has always been contingent, the product of people, places, politics, and evolving technologies. As global warming transforms the globe, Hardenberg reminds us that a holistic understanding of the ocean and its changes requires a multiplicity of reference points.

A fascinating story that revises our assumptions about land and ocean alike, Sea Level calls for a more nuanced understanding of this baseline, one that allows for new methods and interpretations as we navigate an era of unstable seas.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sonja Stojanovic, "Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French (Liverpool UP, 2023) is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains.

The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.

Maureen G. Shanahan, J.D., PhD is Professor of Art History, School of Art, Design & Art History, James Madison University

Machine Modernisms, Masculinity, and the Trauma of War: The Art of Fernand Léger (Penn State University Press, May 2024).

Colonial Wounds / Postcolonial Repair, exhibition catalog (University of Virginia 2019)

Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon (University Press of Florida 2016)

LINKED IN.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anne Higonnet, "Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution" (Norton, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cages and massive, rigid garments that women had been obliged to wear for centuries. They slipped into light, mobile dresses, cropped their hair short, wrapped themselves in shawls, and championed the handbag. Juliette made the new style stand for individual liberty.

The erotic audacity of these fashion revolutionaries conquered Europe, starting with Napoleon. Everywhere a fashion magazine could reach, women imitated the news coming from Paris. It was the fastest and most total change in clothing history. Two centuries ahead of its time, it was rolled back after only a decade by misogynist rumors of obscene extravagance.

As Dr. Anne Higonnet shows in Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution (Norton, 2024), new evidence allows the real fashion revolution to be told. This is a story for our time: of a revolution that demanded universal human rights, of self-creation, of women empowering each other, and of transcendent glamor.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Amanda Shoaf Vincent, "Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris's New Parks, 1977-1995" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the space of about two decades, five major parks were proposed, designed, and created in Paris. Some emerged from competitions between professional landscape architects, others were imagined by planners working for the city, all represented a shift in what Amanda Shoaf Vincent calls “post-modern” understandings of the role of parks and garden in the city.

In Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris's New Parks, 1977-1995 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Vincent explores the development of parks as “cultural objects” in Paris’ urban landscape, helping students and scholars of urbanism, architecture, and social and cultural history understand how parks served not only as places where people could sit, read a book, or watch their children play, but also as places where new theories about leisure and life in the city played out. In our conversation, Vincent explains how she developed this study out of a broader interest in architecture and urban space and takes listeners through each of the major parks that are the focus of her book: from Maine-Montparnasse high above the Montparnasse train station on the Left Bank to Les Halles in the center of Paris to the Park de Bercy, just a short walk away from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Along the way, we talk about gardeners, ironwork, and a surprising lack of park scandals in the City of Light and learn to “take parks a little more seriously,” as Vincent herself has learned to do.

Amanda Shoaf Vincent is Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at Wake Forest University. Her research focuses on the representation and production of designed spaces (from parks to gardens to cities and buildings) in twentieth and twenty-first century France. Her work has previously appeared in French Cultural Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and Contemporary French Civilization, among other venues.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Corey Ross tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.

Spanning the major European empires of the period, Dr. Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.

Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Meghana Joshi, "Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin" (Berghahn, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin (Berghahn Books, 2024) by Dr. Meghana Joshi engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context.

This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jacques Bertrand, "Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Southeast Asia Program Publications/Cornell UP, 2022) asks why the peace process stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities.

Winning by Process argues that stalled conflicts are more than pauses or stalemates. "Winning by process," as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state's ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued to impose their vision of a centralized state even as they appeared to support federalism.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jamie Furlong and Will Jennings, "The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

What is the connection between where people live and how they vote? In The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales (Oxford UP, 2024), Jamie Furlong a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster and Will Jennings Associate Dean Research & Enterprise and Professor at the University of Southampton, analyse the continuities and changes in history of party support at general elections. The book uses a variety of methods- and a huge range of data- to critically interrogate the idea of ‘left behind’ places, as well as interrogating the long term social, economic, and cultural changes associated with those places and that idea. Rich in detail, including case studies of places that stand out within the overall trends, and accessibly written, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary politics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rochelle Gurstein, "Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art" (Yale UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true.

Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Theo Williams, "Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation" (Verso, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Theo Williams’ Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation (Verso, 2022) shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. A history that runs from 1929 to the years after WWII here we see a number of significant activists and intellectuals such as George Padmore, C.L.R. James, Jomo Kenyatta and Amy Ashwood Garvey, establish significant groups on the British Left and how they related to the dominant groups in this field, most notably the Communist Party of Great Britian (CPGB) and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). As Williams shows, while these activists continually emphasised the need to combine international socialism with colonial liberation, these other groups were often resistant to this, with the CPGB responding to the shifting demands of international communism and the ILP facing internal splits on the role of colonialism. Despite these frustrations, these activists develop a significant radical tradition which doesn’t reject the British Left, but rather changes it, as the events during, and after WWII show.

As our conversation discusses Williams is encouraging us to reconsider this history, not just in order to correct the historical record and more fully account for the place of this black radical tradition within the British left, but also to think about the continuing impacts of decolonisation and what this may mean for contemporary demands to ‘decolonise the university’.

Your host Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow with research interests in social theory and the history of sociology. He is the author of a number of books, including G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan)

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Helena Taylor, "Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 04:00:00 +0000

Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, translators, poets, playwrights, and essayists to see how they both reacted to and in turn shaped cultural discourses, especially around learned women and the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. From Marie de Gournay's polemic translations to the conteuses fairy tales, Greco-Roman culture provided inspiration, authorization, and means of self-fashioning for a wide range of women writers.

Women Writing Antiquity is perfect for readers interested in classical reception, women's writers, authorial strategies, gender history, and French literature.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A Deep Dive on Karl Marx's "Capital"

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 7 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Over 150 years ago, Marx published the first volume of Capital, a systematic and voluminous account of capitalism, from the economic bedrock all the way up to the social and political consequences. The book itself would stand as one of the most influential and decisive texts of all time, proving to be a wildly fruitful foundation for further research into everything it touched, and also becoming a cornerstone text for various political movements that would try and develop the critical analysis into a workable theory of action and social transformation.

Even after its 1867 publication, the text remained a fluid, dynamic object, with a 2nd edition being put out in Marx’s own lifetime and a 3rd and 4th edition being published posthumously under the stewardship of Friedrich Engels. These later editions would be the foundations for the first two translations of the text into English, first by Edward Aveling and Sam Moore in 1887, and then by Ben Fowkes in 1976. Now in 2024, we can add a third version of the text in English.

Translated by Paul Reitter and edited by both Paul Reitter and Paul North, Marx has been given a fresh voice with a new edition of the text that includes a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts. The introduction by Paul North helps situate the text in Marx’s larger output, showing how it was the culmination of an early political radicalization that took time to develop into a more systematic critique. Paul Reitter’s preface explains some of the difficulties of translating such a large and complex text, and will help readers appreciate the care Marx chose his words with. Substantial editorial endnotes will help contextualize obscure phrases and terms, helping readers keep up with the massive scope of Marx’s vision as he pulls information, inspiration and ideas from economics, philosophy, literature and history into a cohesive yet dynamic vision of what the ceaseless pursuit of value was doing to our world, and what might be done about it.

For this interview, there are two parts. For the first hour, Paul Reitter and Paul North sat together and discussed the main ideas of the text, the various ways it tries to develop its critical perspective and its continued importance. For the second hour, Paul Reitter stayed to discuss some passages in detail, explaining the various choices made and roads not traveled, and how he tried to bring various aspects of Marx’s voice into English.

Translation is at least as much an art as a science, one that demands hermeneutic sensitivity as much as a knowledge of which words correspond to which. Reitter is a humble practitioner of what is often thankless work and makes no claim to being the final word on how best to translate Marx, but his contribution will absolutely raise the bar and give readers who’ve never read Marx an excellent place to start, and will give those familiar with the text a chance to see it in new light. To borrow a phrase from Marx himself, this new translation is as royal a road to science as we could ask for.

Paul Reitter is a professor of Germanic languages at Ohio State University.

Paul North is the Maurice Natanson professor of Germanic languages and literature at Yale University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Pamela O. Long on the Long, Long, Long History of Technology

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 7 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the history of ancient and Medieval technologies. The pair use Long’s forthcoming book, Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), as a launching point but also cover her previous work, especially including Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2018), which, among other things, contains deep reflections on the history of maintenance. Long and Vinsel also discuss Long’s future projects, including a fascinating sounding study of the history of sumptuary laws - regulations on expenditures of luxury goods, including food, clothing, and personal items - and their connection to technological change. GET EXCITED!

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 6 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marco Bastos presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation.

The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding into polarisation and echo-chamber communication. It pulls the curtain back on the techniques employed to interfere with, and potentially distort, the public discussion. Making complex data accessible to non-technical audiences, this unique post-mortem of the Brexit referendum contributes to our understanding of social media disinformation in the UK and beyond.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kyle Falcon, "Haunted Britain: Spiritualism, Psychical Research and the Great War" (Manchester UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 6 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Great War haunted the British Empire. Shell shocked soldiers relived the war's trauma through waking nightmares consisting of mutilated and grotesque figures. Modernist writers released memoirs condemning the war as a profane and disenchanting experience. Yet British and Dominion soldiers and their families also read prophecies about the coming new millennium, experimented with séances, and claimed to see the ghosts of their loved ones in dreams and in photographs. On the battlefields, they had premonitions and attributed their survival to angelic, psychic, or spiritual forces. For many, the war was an enchanting experience that offered proof of another world and the transcendental properties of the mind. Between 1914 and 1939, an array of ghosts lived in the minds of British subjects as they navigated the shocking toll that death in modern war exerted in their communities.

Kyle Falcon is a historian specialising in the British Empire during the First World War. He is based in Ontario, Canada.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Serena Laiena, "The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing" (U Delaware Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 5 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Serena Laiena joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Theater Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing (University of Delaware Press, 2023).

Who were the first celebrity couples? How was their success forged? Which forces influenced their self-fashioning and marketing strategies? These questions are at the core of this study, which looks at the birth of a phenomenon, that of the couple in show business, with a focus on the promotional strategies devised by two professional performers: Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654) and Virginia Ramponi (1583–ca.1631). This book examines their artistic path – a deliberately crafted and mutually beneficial joint career – and links it to the historical, social, and cultural context of post-Tridentine Italy. Rooted in a broad research field, encompassing theatre history, Italian studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, and performance studies, The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy revises the conventional view of the Italian diva, investigates the deployment of Catholic devotion as a marketing tool, and argues for the importance of the couple system in the history of Commedia dell’Arte, a system that continues to shape celebrity today.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Francesco Piraino, "Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 4 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Francesco Piraino’s Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) is a vital contribution to the growing field of Sufism in the Global North which often encompasses studies of North America and western Europe. This monograph study, the first focused study of Sufism in Italy and France, uses ethnographic data and sociological analysis to map and situate various Sufi communities in Paris and Milan, along with transnational flows of these communities across Morocco, Algeria, and Cyprus.

At the heart of these case studies is the question of how to approach and study Sufi communities across an ever diversifying social, religious/spiritual, and political landscape and across categorical commitments such as New Age, New Religious Movements, esotericism, diasporic Islam, Traditionalism and mysticism. Piraino argues for the limitations and utilities of these various categories, and ultimately helps us shift our focus to to the everyday embodied ebbs and flows of a variety of Italian and French Sufi communities to showcase how these terms should be used with fluidity to reflect the lived realities of his interlocutors. This book will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Sufism, sociology of Islam, contemporary Islam, Islam in Europe and much more.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

William Cook Miller, "The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture" (Cornell UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 3 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of a character type that was developed in early modern Britain to discredit radical prophets during an era that witnessed the dismantling of the Church of England's traditional means for punishing heresy. As William Cook Miller shows, the caricature of fanaticism, here called the Enthusiast began as propaganda against religious dissenters, especially working-class upstarts, but was adopted by a range of writers as a literary vehicle for exploring profound problems of spirit, soul, and body and as a persona for the ironic expression of their own prophetic illuminations.

Taking shape through the public and private writings of some of the most insightful authors of seventeenth-century Britain-Henry More, John Locke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Mary Astell, and Jonathan Swift, among others-the Enthusiast appeared in various guises and literary modes.

By attending to this literary being and its animators, The Enthusiast establishes the figure of the fanatic as a bridge between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, showing how an incipient secular modernity was informed by not the rejection of religion but the transformation of the prophet into something sparkling, witty, ironic, and new.

William Cook Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His work has appeared in the journals New Literary History and Studies in Philology.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Julia Caterina Hartley, "Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France" (Bloomsbury. 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 2 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Julia Caterina Hartley about Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbury. 2023).

New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France's perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary culture of the period. In an ambitious study spanning poetry, historiography, fiction, travel-writing, ballet, opera, and marionette theatre, Julia Hartley reveals the unique place that Iran held in the French literary imagination between 1829 and 1912. Iran's history and culture remained a constant source of inspiration across different generations and artistic movements, from the 'Oriental' poems of Victor Hugo to those of Anna de Noailles and Théophile Gautier's strategic citation of Persian poetry to his daughter Judith Gautier's full-blown rewriting of a Persian epic. Writing about Iran could also serve to articulate new visions of world history and religion, as was the case in the intellectual debates that took place between Michelet, Renan, and Al-Afghani. Alternatively joyous, as in Félicien David's opera Lalla Roukh, and ominous, as in Massenet's Le Mage, Iran elicited a multiplicity of treatments.

This is most obvious in the travelogues of Flandin, Gobineau, Loti, Jane Dieulafoy, and Marthe Bibesco, which describe the same cities and cultural practices in altogether different ways. Under these writers' pens, Iran emerges as both an Oriental other and an alter ego, its culture elevated above that of all other Muslim nations. At times this led French writers to critique notions of European superiority. But at others, they appropriated Iran as proto-European through racialist narratives that reinforced Orientalist stereotypes. Drawing on theories of Orientalism and cultural difference, this book navigates both sides of this fascinating and complex literary history. It is the first major study on the subject.

Julia Hartley is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow. She was previously Laming Fellow at the Queen’s College Oxford and Edward W. Said Visiting Fellow at Columbia University. She is the author of Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy (2019) and peer-reviewed articles in Iranian Studies and Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Paola Bertucci, "In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 1 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science.

In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola Bertucci's In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) brilliantly reveals the mysteries of Nollet's journey, uncovering a subterranean world of secretive and ambitious intelligence gathering masked as scientific inquiry.

The advent of electricity was a pivotal phenomenon not only in the history of physical experimentation, but also in the cultivation of popular scientific interest. Nollet's journey was supposedly inspired by the need to investigate, and subsequently report on, claims of the use of electrified "medicated tubes" by their Italian inventor Gianfrancesco Pivati. Motivated by economic interests in the silk industry, Nollet's journey was in fact an undercover mission commissioned by the French state to discover the secrets of Italian silk manufacture and possibly supplant its international success. The event that sparked the medical controversy—the unusual cure of a bishop—was a complete fabrication.

Bertucci insightfully contrasts published accounts of the event with private documents and discusses how eighteenth-century scientists published fictional events and results to bolster their careers, ultimately leading to long-lasting misrepresentations of scientific practice and enduring stereotypes. In the Land of Marvels reveals the constellation of historical actors, from reputed physicists to travel writers and electrical amateurs, who manipulated information to gain authority and prestige.

Paola Bertucci (NEW HAVEN, CT) is a professor in the department of history at Yale University. She is the author of the award-winning Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Annette Kehnel, "The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Annette Kehnel joins Jana Byars to talk about The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (Brandeis University Press, 2024). A fascinating blend of history and ecological economics that uncovers the medieval precedents for modern concepts of sustainable living. In The Green Ages, historian Annette Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon.

Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably--we've done it before! From the garden economy in the mythical-sounding City of Ladies to early microcredit banks, Kehnel uncovers a world at odds with our understanding of the typical medieval existence. Premodern history is full of inspiring examples and concepts ripe for rediscovery, and we urgently need them as today's challenges--finite resources, the twilight of consumerism, and growing inequality--threaten what we have come to think of as a modern way of living sustainably. This is a stimulating and revelatory look at a past that has the power to change our future.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

J. C. D. Clark, "The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents of the 'movement'. This book cuts the Gordian knot. There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept. Currently 'the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines, notably history, philosophy, political theory, political science, literary studies, and theology; Clark calls for a fundamental reconsideration in each.

The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History (Oxford UP, 2024) provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each--and, more broadly, between the five societies--has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth. Without the concept, people at the time were unable to act in ways that would have created the Enlightenment as a coherent movement. Since the conventional account has held that the Enlightenment was a phenomenon, the idea could be used as a component of what has been called a 'civil religion': a summing up of the myths of origin, aims, and essential values of a society from which dissent is not permitted. An appreciation that it was instead a historiographical concept undermines, in turn, the idea that there was any great transition to what came to be called 'modernity'.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alessandra Russo, "A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400-1600" (Penn State UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

We tend to think of sixteenth-century European artistic theory as separate from the artworks displayed in the non-European sections of museums. In A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400–1600 (Penn State University Press, 2024) Dr. Alessandra Russo argues otherwise. Instead of considering the European experience of “New World” artefacts and materials through the lenses of “curiosity” and “exoticism,” Russo asks a different question: What impact have these works had on the way we currently think about—and theorise—the arts?

Centering her study on a vast corpus of early modern textual and visual sources, Dr. Russo contends that the subtlety and inventiveness of the myriad of American, Asian, and African creations that were pillaged, exchanged, and often eventually destroyed in the context of Iberian colonisation—including sculpture, painting, metalwork, mosaic, carving, architecture, and masonry—actually challenged and revolutionised sixteenth-century European definitions of what art is and what it means to be human. In this way, artefacts coming from outside Europe between 1400 and 1600 played a definitive role in what are considered distinctively European transformations: the redefinition of the frontier between the “mechanical” and the “liberal” arts and a new conception of the figure of the artist.

Original and convincing, A New Antiquity is a pathbreaking study that disrupts existing conceptions of Renaissance art and early modern humanity. It will be required reading for art historians specialising in the Renaissance,scholars of Iberian and Latin American cultures and global studies, and anyone interested in anthropology and aesthetics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Charmian Mansell, "Female Servants in Early Modern England" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Charmian Mansell joins Jana Byars to talk about Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2024).

What was it like to be a woman in service in early modern England? Drawing on evidence recorded in church court testimony, Mansell excavates experiences of over a thousand female servants between 1532 and 1649. Intervening in histories of labour, gender, freedom, law, migration, youth, and community, Female Servants in Early Modern England rethinks traditional scholarship of servant institution. De-coupling 'household' and 'service', it highlights the importance of female servants' labour to the wider economy and their key role in broader social networks and communities, despite their high mobility. Moving beyond regulatory codes of service prescribed by law and conduct literature, Mansell reveals the varied experiences of these women in service, both fluid and contingent: in early modern England, service (and the freedoms it allowed) was in flux.

This book is available open access here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, "Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite" (Harvard UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Who runs Britain? In Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (Harvard UP, 2024), Aaron Reeves, and Sam Friedman, both Professors of Sociology at the London School of Economics, tell the story of the UK’s ruling class. The book blends a huge range of qualitative and quantitative data, and uses innovative sociological methods, to offer a historically informed understanding of how those at the top of society preserve their status and privileges. Examining inequalities of race and gender, as well as social class, alongside the enduring impact of Britain’s imperial past, Born to Rule is essential reading for anyone interested in Britain’s past, present and future.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joseph Harley, "At Home with the Poor: Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in England, c.1650-1850" (Manchester UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

At Home with the Poor: Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in England, c.1650-1850 (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Joseph Harley opens the doors to the homes of the forgotten poor and traces the goods they owned before, during and after the industrial revolution (c. 1650-1850). Using a vast and diverse range of sources, it gets to the very heart of what it meant to be 'poor' by examining the homes of the impoverished and mapping how numerous household goods became more widespread. As the book argues, poverty did not necessarily equate to owning very little and living in squalor. In fact, its novel findings show that most of the poor strove to improve their domestic spheres and that their demand for goods was so great that it was a driving force of the industrial revolution.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Susan Doran, "From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of the troubled accession of England's first Scottish king and the transition from the age of the Tudors to the age of the Stuarts at the dawn of the seventeenth century.

From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I tells the story of the dramatic accession and first decade of the reign of James I and the transition from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean era, using a huge range of sources, from state papers and letters to drama, masques, poetry, and a host of material objects.

The Virgin Queen was a hard act to follow for a Scottish newcomer who faced a host of problems in his first years as king: not only the ghost of his predecessor and her legacy but also unrest in Ireland, serious questions about his legitimacy on the English throne, and even plots to remove him (most famously the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). Contrary to traditional assumptions, James's accession was by no means a smooth one.

The really important question about James's reign, of course, is the extent of change that occurred in national political life and royal policies. Sue Doran also examines how far the establishment of a new Stuart dynasty resulted in fresh personnel at the centre of power, and the alterations in monarchical institutions and shifts in political culture and governmental policies that occurred. Here the book offers a fresh look at James and his wife Anna, suggesting a new interpretation of their characters and qualities.

But the Jacobean era was not just about James and his wife, and Regime Change includes a host of historical figures, many of whom will be familiar to readers: whether Walter Raleigh, Robert Cecil, or the Scots who filled James's inner court. The inside story of the Jacobean court also brings to life the wider politics and national events of the early seventeenth century, including the Gunpowder Plot, the establishment of Jamestown in Virginia, the Plantations in Ulster, the growing royal struggle with parliament, and the doomed attempt to bring about union with Scotland.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Far-Right Threat in German Politics: A Discussion with Marcus Böick

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The recent elections in eastern Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far-right party to win a parliamentary election at the state level in postwar Germany, raised significant concern internationally about what’s happening in Germany. Should we be concerned?

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey talks with Marcus Böick, assistant professor of history at the University of Cambridge, on the difficulties that have attended the process of unification in Germany since 1989 and their consequences for German politics. Böick addresses the reasons behind the AfD's success and how those in eastern Germany have experienced the process, their dissatisfaction with traditional parties and their migration policies, and their sense of being ignored by the country’s political elites. Böick delves into AfD's radicalization and the charisma of Björn Höcke as a factor in AfD's victory, and the prospects for the election in Brandenburg this weekend, which could further complicate Germany's political landscape at both the state and national levels.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jason A. Josephson Storm, "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (U Chicago Press, 2017) dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Professor Storm is a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly. At the heart of his work, lies an attempt to challenge conventional narratives in the study of religion and science.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Felia Allum, "Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra" (Cornell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra (Cornell UP, 2024) by Dr. Felia Allum dives into the Neapolitan criminal underworld of the Camorra as seen and lived by the women who inhabit it. It tells their life stories and unpacks the gender dynamics by examining their participation as active agents in the organisation as leaders, managers, foot soldiers, and enablers. Felia Allum shows that these women are true partners in crime.

The author offers an innovative interdisciplinary analysis that demystifies the notion that the Camorra is a sexist, male-centric organisation. She links her analysis of Camorra culture within the wider Neapolitan context to show how mothers and women act and are treated in the private sphere of the household and how the family helps explain the power women have found in the Neapolitan Camorra.

It is civil society and law enforcement agencies that continue to see the Camorra using traditional gender assumptions which render women irrelevant and lacking independent agency in the criminal underworld. In Women of the Mafia, Allum debunks these assumptions by revealing the power and influence of women in the Camorra.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Aideen O’Shaughnessy, "Embodying Irish Abortion Reform: Bodies, Emotions, and Feminist Activism" (Bristol UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Dr. Aideen O'Shaughnessy is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lincoln. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Gender Studies Research from Utrecht University and a BA in Sociology and French at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on gender, health, and social movements and she is particularly interested in the study of reproductive health, rights, and justice. She has published widely in journals including Body and Society, the European Journal of Women's Studies, and the BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Embodying Irish Abortion Reform: Bodies, Emotions, and Feminist Activism (Bristol UP, 2024) explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban.

Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion.

It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lucy Weir, "Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury" (Routledge, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Can self-harm be art? In Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury (Routledge, 2024), Lucy Weir, a Reader in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh rethinks the recent history of performance to understand the ‘injurious turn’ in contemporary live art. The book challenges the usual associations between self-harm and gender by exploring the work of a diverse range of artists.

Taking Viennese Actionism as its starting point, the book then offers detailed case studies of, amongst others, André Stitt, Ron Athey, Wafaa Bilal and Pyotr Pavlensky. Each artist is considered in relation to their context, as well as how their work relates to the more general question of how masculinity itself relates to extreme performance in challenging and censorious settings. As well as being theoretically and empirically rich, the book offers an engaging route into art theory and art history for non-specialists. It will be of interest widely in humanities, medicine and the social sciences.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michael Livingston, "Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Agincourt is one of the most famous battles in English history, a defining part of the national myth. This groundbreaking study by Michael Livingston presents a new interpretation of Henry V's great victory.

King Henry V's victory over the French armies at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 is unquestionably one of the most famous battles in history. From Shakespeare's “band of brothers” speech to its appearances in numerous films, Agincourt rightfully has a place among a handful of conflicts whose names are immediately recognized around the world.

The English invasion of France in 1415 saw them take the French port of Harfleur after a long siege, following which Henry was left with a sick and weakened army, which he chose to march across Normandy to the port of Calais against the wishes of his senior commanders. The French had assembled a superior force and shadowed the English Army before finally blocking its route. The battle that followed was an overwhelming victory for the English, with the French suffering horrific casualties. Agincourt opened the door for Henry V's further conquests in France.

Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a new look at this famous battle. Livingston goes back to the original sources, including the French battle plan that still survives today, to give a new interpretation, one that challenges the traditional site of the battlefield itself. It is a thrilling new history that not only rewrites the battle as we know it, but also provides fresh insights into the men who fought and died there.

An acclaimed conflict analyst, Michael Livingston has twice won the Distinguished Book Prize from the international Society for Military History (2017, 2020) and is the author of numerous popular history books, including Never Greater Slaughter and Crécy: Battle of Five Kings. He serves as Distinguished Professor at The Citadel.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jack Crangle, "Migrants, Immigration and Diversity in Twentieth-century Northern Ireland: British, Irish or 'Other’?" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Addressing questions about what it means to be ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ in the twenty-first century, Migrants, Immigration and Diversity in Twentieth-Century Northern Ireland: British, Irish or “Other”? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) focuses its attention on twentieth-century Northern Ireland and demonstrates how the fragmented and disparate nature of national identity shaped and continues to shape responses to social issues such as immigration. Immigrants moved to Northern Ireland in their thousands during the twentieth century, continuing to do so even during three decades of the Troubles, a violent and bloody conflict that cost over 3,600 lives.

Foregrounding the everyday lived experiences of settlers in this region, in this groundbreaking book, Dr Jack Crangle comparatively examines the perspectives of Italian, Indian, Chinese and Vietnamese migrants in Northern Ireland, outlining the specific challenges of migrating to this small, intensely divided part of the UK. The book explores whether it was possible for migrants and minorities to remain ‘neutral’ within an intensely politicised society and how internal divisions affected the identity and belonging of later generations. An analysis of diversity and immigration within this divided society enhances our understanding of the forces that can shape conceptions of national insiders and outsiders - not just in the UK and Ireland - but across the world. It provokes and addresses a range of questions about how conceptions of nationality, race, culture and ethnicity have intersected to shape attitudes towards migrants. In doing so, the book invites scholars to embrace a more diverse, ‘four-nation’ approach to UK immigration studies, making it an essential read for all those interested in the history of migration in the UK.

This interview was conducted by Niall Herron, a PhD student at Queen's University Belfast in Anthropological Studies, researching queer assemblages during the Troubles in NI.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Zrinka Stahuljak, "Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both mediaeval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the mediaeval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Dr. Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Dr. Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles mediaeval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

William H. F. Altman, "The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism" (Lexington Books, 2010)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish emigrant to the United States, an author, professor and political philosopher. Born in 1899 in Kirchhain in the Kingdom of Prussia to an observant Jewish family, Strauss received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921, and began his scholarly work in the 1920s, as well as participating in the German Zionist movement. In 1932, a recommendation letter from the jurist and later Nazi party member Carl Schmitt enabled Strauss to leave Germany on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power. Strauss continued his work in France and England before settling in the United States in 1937, teaching at the New School and other colleges, and then becoming professor of political science at the University of Chicago in 1949. It is in America that Strauss wrote his most famous works, including Persecution and the Art of Writing, On Tyranny, Natural Right and History, The City and Man, What Is Political Philosophy?, and many other works. His work typically takes the form of interpretations of ancient authors, especially Plato.

Over the years, Strauss attracted many dedicated students, who became known as “Straussians,” spreading his influence not only within academia but eventually into the American government. Straussians would attain such prominence and eventually cause such controversy, that, decades after Strauss’ death, the field of political science was gripped by what would become known as “the Strauss wars.” Strauss wrote in a difficult, densely layered and evasive style that has led to long-lasting disputes about whether his apparent endorsement of liberal democracy was genuine, or whether his work contains an esoteric teaching about human hierarchies, one that might justify illiberal and anti-democratic Machiavellian coups. Heightening the urgency of figuring out what Strauss truly stood for is the widespread view that Straussians who worked in the State Department and Defense Department and who came to be called “Neoconservatives” were instrumental in launching the Iraq war in 2003, and are otherwise associated with hawkish, not to say hubristic and imperial U.S. foreign policy.

But, leaving the neocons aside; Leo Strauss, Jewish Nazi? Could such a charge possibly be fair? Who is the real Leo Strauss? These are the questions that bring us to this author and this book. William Henry Furness Altman is a retired public high school teacher and author of many articles and books on figures including Plato, Cicero, Plotinus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and indeed, Leo Strauss.

The book we are discussing today is entitled The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lexington Books, 2010). William Altman’s first published book is an extensively researched and exhaustively footnoted work substantiating his charge that Leo Strauss, the revered and influential Jewish emigre, and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, did indeed harbor a lifelong commitment to the principles of Nazi ideology and that such indeed is Strauss’ secret teaching.

Joseph Liss is an independent scholar based in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. His studies focus on ancient religion, philosophy, political theory, critical theory, and history. He can be reached at Joseph.Nathaniel.Liss@gmail.com.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, "Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State" (Faber & Faber, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024) offers a lively, new and sweeping history of the rise of the state in Plantagenet England.

Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting - including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords - as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history.

Arise, England uses the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England's emergent statehood. Drawing on original accounts and arresting new research, it draws resonances between government, international relations, and the abilities, egos and ambitions of political actors, then and now. Colourful and complicated, and by turns impressive and hateful, the six kings stride through the story; but arguably the greatest character is the emerging English state itself.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Karl Marx, "Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1" (Princeton UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx's lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history.

This magnificent new edition of Capital (Princeton UP, 2024) is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx's thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.

For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by "value"--to produce it, capture it, trade it, and, most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement.

With a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts, this is a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx's German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers.

An audiobook narrated by Simon Vance is available here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wendy Ugolini, "Wales in England, 1914-1945: A Social, Cultural, and Military History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

At the beginning of the twentieth century, for many English men and women of Welsh origin the idea of being in some part 'Welsh' reaffirmed their own understanding of what it meant to 'be British'. Wales in England, 1914-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wendy Ugolini is the first cultural history of this English Welsh duality - an identification with two constituent nations at once - and explores how 'Welshness' was imagined, performed, and mobilised in England during and between the two world wars. In so doing, and making use of individual English Welsh case studies from the worlds of politics, art, literature, and soldiering, the book provides a wholly new perspective on the social, cultural, and military history of Britain at war. It shows English-Welsh duality to have been an important strand of pluralistic Britishness in wartime, and that this diasporic construction of Welshness held a wide urban appeal with significant implications for military enlistment, cultural production, and commemorative practices in England.

Working at the intersection of war studies, British studies, and diaspora studies, Wales in England makes a significant contribution to 'four nations' history and the history of British society at war.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jennifer Redmond and Mary McAuliffe, "The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland: A Reader" (Four Courts Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Mary McAuliffe is a historian and lecturer in Gender Studies at UCD. Her latest publications include (is The Diaries of Kathleen Lynn co-authored with Harriet Wheelock) and Margaret Skinnider; a biography (UCD Press,2020). Throughout the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 she has been conducting extensive research on the experiences of women during the War of Independence and Civil War and is currently completing her book based on that research, OUTRAGE: Gendered and Sexual Violence in the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, 1919-1923 (forthcoming 2025). Jennifer Redmond is Associate Professor in Twentieth Century Irish History in the Department of History at Maynooth University. She is the author of Moving Histories: Irish Women’s Emigration to Britain from Independence to Republic and the co-editor of Irish Women in the First World War Era. She also sits on the Editorial Board for the journal, Women's History Review and for the Documents in Irish Foreign Policy series, a joint initiative of the National Archives of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy.

In this interview, they discuss their new edited collection The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2024) as well as their own intellectual backgrounds and views on Irish history-writing.

The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland is an edited collection of focused, cohesive and persuasive essays, based on the newest research on gender, sexuality and sexual politics. It offers historical reflections and contemporary analyses of issues related to the contested and often hidden histories of sexual politics and gender identities in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Including but going beyond the binary of male and female heterosexual experience, the book explores LGBTQI+ histories, the treatment of intersex persons, and the history of trans people and activism in Ireland. As an interdisciplinary work, this reader draws together scholars working in a range of fields on innovative, new research on this theme. The essays consider these histories as seen over two centuries and reflect on the societal shifts in modern Ireland as evidenced in two recent referenda and the responses to the scandals emerging from the state’s treatment of unmarried mothers.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Whitney Barlow Robles, "Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History" (Yale UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Dive into the world of animals with Whitney Barlow Robles in her captivating new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Yale UP, 2023). Can corals truly build worlds? Do rattlesnakes possess a mystical charm? What secrets do raccoons hold? These questions reflect how animals have historically challenged human attempts to control nature, particularly during the Enlightenment—a time marked by rigid classifications, colonial exploitation, and the complex interplay between humans and the natural world.

Robles takes us on a journey through four distinct ecological zones: the ocean, underground, curiosity cabinets, and the field. Her exploration reveals a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry that embraces uncertainty and highlights the tumultuous history of human-animal encounters. This legacy continues to influence modern biologists and ecologists today as they strive to understand the intricate lives of animals.

In a unique blend of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between meticulous research and personal narratives, uncovering the animal foundations of human knowledge. She argues that addressing our current environmental crisis requires us to reflect on the past and recognize the vital roles animals play in shaping our understanding of the world. Join us as we explore the unruly protagonists of 18th-century science and discover why the stories of these creatures are essential to navigating the challenges we face today.

Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta is a Doctoral candidate at El Colegio de México and Adjunct Lecturer at the Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lynn M. Tesser, "Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics" (Stanford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, ethnic, or status-based identities rather than national identities. Why then did the desires of a typically small number result in wave after wave of new states? The answer has customarily centred on the actions of "nationalists" against weakening empires during a time of proliferating beliefs that "peoples" should control their own destiny.

Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Lynn M. Tesser upends conventional wisdom by demonstrating that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents. Dr. Tesser adds nuance to scholarship that assumes most, if not all, pre-independence unrest was nationalist and separatist, and sheds light on why the various demands for change eventually coalesced around independence in some cases but not others.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Edel Bhreathnach, "Monasticism in Ireland, AD 900-1250" (Four Courts Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The history of monasticism in early Ireland is dominated by its flourishing during the sixth and seventh centuries, a period dominated by Columba of Iona and Columbanus of Bobbio, and later by the 'reform' spearheaded by Malachy of Armagh during the twelfth century. But what of monasticism in Ireland during the intervening period? Regarded as different from ' mainstream' Anglo-Saxon and continental monasticism, monastic life in Ireland has not been fully understood in scholarly discussions about the existence of distinct ' monasticisms' throughout Christianity.

The Irish sources, many written in the vernacular, are not accessible and are viewed as unconventional. The secularization of monasticism in Ireland has overshadowed evidence for a thriving lived monasticism. Edel Bhreathnach's book Monasticism in Ireland, AD 900-1250 (Four Courts Press, 2024) concentrates on those men and women who followed a monastic life, especially between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and who maintained a universal monastic ideology while incorporating monasticism into their own cultural environment.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Morgane Cadieu, "On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes.

Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu's study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation.

Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Martha Rampton, "Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000" (Cornell UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 9 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith.

As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essence of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.

Martha Rampton is full of energy and excitement about her book and she and Jana Byars have a wonderful, spirited chat.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Raquel Velho on Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 9 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Raquel Velho, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about her recent book, Hacking the Underground: Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System (U Washington Press, 2023). Hacking the Underground provides a fascinating ethnographic investigation of how disabled people navigate a transportation system that is far from accessible.

Velho finds disabled passengers constantly hacking and finding workarounds, including lots of fix-y maintenance tasks, to get from one place to another. While these workarounds involve obvious creativity, they are also the products of an unequal system and the failure to enact a more-thoroughgoing and radically-transformative redesigning of public transportation systems in the name of accessibility. Vinsel and Velho also touch on a wide range of other topics, including issues of theory and method, and they talk about what Velho is up to next.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Naomi Leite, "Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging" (U California Press, 2017)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 6 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging (U California Press, 2017) is a lively, readable exploration of "chosen" identity, kin, and community in a global era. Anthropologist Naomi Leite examines the complexity of how we know ourselves -- who we "really" are -- and how we recognize others as strangers or kin through the case of Portugal's "Marranos", people in Lisbon and Porto who identify as descendants of 15th-century Portuguese and Spanish Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism. As the book's story unfolds, these individuals are first dismissed by the local Portuguese Jewish community as "non-Jews" and then embraced by foreign Jewish tourists and other visitors, who are fascinated to meet a remnant of Portugal's "lost" medieval Jewish population. Drawing on more than a decade of participatory research, Leite explores how both the Marranos' and their visitors' perceptions of self, peoplehood, and belonging are transformed through their face-to-face encounters with one another. Written in a compelling, first-person narrative style, this acclaimed book will appeal to a wide audience.

Accolades: Finalist, National Jewish Book Award (2017) * StIrling Prize for Best Book in Psychological Anthropology (2018) * Graburn Prize for Best First Book in Anthropology of Tourism (2018) * Honorable Mention, Douglass Prize for Best Book in Europeanist Anthropology (2018)

Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Duncan Simpson, "I am pleased to inform the director: letters from Portuguese people to PIDE (1958-1968)" (Silveira, BookBuilders, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 5 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Duncan Simpson about his book Tenho o prazer de informar o senhor director: cartas de portugueses à PIDE (1958-1968) ("I am pleased to inform the director: letters from Portuguese people to PIDE (1958-1968)")

Were the Portuguese mere victims of the PIDE and the oppressive policies it imposed or, in reality, as under any authoritarian regime, did they interact with this police force by serving it or making use of it?

Created in 1945, in a merely cosmetic reformulation of its predecessor (the PVDE), as it was too closely associated with the “fascist era”, the PIDE (acronym for International and State Defense Police) maintained the extensive arbitrary powers of the PVDE in its triple mission: guaranteeing “state security” (eliminating political dissent), controlling borders and acting as an intelligence service. To this end, it was necessary to create a network of informants.

To this day, the bibliography dedicated exclusively to PIDE continues to focus on the mechanisms of repression exercised over the small minority of opponents to the regime, as if this were the only form of relationship between society and PIDE. The main consequence of this type of approach was to reduce the bulk of the population to the status of “victim people”, who passively endured the repression carried out by PIDE.

However, the reality is much more complex, as this work aims to demonstrate. The relationship between Portuguese society and PIDE has always been much more active and multifaceted than has been recognized to date. The Portuguese were never a simple “victim people” passively and fearfully enduring the repressive impetus of the PIDE. On the contrary, Portuguese society actively adapted to the presence of the political police and this book aims to illustrate the ways in which ordinary citizens interacted freely with the PIDE, often (but not always) using it to fulfill personal interests or satisfy basic needs. of everyday life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Daniel Laqua, "Activism Across Borders Since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and Beyond Europe" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 4 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

From the Occupy protests to climate change school strikes and the Black Lives Matter movement, the 21st century has been rife with activism. Although very different from one another, each of these movements have created alliances across borders and show that these issues are not confined to individual nation states. In this book, Daniel Laqua shows that these global efforts are not just a recent phenomenon, and that as long as there have been borders, activists have sought to cross them.

Showing how individuals, groups and organisations have fostered bonds in their quest for political and social change, and exploring how national or ideological boundaries have impacted their efforts, Activism Across Borders Since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and Beyond Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022) traces activists and movements from 1870 to the 21st century. Focusing on Europe but with a global outlook, it examines groups and individuals that expressed far-reaching ambitions and operated within imperial or post-colonial settings. From feminism and socialism to anti-war campaigns and green politics, this book offers a synthesis of transnational activism through four analytical lenses; connectedness, ambivalence, transience and marginality. In doing so, it demonstrates the intertwined nature of different movements, problematizes transnational action, discusses the temporary nature of some alliances, and shows how transnationalism has been used by those marginalised at the national level. With a broad chronological perspective and thematic chapters, it provides historical context, clarifies terms and concepts and offers an alternative history of the modern world through the lens of activists, movements and campaigns.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andrea Moudarres, "The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso" (U Virginia Press, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 3 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso (University of Delaware Press, 2019), Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante's Divine Comedy, Luigi Pulci's Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies.

Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 2 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Daniel Todman, "Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947" (Oxford UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 (Oxford UP, 2020), begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history: the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese. As in the first volume of Todman's epic account of British involvement in World War II ("Total history at its best," according to Jay Winter), he highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing on its inhabitants, its defenders, and its wartime leadership. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return. It also documents the full impact of the entrance into the war by the United States, and its ascendant stewardship of the war.

Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 is a triumph of narrative and research. Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences--at home and abroad--of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain and the world.

Bob Wintermute is professor of history at Queens College, CUNY.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lise Butler, "Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970" (Oxford UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Lise Butler’s Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70 (Oxford UP, 2020) invites us to revisit a figure who, in Butler’s words, is both a ‘relatively obscure’ yet also ‘curiously ubiquitous’ in the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain. The book uses Young, a policy maker and sociology to explore the role of social science in social democratic politics in the postwar period. Butler explores Young’s role in activities such as his role developing the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto ‘Let us Face the Future’, his work as a sociologist, most notably in his monograph Family and Kinship in East London (co-authored with Peter Wilmott), and his role as a social innovator helping to establish Institute of Community Studies, the Consumers' Association, Which? magazine, the Social Science Research Council and the Open University. In doing so she offers a thought provoking story which encourages rethinking some of the common assumptions made about the role of sociology, and social science more broadly, in British politics.

In this podcast we explore the themes of the book, which includes not only discussing the above but also themes such as the role of women and the family in Young’s thought, why he favoured the basic income, the social scientific turn in the history of modern Britain and why, exactly, buying a fridge is a political act.

Matt Dawson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow with research interests in social theory and the history of sociology.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ellen Hampton, "Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle Against the Nazi Occupation of France" (LSU Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Ellen Hampton's Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle Against the Nazi Occupation of France (LSU Press, 2023) tells the stories of physicians in France working to impede the German war effort and undermine French collaborators during the Occupation from 1940 to 1945. Determined to defeat the Third Reich's incursion, one group of prominent Paris doctors founded a medical network to treat injured Resistance fighters who they then secretly transported to Allied countries to avoid forced labor in Germany. Another team of medics organized a cabal focused on intelligence gathering and sabotage that became one of the largest in wartime France, even after the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned its leaders. Deported to concentration camps, these physicians continued to frustrate Nazi efforts by rendering aid and keeping their fellow prisoners alive. Others joined rural guerrilla camps to care for the young conscripts fighting to block German reinforcements from reaching Normandy after the D-Day landing.

These stories, assembled here for the first time, add a crucial dimension to the history of Occupied France. Written for both historians and general readers of World War II history, Doctors at War stands as a dramatic, character-driven account of physicians' courage and resilience in the face of evil. It serves as a window into life under a fascist regime and the travails of doctors who negotiated the terrifying moral labyrinth that was the German military's occupation of France.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ludovico Silva, "Marx's Literary Style" (Verso, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx’s oeuvre, Silva isolates the key elements of his style: his search for an “architectonic” unity at the level of the text, his capacity to express himself dialectically at the level of the sentence, and, above all, his great gift for metaphor. Silva’s unique sensitivity to Marx’s literary choices allows him to illuminate a number of terms that have been persistently, and fatefully, misunderstood by many of Marx’s most influential readers, including alienation, reflection, and base and superstructure. At the heart of Silva’s book is his contention that we we cannot hope to understand Marx if we treat him as a scientist, a philosopher, or a literary writer, when he was in fact all three at once.

Originally published in 1971, this is a key work by one of the most important Latin American Marxists of the twentieth century. This edition, which marks the first appearance of one of Silva’s works in English, features an introduction by Alberto Toscano.

Alberto Toscano is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anders Persson, "EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Nearly 50 years since the European Foreign Ministers issued their first declaration on the conflict between Israel and Palestine in 1971, the European Union continues to have close political and economic ties with the region. Based exclusively on primary sources, Anders Persson's EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019 (Edinburgh UP, 2020) offers an up-to-date overview of the European Union’s involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict since 1967. This study uses an innovative conceptual methodology to examine keyword frequency in a sample of more than 2300 declarations and statements published in the Bulletin of the European Communities/European Union (1967–2009) as well as council reports and press interviews (2009–2018) to uncover broad patterns for qualitative analysis. The study suggests that the Israeli-Arab conflict is more important to the EU than any other conflict, having been key to shaping EU’s foreign policy overall.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Laurien Vastenhout, "Between Community and Collaboration: 'Jewish Councils' in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The first comprehensive, comparative study of the 'Jewish Councils' in the Netherlands, Belgium and France during Nazi rule. In the postwar period, there was extensive focus on these organisations' controversial role as facilitators of the Holocaust. They were seen as instruments of Nazi oppression, aiding the process of isolating and deporting the Jews they were ostensibly representing. As a result, they have chiefly been remembered as forms of collaboration.

Using a wide range of sources including personal testimonies, diaries, administrative documents and trial records, Laurien Vastenhout demonstrates that the nature of the Nazi regime, and its outlook on these bodies, was far more complex. She sets the conduct of the Councils' leaders in their prewar and wartime social and situational contexts and provides a thorough understanding of their personal contacts with the Germans and clandestine organisations. Between Community and Collaboration: 'Jewish Councils' in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation (Cambridge UP, 2022) reveals what German intentions with these organisations were during the course of the occupation, and allows for a deeper understanding of the different ways in which the Holocaust unfolded in each of these countries.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christopher Beckman, "Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine" (Hurst, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine (Hurst, 2024) by Christopher Beckman takes readers on a tantalising voyage through European and American gastronomic history, following the trail of a small but mighty fish: the anchovy.

Whether in ubiquitous Roman garum, mass-produced British condiments, elaborate French haute cuisine or modern Spanish tapas, anchovies have been enhancing the flavour of many dishes for thousands of years. Yet, depending upon the time and place—and who was eating them—they have also been disdained as worthless little fish, deemed too small, bony and inconsequential for popular or elite consumption. From Western Europe to the USA, Beckman shows how the evolving and ambiguous position of anchovies provides surprising insights into the relationship between food, class and status throughout history.

Drawing on cookbooks, literature and art, this is the hidden story of the diminutive anchovy, and its outsized role in shaping the West’s cuisine.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ren Pepitone, "Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

How did ideas of masculinity shape the British legal profession and the wider expectations of the white-collar professional? Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ren Pepitone examines the cultural history of the Inns of Court – four legal societies whose rituals of symbolic brotherhood took place in their supposedly ancient halls. These societies invented traditions to create a sense of belonging among members – or, conversely, to marginalise those who did not fit the profession's ideals.

Dr. Pepitone examines the legal profession's efforts to maintain an exclusive, masculine culture in the face of sweeping social changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utilising established sources such as institutional records alongside diaries, guidebooks, and newspapers, this book looks afresh at the gendered operations of Victorian professional life. Brotherhood of Barristers incorporates a diverse array of historical actors, from the bar's most high-flying to struggling law students, disbarred barristers, political radicals, and women's rights campaigners.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oliver Volckart, "The Silver Empire: How Germany Created Its First Common Currency" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The problems that gave rise to the widespread desire to introduce a common currency were myriad. While trade was able to cope with-and even to benefit from-the parallel circulation of many different types of coin, it nevertheless harmed both the common people and the political authorities. The authorities in particular suffered from neighbours who used their comparatively good money as raw material to mint poor imitations. Debasing their own coinage provided an, at best, short-term solution. Over the medium and long term, it drove the members of the Empire into rounds of competitive debasements, until they realised that a common currency was the only answer that addressed the core of the problem.

In The Silver Empire: How Germany Created Its First Common Currency (Oxford University Press, 2024) Dr. Oliver Volckart examines the conditions that shaped the monetary outlook of the member states of the Empire, paying particular attention to the uneven access to silver and gold. Following closely the negotiations that prepared the common currency, he is able to illuminate the interest groups that were formed, what their agendas and ulterior motives were, how alliances were forged, and how it was eventually possible to obtain majority agreement on what a common currency should look like: a silver-based currency that was introduced in 1559-66.

In fact, in contrast to what historians once believed, the common currency they achieved turns out to have functioned not significantly worse than other currencies of the time: it had similar problems and similar advantages as the money issued by more centralised governments.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joachim C. Häberlen, "Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe" (Penguin, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the streets, fighting for a better world. Their efforts came to a head most dramatically in 1968 and 1989, when mass movements swept Europe and rewrote its history.

In the decades between, Joachim C. Haberlen argues in Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Penguin, 2023), new movements emerged that transformed the nature of protesting. Activism moved beyond traditional demonstrations, from squatting to staging 'happenings' and camping out at nuclear power plants. People protested in the way they dressed, the music they listened to, the lovers they slept with, the clubs where they danced all night. New movements were born, notably anti-racism, women's liberation, gay liberation and environmentalism. And protest turned inward, as activists experimented with new ways of living and feeling, from communes to group therapy, in their efforts to live a better life in the here and now.

Some of these struggles succeeded, others failed. But successful or not, their history provides a glimpse into roads not taken, into futures that did not happen. The stories in Haberlen's book invite us to imagine different futures; to struggle, to fail, and to try again. In a time when we are told that there are no alternatives, they show us that there could be another way.

Joachim C. Häberlen is a historian of modern Europe. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and worked until 2022 at the University of Warwick; he now lives and works in Berlin.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shaun S. Yates, "Over-Efficiency in the Lower Criminal Courts: Understanding a Key Problem and How to Fix it" (Policy Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In our pursuit of efficiency in the lower criminal courts, have we lost sight of quality justice? Through the critical examination of original stenographic data, Over-Efficiency in the Lower Criminal Courts: Understanding a Key Problem and How to Fix it (Policy Press, 2024) by Dr. Shaun Yates demonstrates how an English Magistrates' courthouse often pursued managerial efficiency to the detriment of social justice and procedural due process values.

Given that these courts process more than 95% of all criminal cases, this ‘over-efficiency’ problem has the capacity to cause significant social harm. Dr. Yates’ work concludes by providing socio-legal and criminological readers with ways to fix this over-efficiency problem. This accessible work is of value to policy makers and post-graduate students alike.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Javier Fernández-Galeano, "Queer Obscenity: Erotic Archives in Dictatorial Spain" (Stanford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Queer Obscenity: Erotic Archives in Dictatorial Spain (Stanford University Press, 2024) takes us inside the archive to demonstrate how the incongruities of the Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) and Franco (1939–1975) regimes were manifested in the regulation of erotic material cultures. Focusing on amateur pornographers and their confiscated and censored erotica, this book adds a rich complexity to both the history and theory of pornography, demonstrating that surveillance depends entirely on documenting intimacy and preserving transgression. This book sheds new light on the production, consumption, and circulation of pornography and erotica in Spain over the course of the twentieth century, drawing connections between intimate queer desires, preservation, and erasure.

Javier Fernández-Galeano is Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral fellow at Universitat de València in Spain.

Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lesley Smith, "Fragments of a World: William of Auvergne and His Medieval Life" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Lesley Smith of Oxford University joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fragments of a World: William of Auvergne and His Medieval Life (University of Chicago Press, 2023). It has been 140 years since a full biography of William of Auvergne (1180?-1249), which may come as a surprise, given that William was an important gateway of Greek and Arabic thought and philosophy to western Europe in the thirteenth century, and one of the earliest writers in the medieval Latin west on demonology. Lesley Smith's aims in this book are two-fold: first, to take a closer look at William, the human being, how he saw the world and his place in it; and to uncover William's interactions with his Parisian congregation through the nearly 600 sermons he left after his death.

Smith has mined these writings, unremarked in previous scholarship, to give us a different perspective on the schoolmaster, bishop of Paris, and strict theologian we have come to know: a preacher who spoke and ministered not just to the powerful and elite, but also to commoners, to the poor, and to the less fortunate. Through a study of the sermons, Smith creates a broader landscape of William's thought and life, highlighting his attention to the importance--and limits--of language, and his attempts to find a way to address the concerns of the larger populace. In his preaching, we get a sense of the balance William achieved, in the way he communicated religious teachings, in his understanding of the concerns of ordinary Parisians, and in his awareness of the ebb and flow of daily life in a medieval city. The book will interest scholars of intellectual history and philosophy, religion, and literary studies more broadly for Smith's innovative method of excavating the sermons in pursuit of William the person, and his humanity. An altogether "new" William for the twenty-first century.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Barbara Emerson, "The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century" (Hurst, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Britain and Russia maintained a frosty civility for a few years after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. But, by the 1820s, their relations degenerated into constant acrimonious rivalry over Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia--the Great Game--and, towards the end of the century, East Asia.

The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, 2024) presents for the first time the Russian perspective on this 'game', drawing on the archives of the Tsars' Imperial Ministry. Both world powers became convinced of the expansionist aims of the other, and considered these to be at their own expense. When one was successful, the other upped the ante, and so it went on. London and St Petersburg were at war only once, during the Crimean War. But Russophobia and Anglophobia became ingrained on each side, as these two great empires hovered on the brink of hostilities for nearly 100 years.

Not until Britain and Russia recognized that they had more to fear from Wilhelmine Germany did they largely set aside their rivalries in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which also had major repercussions for the balance of power in Europe. Before that came a century of competition, diplomacy and tension, lucidly charted in this comprehensive new history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sara J. Charles, "The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2024) by Sara J. Charles takes the reader on an immersive journey through mediaeval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a mediaeval narrator – including a parchment-maker, scribe and illuminator – introducing various aspects of manuscript production.

Charles poses the question ‘What actually is a scriptorium?’, and explores the development of the mediaeval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press. With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labour, planning and networks needed to produce each individual manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, we can experience mediaeval life through the lens of a manuscript maker.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marissa Nicosia, "Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 (Oxford University Press, 2023) argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays—plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars—in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past.

Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, Dr. Marissa Nicosia shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

George Musgrave, "The England No One Cares About: Lyrics from Suburbia" (Goldsmiths Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

An exploration of the much-derided English suburbs through rap music.

There are many different Englands. From the much-romanticized rolling countryside, to the cosmopolitanism of the inner cities (embraced by some as progressive, multicultural enlightenment and derided by others as the playground of a self-righteous metropolitan elite), or the disparagingly named "left behind" communities which, post-Brexit, have so interested political parties and pundits, demographers and statisticians.

But there is also an England no one cares about. The England of semi-detached houses and clean driveways for multiple cars devotedly washed on Sundays, of "twitching curtains" and Laura Ashley sofas; of cul-de-sacs to nowhere and exaggerated accents; of late night drives to petrol stations on A roads, fake IDs tested in Harvesters, and faded tracksuits and over-gelled hair in Toby Carverys; of questionable hash from a "mate of a mate" and two-litre bottles of White Lightning from Budgens consumed in a kids playground. Much derided. Unglamorous, ordinary; cultural vacuity and small "c" conservatism. A hodgepodge. An--apparently--middling, middle-of-the-road middle-England of middle-class middle-mindedness.

Part poetry anthology, part academic study into placemaking, and part autoethnography, The England No One Cares About (Goldsmith Press, 2024) innovatively brings together academic discussions of the ethnographic potential of lyrics, scholastic representations of suburbia, and thematic analysis to explore how rap music can illuminate the experiences of young men growing up in suburbia. This takes place by exploring the author's own annotated lyrics from his career as a musician known as Context where he was referred to by the BBC as "Middle England's Poet Laureate."

George Musgrave studies the psychological experiences and working conditions of creative careers. He collaboratively undertook a major research project entitled Can Music Make You Sick? and cowrote a bestselling book on the subject. He has worked on ethical decision-making by music managers and wellbeing in the gig economy, and his research has been featured on BBC News, Pitchfork, Mixmag, GQ, The Financial Times, BBC Introducing, The Grammys, and Billboard among others. He is also a musician, signed with EMI/Sony/ATV.

George on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America: Music, Satire, & the Battle Against the Christian Right (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).

Bradley on Twitter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cordelia Heß, "The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden" (de Gruyter, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The significance of religion for the development of modern racist antisemitism is a much debated topic in the study of Jewish-Christian relations. Cordelia Heß's The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden (de Gruyter, 2021), the first study on antisemitism in nineteenth-century Sweden, provides new insights into the debate from the specific case of a country in which religious homogeneity was the considered ideal long into the modern era.

Between 1800 and 1900, approximately 150 books and pamphlets were printed in Sweden on the subject of Judaism and Jews. About one third comprised of translations mostly from German, but to a lesser extent also from French and English. Two thirds were Swedish originals, covering all genres and topics, but with a majority on religious topics: conversion, supersessionism, and accusations of deicide and bloodlust. The latter stem from the vastly popular medieval legends of Ahasverus, Pilate, and Judas which were printed in only slightly adapted forms and accompanied by medieval texts connecting these apocryphal figures to contemporary Jews, ascribing them a physical, essential, and biological coherence and continuity - a specific Jewish temporality shaped in medieval passion piety, which remained functional and intelligible in the modern period.

Relying on medieval models and their combination of religious and racist imagery, nineteenth-century debates were informed by a comprehensive and mostly negative "knowledge" about Jews.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dora Osborne, "What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture" (Camden House, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 9 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to eradicate its victims without trace. Dora Osborne's book What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture (Camden House, 2020) argues that memory culture in the Berlin Republic is marked by an archival turn that reflects this shift from embodied to externalized, material memory and responds to the particular status of the archive "after Auschwitz." What remains in this late phase of memory culture is the post-Holocaust archive, which at once ensures and haunts the future of Holocaust memory.

Drawing on the thinking of Freud, Derrida, and Georges Didi-Huberman, this book traces the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture across different media and genres. In its discussion of recent memorials, documentary film and theater, as well as prose narratives, all of which engage with the material legacy of the Nazi past, it argues that the performance of “archive work” is not only crucial to contemporary memory work but also fundamentally challenges it.

Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Katharine Sykes, "Symbolic Reproduction in Early Medieval England" (Oxford UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 8 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Katharine Sykes joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Symbolic Representation in Early Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2024). In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical.

Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Douglas Greene, "The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade's Revenge" (Routledge, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 4 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Returning to the New Books Network is Doug Greene, here to discuss his book The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky (Routledge, 2024). Split into three main parts, the book first surveys Kautsky’s own life and thought, starting with his early interest in socialist politics and turn towards Marxism, followed by a slow but steady turn away from revolution and towards reform, believing parliamentary procedures were the best road to social transformation. The second part looks at the works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, all of whom offer critical responses to Kautsky’s reformism, and the reassertion of the importance of revolutionary thought to any Marxist project. The third and final part looks at the contemporary works of Lars Lih, Eric Blanc and Mike Macnair and their attempts to make Kautsky’s reformist practice the central pillar of the contemporary left. Throughout, Greene argues that the real lesson Kautsky offers is the dead-end of reformism to any revolutionary project.

Some other relevant readings on this topic include

Douglas Greene is a historian in Boston. He is also the author of the books A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism and Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union. His writing has appeared in a number of outlets.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nicholas Orme, "Going to Church in Medieval England" (Yale UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 4 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

For people in medieval England, the parish church was an integral part of their community. In Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021), Nicholas Orme describes how parish churches operated and details the roles they played in the lives of their parishioners. While there was a considerable variety of experience over the centuries and between the parishes throughout England, the basic practices in them largely remained the same. These were supervised by a range of people, both lay and clerical, who staged the Mass and managed the church’s everyday operations. Their activities touched on the lives of the members of the community in a variety of ways, from regular attendance at daily and weekly services to celebrations marking the seasons and the great events of life: birth, coming of age, marriage, and comfort in sickness and death. And while the English Reformation transformed the relationship between England and the Roman Catholic Church, Orme shows how some of the changes associated with it were already underway before it began, while much of what went on in parish churches remained as before.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Petra Goedde, "The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History" (Oxford UP, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 4 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Earlier histories of the Cold War haven’t exactly been charitable toward the peace activists and pacifists who led peace initiatives. Pacifists in the United States were either simplistic and naïve, or they were fellow travelers of the Soviet Union. Peace proposals coming from the Soviet Union were nothing more than propaganda. Activists in Europe, meanwhile, were treated as a kind of curiosity in the broader Cold War, but their role was to highlight the growing tensions between the superpowers. This left an important question unanswered: what exactly was the significance of this peace activism that emerged after 1945? Did it amount to anything?

Petra Goedde’s The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019) fills in the important history of peace movements during the Cold War. Goedde discusses the different movements that existed in the United States and Europe from 1945 until the early 1970s. She looks at different facets of these peace movements. Much of it is centered on opposition to nuclear weapons, but Goedde’s analysis extends into the realm of decolonization, environmentalism, and gender. She concludes by noting some of the long-term impacts of peace activism, including the formation of the Green Party in Germany and the adoption of certain policies by foreign policy realists such as Richard Nixon.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Laura Beers. "Orwell’s Ghosts Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century" (Norton, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 3 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Is Orwell still relevant today?

In Orwell’s Ghosts Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century (Norton, 2024), Laura Beers, a Professor of History at American University examines the life and writing of Orwell to offer lessons for contemporary politics and society. The book examines the influences that shaped Eric Blair’s nom de plume, as well as showing how his ideas offer vital insights for the project of equality and social justice today. The book is even handed in its analysis, placing Orwell as a writer and thinker of his time and place, as much as he is relevant today. Moreover, the book offers an important critical perspective on his views about gender and feminism, reminding the reader of the importance of a nuanced perspective even for this hugely significant figure. A fascinating read as well as a vital political intervention, the book will be essential reading across humanities, social science and for anyone interested in politics too.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David A. Messenger, "Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain" (LSU Press, 2014)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the waning days and immediate aftermath of World War II, Nazi diplomats and spies based in Spain decided to stay rather than return to a defeated Germany. The decidedly pro-German dictatorship of General Francisco Franco gave them refuge and welcomed other officials and agents from the Third Reich who had escaped and made their way to Iberia. Amid fears of a revival of the Third Reich, Allied intelligence and diplomatic officers developed a repatriation program across Europe to return these individuals to Germany, where occupation authorities could further investigate them. Yet due to Spain's longstanding ideological alliance with Hitler, German infiltration of the Spanish economy and society was extensive, and the Allies could count on minimal Spanish cooperation in this effort.

In Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain (LSU Press, 2014), David Messenger deftly traces the development and execution of the Allied repatriation scheme, providing an analysis of Allied, Spanish, and German expatriate responses. Messenger shows that by April 1946, British and American embassy staff in Madrid had compiled a census of the roughly 10,000 Germans then residing in Spain and had drawn up three lists of 1,677 men and women targeted for repatriation to occupied Germany. While the Spanish government did round up and turn over some Germans to the Allies, many of them were intentionally overlooked in the process. By mid-1947, Franco's regime had forced only 265 people to leave Spain; most Germans managed to evade repatriation by moving from Spain to Argentina or by solidifying their ties to the Franco regime and Span-ish life. By 1948, the program was effectively over.

Drawing on records in American, British, and Spanish archives, this first book-length study in English of the repatriation program tells the story of this dramatic chapter in the history of post--World War II Europe.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard D. Oram, "Where Men No More May Reap Or Sow: The Little Ice Age: Scotland 1400-1850" (Birlinn, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age: Scotland 1400–1850 (Birlinn, 2024) by Dr. Richard D. Oram spans 450 years that saw profound transformation in Scotland’s environment. It begins in the fifteenth century, when the ‘Golden Age’ of the early 1200s was but a fading folk memory in a land gripped by the gathering grimness of a ‘little ice age’. Colder, wetter, stormier weather became the new normal, interspersed with brief episodes of warmer but still moist conditions, all of which brought huge challenges to a society on the knife-edge of subsistence.

Viewing the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the cycles of disease and dearth that were ever-present into the later 1700s, the book explores the slow adoption and application of the ideas of ‘Improvement’ and the radical disruption of Scotland’s environment that ensued. Reformation, revolution and rebellion were the background noise to efforts to subsist and succeed through a hostile age, in which Scotland’s environment was an adversary to be tamed, mastered and made ‘polite’. As the last, bitter decades of the ‘little ice age’ were ground out in foreign wars, forced clearances and potato famines, Scotland prepared itself to embrace the Industrial Age.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tim Cooper, "When Christians Disagree: Lessons from the Fractured Relationship of John Owen and Richard Baxter" (Crossway, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Our current culture seems to be increasingly divided on countless issues, including those affecting the church. But for centuries, theological disagreements, political differences, and issues relating to church leadership have made it challenging for Christians to foster unity and love for one another.

In When Christians Disagree: Lessons from the Fractured Relationship of John Owen and Richard Baxter (Crossway, 2024), author Tim Cooper explores this polarization through the lives of two oppositional figures in church history: John Owen and Richard Baxter. Cooper highlights their individual stories while showing how their contrasting life experiences, personalities, and temperaments led to their inability to work together. After exploring these lessons from the past, readers will gain insights into their own relationships, ultimately learning how to love and live in harmony with their fellow believers despite their disagreements.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gilad Sharvit, "Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought" (Brandeis UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought (Brandeis UP, 2022) proposes a new understanding of modern Jewish theories of messianism across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy. The book explores how ideals of repetition, return, and the cyclical occasioned a new messianic impulse across an important swath of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jewish thought. To grasp the complexities of Jewish messianism in modernity, the book focuses on diverse notions of “dynamic repetition” in the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud, and their interrelations with basic trajectories of twentieth-century philosophy and critical thought.

Gilad Sharvit is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. A scholar of modern Jewish thought, Sharvit's interests lie in Jewish philosophy, German-Jewish literature and culture, German and continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory. He completed his PhD studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Philosophy Department and later accepted a Diller Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Jewish Studies at University of California, Berkeley (2014-16) and was a Townsend Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at University of California, Berkeley (2016-17). In 2017-18, Professor Sharvit was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Koebner Minerva Center for German History (Hebrew University) and at Tel Aviv University (Minerva Center for German History and School of Philosophy).

Professor Sharvit is the author of Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom (Magnes Press) (in Hebrew) and co-editor and contributing author of the volumes Freud and Monotheism: The Violent Origins of Religion with Karen Feldman (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Canonization and Alterity: Heresy in Jewish History, Thought, and Literature with Willi Goetschel (De Gruyter, 2020).

Amir Engel is a professor at the German Department of the Hebrew University and currently also a visiting professor for the history and present of Jewish-Christian relations at the Theological Faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin. He studied philosophy, literature and cultural studies at the Hebrew University and earned his doctorate in German Studies at Stanford University, California. He then taught and researched at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on religion, politics, literature, and the relationships between these three areas. His main topics include German-Jewish Romanticism and German-Jewish literature and culture in the post-war period. His first book, Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography, was published in 2017, and he is currently finalizing his second book manuscript, tentatively titled The Politics of Spirituality: German, Jews and Christian 1900 - 1942

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Burke, "The Puppet Masters: How MI6 Masterminded Ireland's Deepest State Crisis" (Mercier Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In The Puppet Masters: How MI6 Masterminded Ireland's Deepest State Crisis (Mercier Press, 2024), David Burke uncovers the clandestine activities of Patrick Crinnion, a Garda intelligence officer who secretly served MI6 during the early years of the Troubles. As the Garda Síochána launched a manhunt for the Chief-of-Staff of the IRA, Crinnion found himself playing a crucial role in the effort to track him down. Before his disappearance, Crinnion’s actions exposed a web of secrets including those of another British spy in the Irish police, damaging intelligence leaks, gunrunning by Irish politicians, and a cover-up related to the murder of a Garda.

Burke reveals MI6’s shady dealings, from attempts to smear Irish politicians to plans for using criminals as assassins and the secret surveillance of a key IRA member. Crinnion fled into exile. The Puppet Masters not only reveals what became of him but also provides an insightful look into a turbulent period marked by covert operations, betrayal, and the power struggle that shaped modern Irish history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Charles Barr, "British Cinema: a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers.

In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022), Charles Barr considers films and filmmakers, and studios and sponsorship, against the wider view of changing artistic, socio-political, and industrial climates over the decades of the 20th Century. Considering British cinema in the wake of one of the most familiar of cinematic reference points–Alfred Hitchcock–Barr traces how British cinema has developed its own unique path, and has since been celebrated for its innovative approaches and distinctive artistic language.

Charles Barr worked for many years at the University of East Anglia, helping to develop one of the first UK programs in film studies at the graduate and undergraduate level. He has since taught in St. Louis, Galway, and Dublin, and is currently a Research Fellow at St. Mary's University, Twickenham. Much of his published work has been on British cinema, including the books Ealing Studios and English Hitchcock, and he was cowriter, with director Stephen Frears, of Typically British, part of the centenary history of cinema broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995. He has continued writing on Hitchcock, with a study of Vertigo in the BFI Classics series and Hitchcock: Lost and Found, coauthored with the Parisian scholar Alain Kerzoncuf.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His writing and other interviews about literature and film can also be found on Pages and Frames.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nancy M. Bradbury, "Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales" (Penn State UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In this elegantly written study Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedded microgenres could be potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary.

In order to understand Chaucer’s use of proverbs and their reception by premodern readers, we must set aside post-Romantic prejudices against such sayings as prosaic and unoriginal. The premodern focus on proverbs conditioned the literary culture that produced the Canterbury Tales and helped shape its audience’s reading practices. Aided by Thomas Speght’s notations in his 1602 edition, Dr. Bradbury shows that Chaucer acknowledges the power of the proverb, reflecting on its capacity for harm as well as for good and on its potential to expand and deepen—but also to regulate and constrict—the meanings of stories. Far from banishing proverbs as incompatible with the highest reaches of poetry, Chaucer places them at the center of the liberating interpretive possibilities the Canterbury Tales extends to its readers.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, commerce, music, art, architecture, communications, food, and every other corner of society. Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2020), written by the historian of innovation and the RSA’s resident historian Anton Howes, is the fascinating story of this unique institution.

Drawing on exclusive access to a wealth of rare papers and artifacts from the Society’s own archives, Howes shows how the Society of Arts has constantly reinvented itself to keep in step with changing times. The Society has served as a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, purchased and restored an entire village, encouraged the planting of more than sixty million trees, and sought technological alternatives to child labour. Arts and Minds reveals how a society of public-spirited individuals tried to make their country a better place, and draws vital lessons from their triumphs and failures for all would-be reformers today.

Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alessandra Montalbano, "Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them.

Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Alessandra Montalbano examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terrified society, ignited juridical and parliamentary debates, and mobilised citizens. Bringing together archival and media materials with the victims’ accounts and diverse forms of cultural response, the book examines ransom kidnapping through the lenses of historiography, law, literary criticism, trauma studies, phenomenology, and political philosophy. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy traces how and at what price Italians became aware of living in a country that was being blackmailed by criminal organisations that arguably jeopardised the nation even more than terrorism.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michelle Moffat, "Scottish Society in the Second World War: Tradition, Tension, Transformation" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 04:00:00 +0000

Surprisingly little is known about Scottish experiences of the Second World War. Scottish Society in the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Michelle Moffat addresses this oversight by providing a pioneering account of society and culture in wartime Scotland. While significantly illuminating a pivotal episode in Scottish history, this book also charts the uncertainties that permeated Scottish society at that time: relating to nationhood, to cultural identity, to Scotland’s place within the Union, and towards the country’s future.

Using recently discovered archives, this text examines key aspects of wartime life, including work, leisure, morale, and religion. It also explores the underlying tension between conformity and resistance, and the ways that social fissures shaped Scottish responses to war. Further, in taking a national approach to the British home front, it draws out areas of cultural difference between Scotland and established scholarship on other nations and regions of Britain.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anthony Di Renzo, "Pasquinades: Essays from Rome's Famous Talking Statue" (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Anthony Di Renzo's Pasquinades: Essays from Rome's Famous Talking Statue (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023) is the most audacious guide to Rome you will ever read. Pasquino, the city’s witty talking statue, will introduce you to the gallant heroes and grotesque villains, humble peddlers and flamboyant nobles, whores and saints and movie stars who have reigned throughout its turbulent history. Life in Rome is a carnival! Let its joy melt in your heart like gelato.

Anthony’s previous books include Trinacria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily, Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America, and Bitter Greens: Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity. He teaches writing at Ithaca College.

Recommended Books:

John Keahey, Following Caesar

Chris Holmes writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, "The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia" (Cornell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Nuria Silleras-Fernandez explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Dr. Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason.

Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Dr. Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in mediaeval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sarah Milton, "Ageing and New Intimacies: Gender, Sexuality and Temporality in an English Salsa Scene" (Manchester UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The 'baby boom' generation, born between the 1940s and the 1960s, is often credited with pioneering new and creative ways of relating, doing intimacy and making families. With this cohort now entering mid and later life in Britain, they are also said to be revolutionising the experience of ageing. Are the romantic practices of this 'revolutionary cohort' breaking with tradition and allowing new ways of understanding and doing ageing and relating to emerge? Based on an innovative combination of sensory ethnography in salsa classes and life history interviews, Ageing and New Intimacies: Gender, Sexuality and Temporality in an English Salsa Scene (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Sarah Milton documents the meanings of desire and romance, and 'new' - or renewed - intimacies, among women in mid and later life.

Beginning with women at a transition point, when newly single or newly dating in midlife, the chapters look back over life histories to examine prior relationship experiences at different life stages, and look forward to hopes for future intimacies. In the navigation of romance and new relationships we see the sensory, sensual and affective nature of heteronormativity, and gendered practices that are informed by memories of the past, the imagination of previous generations and class-based desires. Challenging conventional notions of the baby boomers, this book illuminates the intersections of age, class, and white normativity, making important contributions to our understanding of ageing and generation, intimacy and gender.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yosefa Raz, "The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, Yosefa Raz's book The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2023) reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship's development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, while on the other, poets drew upon a counter-tradition of destabilizing, indeterminate, weak prophetic power. Yosefa Raz considers British and German Romanticism alongside their margins, incorporating Hebrew literature written at the turn of the twentieth century in the Russia Empire. Ultimately she explains the weakness of modern poet-prophets not only as a crisis of secularism but also, strikingly, as part of the instability of the biblical text itself.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Emily Wilbourne, "Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Emily Wilbourne argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labour; some laboured at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people.

Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary performances and musical conventions, this book makes the forceful claim that operatic musical techniques were-from their very inception-imbricated with racialized differences. Dr. Wilbourne offers both a macro and micro approach to the content of this book. The first half of the volume draws upon a wide range of archival, theatrical and historical sources to articulate the theoretical interdependence of razza (lit. "race"), voice, and music in early modern Italy; the second half focuses on the life and work of a specific, racially-marked individual: the enslaved, Black, male soprano singer, Giovannino Buonaccorsi (fl.1651-1674). Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence reframes the place of racial difference in Western art music and provides a compelling pre-history to later racial formulations of the sonic.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stefanie Coché, "Psychiatric Institutions and Society: The Practice of Psychiatric Committal in the "Third Reich," the Democratic Republic of Germany, and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1941-1963" (Routledge, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Stefanie Coché's Psychiatric Institutions and Society: the Practice of Psychiatric Commital in the “Third Reich,” the Democratic Republic of Germany, and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1941-1963 (London: Routledge, 2024; translated by Alex Skinner) probes how the serious and sometimes fatal decision was made to admit individuals to asylums during Germany’s age of extremes. The book shows that - even during the Nazi killing of the sick - relatives played an even more important role in most admissions than doctors and the authorities.

In light of admission practices, this study traces how ideas about illness, safety, and normality changed when the Nazi regime collapsed in 1945 and illuminates how closely power configurations in the psychiatric sector were linked to political and social circumstances in the early years of both German successor states.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Helen Freear-Papio and Candyce Crew Leonard, "The Theatre of Twenty-First Century Spain" (Vernon Press, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The interview featured an in-depth dialogue about The Theatre of Twenty-First Century Spain (Vernon Press, 2022), a bilingual collection that examines contemporary Spanish theater and its exploration of identity, anxieties and social urgencies. The editors, Helen Freear-Papio and Candyce Crew Leonard, shared their backgrounds, interests in Spanish theater, and the impact of their mentors on their academic careers. The influence of the magazine "Estreno" on the formation and development of theatrical research was highlighted.

The book addresses the myriad of complex social immediacies that impact twenty-first-century Spain. Identifying, naming, and belonging lend a sense of rational order and rootedness within specific societies and eras. Yet, that order may collapse, threatening the predictability that ensures stability. As Spain enters its fifth decade as a fully democratic nation, its identity remains unfocused and disorganized, continuing to reckon with its traumatic past.

The nine research essays in this volume, all on plays authored in the twenty-first century, explore topics such as non-heteronormative gender identity, "fake news" and the distortion of facts, female self-agency and authorship, violence against women, and the ongoing need for justice for family histories erased and repressed by Spain's unresolved recent past.

Central to the book is how contemporary theater addresses issues like immigration, unemployment, gender violence, the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, and the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. By examining these works through the lens of identity, the editors reflect on the complexities and tensions of current Spanish society, proposing that theater is an effective means of capturing the immediacy of these problems.

Helen Freear-Papio (Ph.D. University of Connecticut) is a Senior Lecturer in the Spanish Department at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, where she teaches courses on the contemporary theater of Spain. Her research centers on contemporary Spanish female playwrights of democratic Spain with an emphasis on the following topics: the construction of female identity, female authorship and agency, gender violence, alterity, historical memory, and the retelling of myth.

Candyce Crew Leonard (Ph.D. Indiana University-Bloomington) has worked with the contemporary theater of Spain since the early 1980s. She spent her career teaching classes in European and Modern Drama as well as the literature of Spain; the cornerstone of her research is social justice and gender studies. Dr. Leonard is Professor Emerita at Wake Forest University.

Vernon Press – Bridging Scholarly Ideas and Global Readership

Vernon Press stands out as a bilingual independent publisher of scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences. Their mission is crucial — to provide a home for ideas of international importance and to embrace scholarship from underrepresented voices and perspectives. Through its diverse catalog, Vernon Press engages with global readers, contributing to academic and public discourse.

Dessy Vassileva, the Marketing & Design expert at Vernon Press, brings a 360º multidisciplinary approach to her work at Vernon Press.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Toby Green, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature of slavery in the West during this period combined increasingly disadvantaged the region, while simultaneously changing the internal political dynamics of kingdoms and the societies within them.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matt Houlbrook et al., "Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain: A History for the Present" (Manchester UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

What does the history of men tell us about life today? In Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain: A History for the Present (Manchester UP, 2024), the editors Matt Houlbrook, a Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham, Katie Jones, an independent scholar living in Birmingham, and Ben Mechen, an Associate Lecturer in Modern British History at University College London, bring together a range of essays presenting historical research and contemporary reflections on both the history and historiography of men. The collection is organised into four themes across institutions, histories, everyday lives and bodies. The themes gather an eclectic yet interrelated set of chapters ranging from how bureaucracy intersects with race and gender, through reflections on sexuality and censorship, to place based analysis of work and communities. Essential reading for both historians and anyone interested in understanding contemporary society, the book is available open access here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

James D. Fisher, "The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land and wages. The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. James Fisher reveals that it was also about books, knowledge and expertise. It argues that during the early modern period, farming books were a key tool in the appropriation of the traditional art of husbandry possessed by farm workers of all kinds. It challenges the dominant narrative of an agricultural 'enlightenment', in which books merely spread useful knowledge, by showing how codified knowledge was used to assert greater managerial control over land and labour. The proliferation of printed books helped divide mental and manual labour to facilitate emerging social divisions between labourers, managers and landowners. The cumulative effect was the slow enclosure of customary knowledge. By synthesising diverse theoretical insights, this study opens up a new social history of agricultural knowledge and reinvigorates long-term histories of knowledge under capitalism.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Joseph, "Burgenland: Village Secrets and the First Tremors of the Holocaust" (Amberley, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

When Hitler marched into Austria in March 1938, he was given a rapturous reception. Millions lined the streets and filled the squares of Vienna. Tobias Portschy, a self-appointed regional Nazi chief, considered what to give the Fuhrer for his birthday, and devised a particular gift from the Austrian people: the elimination of Jewish life in the Burgenland, picturesque farming country about 70 km south-east of Vienna. Eichmann took note of the brutal methodology. The Holocaust had begun.

Burgenland: Village Secrets and the First Tremors of the Holocaust (Amberley, 2023) is an astonishing survey of Jewish history in Central Europe, an account of the opening salvo of what turned into the systematic industrial-scale genocide of European Jewry, a stern examination of British policy and the world's wholly inadequate response. It is also a deeply personal memoir and family history. Impeccably researched and hugely ambitious in scope, it narrates the full arc of the Jewish experience in Central Europe over 300 years, following the lives of one family who played a significant part in events described, from the struggle for civil liberties to the resistance to fascism and the rise of Zionism. David Joseph has dissected an uncomfortable history, and the results demand a substantial reassessment of the orthodox narrative around the Holocaust both in Britain and in Austria.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, "Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

During the night of 25 July 1941, assassins planted a time bomb in the bed of the former French Interior Minister, Marx Dormoy. The explosion on the following morning launched a two-year investigation that traced Dormoy's murder to the highest echelons of the Vichy regime. Dormoy, who had led a 1937 investigation into the "Cagoule," a violent right-wing terrorist organization, was the victim of a captivating revenge plot. Based on the meticulous examination of thousands of documents, Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France (U Toronto Press, 2020) tells the story of Dormoy's murder and the investigation that followed.

At the heart of this book lies a true crime that was sensational in its day. A microhistory that tells a larger and more significant story about the development of far-right political movements, domestic terrorism, and the importance of courage, Assassination in Vichy explores the impact of France's deep political divisions, wartime choices, and post-war memory.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Paige Reynolds, "Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 9 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Paige Reynolds's book Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world.

Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.

Disclaimer/apology: Slightly stormy conditions during the recording of the interview led to slightly reduced sound quality.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Karine Varley, "Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 9 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Karine Varley's book Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023) advances a significant new interpretation of French collaboration during the Second World War. Arguing that the path to collaboration involved not merely Nazi Germany but Fascist Italy, it suggests that the Vichy French government was caught in a double bind. On the one hand, many of the threats to France's territory, colonial empire and power came from Rome as well as Berlin. On the other, Vichy was caught between the irreconcilable yet inescapable positions of the two Axis governments. Unable to resolve the conflict, Vichy sought to play the two Axis powers against each other.

By exploring French dealings with Italy at diplomatic, military and local levels in France and its colonial empire, Double Bind reveals the multi-dimensional and multi-directional nature of Vichy's policy. It therefore challenges many enduring conceptions of collaboration with reference to Franco-German relations and offers a fresh perspective on debates about Vichy France and collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ed Simon, "Devil's Contract: A History of the Faustian Bargain" (Melville House, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 9 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

From ancient times to the modern world, the idea of the Faustian bargain—the exchange of one’s soul in return for untold riches and power—has exerted a magnetic pull upon our collective imaginations.

In Devil's Contract: A History of the Faustian Bargain (Melville House, 2024), Dr. Ed Simon takes us on a historical tour of the Faustian bargain, from the Bible to blues, and illustrates how the instinct for sacrificing our principles in exchange for power models all kinds of social ills, from colonialism to nuclear warfare, and even social media, climate change, and AI. In doing so, Simon conveys just how much the Faustian bargain shows us about power and evil … and about ourselves.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb, "The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics" (Oxford UP, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 9 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The story of four remarkable women who shaped the intellectual history of the 20th century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch.

On the cusp of the Second World War, four women went to Oxford to begin their studies: a fiercely brilliant Catholic convert; a daughter of privilege longing to escape her stifling upbringing; an ardent Communist and aspiring novelist with a list of would-be lovers as long as her arm; and a quiet, messy lover of newts and mice who would become a great public intellectual of our time. They became lifelong friends. At the time, only a handful of women had ever made lives in philosophy. But when Oxford's men were drafted in the war, everything changed.

As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch labored to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they made friendships and families, and as they drifted toward and away from each other, they never stopped insisting that some lives are better than others. They argued that courage and discernment and justice--and love--are the heart of a good life.

The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (Oxford UP, 2021) presents the first sustained engagement with these women's contributions: with the critique and the alternative they framed. Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves.

Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at Houghton University. He lives with his family in Fillmore, New York, when his teaching doesn't call him to London for a season.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tabitha Stanmore, "Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic" (Bloombury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 7 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Imagine: it's the year 1600 and you've lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they've been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you're facing a trial. Maybe you're looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do?

In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might have been cunning folk: practitioners of “service magic.” Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to daily life. For people across ages, genders, and social ranks, practical magic was a cherished resource for navigating life's many challenges.

In historian Tabitha Stanmore's beguiling account, we meet lovelorn widows, dissolute nobles, selfless healers, and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I's astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in a bewildering world, buffeted by forces beyond their control. As Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach about how to accommodate the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today.

Charming in every sense, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (Bloombury, 2024) is at once an immersive reconstruction of a bygone era and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human.

Tabitha Stanmore, PhD, is a specialist in medieval and early modern magic.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elizabeth Storr Cohen and Marlee J. Couling, "Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 6 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Elizabeth Cohen, Professor Emerita at York University, joins Jana Byars to talk about her new volume, Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), edited with Marilee Couling. Non-elite or marginalized early modern women-among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers-have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial records, administrative paperwork, letters, pamphlets, hagiography, and picaresque literature, this volume explores how, as social agents, these doubly invisible women built and used networks and informal alliances to supplement the usual structures of family and community that often let them down. Ten essays, ranging widely in geography from the eastern Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America and in time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, show how flexible, sometimes ad hoc relationships could provide crucial practical and emotional support for women who faced problems of livelihood, reputation, displacement, and violence.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jessie Abrahams, "Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class" (Bristol UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 6 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Despite a mass expansion of the higher education sector in the UK since the 1960s, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds remain less likely to enter university than their advantaged counterparts.

Drawing on unique new research gathered from three contrasting secondary schools in England, including interviews with children from three year groups and careers advisors, Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jessie Abrahams explores the aspirations, opportunities and experiences of young people from different social-class backgrounds against a backdrop of continuing inequalities in education.

By focusing both on the stories of young people and the schools themselves, the book sheds light on the institutional structures and practices that render young people more, or less, able to pursue their aspirations.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremy Black, "Defoe's Britain" (St. Augustine's Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 5 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Weight of Words Series continues with Defoe's Britain (St. Augustine's Press, 2023), as historian Jeremy Black uses this writer to interpret Britain in the late 1600s, and likewise looks to the times to interpret the fiction. As seen in previous studies on Christie, Smollett, Fielding, and the Gothic novelists, Black tells the story of the story-teller, and presents the picture of British nationalism that "was the product, history, and record of struggle--collective and individual--as well as its defence. Defoe provides particular accounts of this struggle, both in foreign seas and lands, and at home. This struggle had a moral character that is difficult to capture today."

Defoe was an outsider, a man of many interests whom Black asserts evades too precise a portrait or coherent description of character and career. But he is a traveler, in the literal and imaginative senses, and in his engagement with life and its issues and willingness to associate with 'low-life' prefigures later literary giants like Smollett and Fielding. More than the establishment of genre, Defoe created the writer "whose business is observation." Black's account of this parcel of the British past is impeccable because it is in fact an account that the past, in Defoe, gives of itself. "As a writer, Defoe brought together a reality usually presented as, and endorsed by, history, with the imaginative focus of storytelling, and the direction of, variously, propaganda, analysis, and exemplary tale."

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Language Policy at an Abortion Clinic

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 4 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Ella van Hest (Ghent University, Belgium) about her ethnographic research related to language diversity at an abortion clinic in Belgium. The conversation focusses on a co-authored paper entitled Language policy at an abortion clinic published in Language Policy in 2023.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Miranda Sachs, "An Age to Work: Working-Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 2 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Childhood as lived during the French Third Republic was very different from childhood during the modern era. Working-class children laboured alongside adults in the home, on the streets, and in places of work. French authorities sought to change this and redefine childhood by means of government organizations, separate legal structures, and schools for delinquent children. French authorities visited places of work, schools, and interviewed parents. Yet gender based divisions between males and females were still reinforced.

Professor Sachs was an assistant professor of history at Texas State University and will start as assistant professor with Texas A & M next year. In her latest publication, An Age to Work: Working Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris (Oxford University Press, 2023), Professor Sachs uses police reports, records of interviews, and postcards to explore the history of working class children in Paris. Dr. Sachs received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2017. Prior to coming to Texas State, she taught at William & Mary and Denison University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michael Sonenscher, "Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word" (Princeton UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton UP, 2022), Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it.

“Capitalism” was first coined in France in the early nineteenth century. It began as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas. The first involved thinking about public debt and war finance. The second involved thinking about the division of labour. Sonenscher shows that thinking about the first has changed radically over time. Funding welfare has been added to funding warfare, bringing many new questions in its wake. Thinking about the second set of ideas has offered far less room for manoeuvre. The division of labour is still the division of labour and the debates and discussions that it once generated have now been largely forgotten. By exploring what lay behind the earlier distinction before it collapsed and was eroded by the passage of time, Sonenscher shows why the present range of received ideas limits our political options and the types of reform we might wish for.

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Sans-Culottes and Before the Deluge (both Princeton UP).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shahmima Akhtar, "Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Nation, c. 1850-1970" (Manchester UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Shahmima Akhtar is a historian of race, migration and empire and an assistant professor of Black and Asian British History at the University of Birmingham. She previously worked at the Royal Historical Society to improve BME representation in UK History, whether working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or other learned societies. Dr. Akhtar has also worked closely with museums and heritage sites as a researcher and consultant on shaping histories of the British Empire for today’s populace.

In this interview, she discusses her new book, Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Nation, c. 1850-1970 (Manchester UP, 2024), which studies differing visions of Irish racial identities as displayed at various international fairs and expos.

Exhibiting Irishness analyses how exhibitions enabled Irish individuals and groups to work out (privately and publicly) their politicised existences across two centuries. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. Exhibiting Irishness demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland's political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders.

The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denva Gallant, "Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy" (Penn State UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life.

In Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late mediaeval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Dr. Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late mediaeval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale.

By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nicolas Véron, "Europe's Banking Union at Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative" (Bruegel, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In 2012, to stave off the collapse of their currency union, Europe’s leaders sought to end the so-called “doom loop” between the solvency of their governments and their banking systems. Two years later, a banking union was born.

Created as a crisis response, like the postwar coal and steel community, this ten-year-old union is another step in Europe’s long integrationist road. Yet – as Nicolas Véron points out in Europe’s Banking Union At Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative (Bruegel, 2024) - the effort to "break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns remains fragile and incomplete".

Together with Jean Pisani-Ferry, Nicolas Véron is a co-founder of the Bruegel public-policy think tank in Brussels and a scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) in Washington. A specialist in financial systems and regulatory reform, he is an alumnus of the École Polytechnique and the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and - until 2000 - was a French civil servant. He has written and co-written many papers on banking supervision, crisis management, and Eurozone policy governance.

*The author's book recommendations were Central Banking Before 1800: A Rehabilitation by Ulrich Bindseil (OUP, 2020) and 7500 Euros: Pastiches politico-littéraires by David Spector (Wombat, 2022).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nicola Clark, "The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens" (Norton, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Every Tudor Queen had ladies-in-waiting. They were her confidantes and her chaperones. Only the Queen's ladies had the right to enter her most private chambers, spending hours helping her to get dressed and undressed, caring for her clothes and jewels, listening to her secrets. But they also held a unique power. A quiet word behind the scenes, an appropriately timed gift, a well-negotiated marriage alliance were all forms of political agency wielded expertly by women.

The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens (W. W. Norton, 2024) by Dr. Nicola Clark explores the daily lives of ladies-in-waiting, revealing the secrets of recruitment, costume, what they ate, where (and with whom) they slept. We meet María de Salinas, who travelled to England with Catherine of Aragon when just a teenager and spied for her during the divorce from Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn's lady-in-waiting Jane Parker was instrumental in the execution of not one, but two queens. And maid-of-honour Anne Basset kept her place through the last four consorts, negotiating the conflicting loyalties of her birth family, her mistress the Queen, and even the desires of the King himself. As Henry changed wives, and changed the very fabric of the country's structure besides, these women had to make choices about loyalty that simply didn't exist before. The Waiting Game is the first time their vital story has been told.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Simon Heffer, "Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars" (Penguin, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Simon Heffer's book Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars (Penguin, 2024) is an astonishingly ambitious overview of the political, social and cultural history of the country from 1919 to 1939.

It explores and explains the politics of the period, and puts such moments of national turmoil as the General Strike of 1926 and the Abdication Crisis of 1936 under the microscope. It offers pen portraits of the era's most significant figures. It traces the changing face of Britain as cars made their first mass appearance, the suburbs sprawled, and radio and cinema became the means of mass entertainment. And it probes the deep divisions that split the nation: between the haves and have-nots, between warring ideological factions, and between those who promoted accommodation with fascism in Europe and those who bitterly opposed it.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Henry Reece, "The Fall: The Last Days of the English Republic" (Yale UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Why did England's one experiment in republican rule fail?

Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 sparked a period of unrivalled turmoil and confusion in English history. In less than two years, there were close to ten changes of government; rival armies of Englishmen faced each other across the Scottish border; and the Long Parliament was finally dissolved after two decades. Why was this period so turbulent, and why did the republic, backed by a formidable standing army, come crashing down in such spectacular fashion?

In The Fall: The Last Days of the English Republic (Yale UP, 2024), Henry Reece explores the full story of the English republic's downfall. Questioning the accepted version of events, Reece argues that the restoration of the monarchy was far from inevitable--and that the republican regime could have survived long term. Richard Cromwell's Protectorate had deep roots in the political nation, the Rump Parliament mobilised its supporters impressively, and the country showed little interest in returning to the old order until the republic had collapsed. This is a compelling account that transforms our understanding of England's short-lived period of republican rule.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Genji Yasuhira, "Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilising their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation.

Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672 (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) by Dr. Genji Yasuhira explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the mediaeval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nathaniel Gray Sutanto and Cory Brock, "T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism" (T&T Clark, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism (T&T Clark, 2023) comprehensively demonstrates neo-Calvinism's unique contribution to theology and Christian philosophy. It offers excellent contributions on the movement's most important historical and thematic loci, including its impact on Reformed denominations and churches across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Divided into 3 sections, this handbook first surveys the entire landscape of the neo-Calvinist movement as it pertains to key theological topics. These loci, which range from revelation and Scripture to Christology and theological ethics, show that neo-Calvinist theologies are uniquely modern and yet typically confessional. The second section discusses the influence of key figures from the first and second generation of neo-Calvinist thought, including both principal figures like Abraham Kuyper and lesser known thinkers like August Lecerf. The final section charts the legacy of neo-Calvinism, in non-Dutch geographies, for other sciences, and for the church.

Cory Brock is the minister at St Columbas Free Church of Scotland in Edinburgh and part-time lecturer in Systematic Theology and Preaching at Edinburgh Theological Seminary. He is the author of Orthodox Yet Modern: Herman Bavinck's Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Lexham Press 2020).

Nathaniel Gray Sutanto is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Washington, USA. He is the author of God and Knowledge: Herman Bavinck's Theological Epistemology (T&T Clark, 2020).

Brock and Sutanto also coauthored Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham Academic Press 2022). Listeners can find that interview here.

Listeners interested in topically related NBN interviews, should listen to Zach McCulley's interview with James Eglinton on Bavinck: A Critical Biography and Justin McGeary's interviews with Bruce Pass on The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck and On Theology: Herman Bavinck's Theological Orations.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Harry R. McCarthy, "Boy Actors in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Harry McCarthy provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Dr. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Carlos M. N. Eire, "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" (Yale UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the early modern era, seemingly impossible stories of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft were common and believable. The important question of the time was not if these things happened, but why. This was particularly true as the rise of Protestantism began to challenge Catholic beliefs in miracles and continued to be the case even after scientific research began to supplant religious belief in these phenomena.

In They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023), Carlos Eire shows how these events were an accepted component of early modern life. Based on firsthand accounts, Eire explores the stories of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and others, to describe a world animated by a different understanding of the natural and supernatural. Eire examines why and how cultural, historical, religious, and scientific contexts plays a role in defining both the possible and the impossible.

Todd H. Weir, "Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 (Cambridge UP, 2023) is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern German, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth-century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and early feminists. Todd H. Weir shows how generations of secularist intellectuals staked out leading positions in the Social Democratic Party, but often lost them due to their penchant for dissent.

Moving between local and national developments, this book examines the crucial role of red secularism in the political struggles over religion that rocked Germany and fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Laurence M. Geary, "The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting" (Cork UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In this interview, he discusses his new book The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting (Cork UP, 2023), a collection of interconnected essays on different aspects of agrarian agitation in 1870s and 1880s Ireland.

The Land War in Ireland addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly deficiencies or omissions relating to the themes of the title: famine, humanitarianism, and the activities of agrarian secret societies, commonly referred to as Moonlighting. The famine that afflicted the country in 1879–80, one generation removed from the catastrophic Great Famine of the 1840s, prompted different social responses. The wealthier sectors of society, their consciousness and humanitarianism awakened, provided the bulk of the financial and administrative support for the famine-stricken peasantry. Others, drawn from the same broad social stratum as the latter, vented their anger and frustration on the government and the landlords, whom they blamed for the crisis. The concern of marginal men and women for the welfare of their less fortunate brethren was not so much the antithesis of altruism, as a different, more rudimentary way of expressing it.The volume’s opening chapter introduces the famine that tormented Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard counties in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The four chapters that follow develop the famine theme, concentrating on the role of civic and religious relief agencies, and the local and international humanitarian response to appeals for assistance. The 1879–80 famine kindled benevolence among the diasporic Irish and the charitable worldwide, but it also provoked a more primal reaction, and the book’s two closing chapters are devoted to the activities of secret societies. The first features the incongruously named Royal Irish Republic, a neo-Fenian combination in north-west County Cork. The volume’s concluding essay links history and literature, positing a connection between agrarian secret society activity during the Land War years and the Kerry playwright George Fitzmaurice’s neglected 1914 drama The Moonlighter. This original and engaging work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modern Irish history and literature.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cory C. Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, "Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction" (Lexham Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Discover the rich theology of Neo-Calvinism. Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck sparked a theological tradition in the Netherlands that came to be known as Neo-Calvinism. While studies in Neo-Calvinism have focused primarily on its political and philosophical insights, its theology has received less attention. In Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham Press, 2023), Cory C. Brock and N. Gray Sutanto present the unique dogmatic contributions of the tradition. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theological aspect, such as revelation, creation, salvation, and ecclesiology. Neo-Calvinism produced rich theological work that yields promise for contemporary dogmatics. This book invites readers into this rich theological trajectory.

"This book is the sign that [Neo-Calvinist] theology has now passed beyond the Dutch fairway. It has reached the international waters." --George Harinck

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mark Gilbert, "Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy" (Norton, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Italy's resurrection from 20 years of fascism, three years of war, and two years of civil war is one of the 20th century's great, under-told stories. It's a history of a decade of clashes and compromises between two mass movements - Communism and Christian Democracy - backed offstage by two superpowers.

Above all, it's about the party management of one man - Palmiro Togliatti - and the West-facing vision and cunning of another, Alcide De Gasperi. From the ashes of war, De Gasperi chose a republican government and a market economy, resisted pressure from the Vatican to ally with the far right, and wooed the Americans while acknowledging the unique organisational powers of the Communists until picking the right time to drop them. On top of that, he won Marshall Aid, drove through land reform, and helped found the European communities.

As Professor Gilbert writes in Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy (Norton, 2024): "One need only envision what might have happened had De Gasperi failed to make even one of those calls to see how much his agency mattered for Italy's transition to democracy".

Mark Gilbert is C. Grove Haines Professor of History and International Studies at SAIS Europe in Bologna. Educated at Durham and the University of Wales, he taught history at the universities of Trento and Bath before joining SAIS.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bronagh Ann McShane, "Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) by Dr. Bronagh Ann McShane investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways.

Dr. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad.

Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joseph A. Skloot, "First Impressions: Sefer Hasidim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 8 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Joseph A. Skloot joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, First Impressions: Sefer hasimdim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing (Brandeis UP, 2023). First Impressions uncovers the history of creative adaptation and transformation through a close analysis of the creation of the Sefer Hasidim book. In 1538, a partnership of Jewish silk makers in the city of Bologna published a book entitled Sefer Hasidim, a compendium of rituals, stories, and religious instruction that primarily originated in medieval Franco-Germany. How these men, of Italian and Spanish descent, came to produce a book that would come to shape Ashkenazic culture, and Jewish culture more broadly, over the next four centuries is the basis of this kaleidoscopic study of the history of Hebrew printing in the sixteenth century.

During these early years of printing, the classic works of ancient and medieval Hebrew and Jewish literature became widely available to Jewish (and non-Jewish) readers for the first time. Printing, though, was not merely the duplication and distribution of pre-existing manuscripts, it was the creative adaptation and transformation of those manuscripts by printers. Ranging from Catholic Bologna to Protestant Basel to the Jewish heartland of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Skloot uncovers the history of that creativity by examining the first two print editions of Sefer Hasidim. Along the way, he demonstrates how volumes that were long thought to be eternal and unchanging were in fact artifacts of historical agency and contingency, created by and for human beings.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alistair Moffat, "The Highlands and Islands of Scotland: A New History" (Birlinn, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 7 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In The Highlands and Islands of Scotland: A New History (Birlinn, 2024) by Alistair Moffat, the chronicle begins millions of years ago, with the dramatic geological events that formed the awe-inspiring yet beloved landscapes, followed by the arrival of hunter gatherers and the monumental achievements of prehistoric peoples in places like Skara Brae in Orkney. The story continues with the mysterious Picts; the arrival of the Romans as they expanded the boundaries of their huge empire; the coming of Christianity and the Gaelic language from Ireland; the Viking invasion and the establishment of the great Lordship of the Isles that lasted for three hundred years.

The Highlands are perhaps best known as the key battleground in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s doomed attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy and its dreadful aftermath, which saw the suppression of the clans and the whole of Highland culture. This situation was exacerbated by the terrible Clearances of the nineteenth century which saw tens of thousands evicted from their native lands and forced to emigrate. But, after centuries of decline, the Highlands are being renewed, the land is coming alive once more, and the story ends on an upbeat note as the Highlands look forward to a future full of possibilities.

While this is an epic history of a fascinating subject, Moffat also features the stories of individuals, the telling moments and the crucial details which enrich the human story and add context and colour to the saga of Scotland.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ramón Espejo, "The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000: From Jimmy Valentine to The Vagina Monologues" (Legenda, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 2 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Ramón Espejo's book The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000: From Jimmy Valentine to The Vagina Monologues (Legenda, 2024) delves into the fascinating journey of American drama in Catalonia, exploring how the theatrical output of a world superpower has impacted (and transformed) the stages of an allegedly minor actor in the cultural scene of the 20th century. Yet, while Catalonia is the birthplace of such geniuses as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí or Antoni Gaudí, it is also that of playwrights Joan Brossa, Manuel de Pedrolo, Fermín Cabal or Jordi Galcerán, among others. All of them grew up in, and imbibed, a theatrescape in which American borrowings were not only habitual (often the only foreign plays around) but inspiring and groundbreaking. If Alias Jimmy Valentine re-defined theatrical decorum in Catalonia in the early 1900s, The Vagina Monologues, in the 1990s, challenged prevalent sexual taboos. Throughout the 20th century, Catalonia went from a peripheral, marginalized region of a once vast empire to a booming and largely autonomous centre of culture, recognized all over the world and admired for its uniqueness and original artistic contributions. American plays accompanied, and often directly inspired, such a journey.

Ramón Espejo is Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain, and is one of the leading American drama and theatre scholars in Europe.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 2 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war.

The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Claire Weeda, "Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion" (Boydell and Brewer, 2021)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 2 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other’s military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonization, questioning their work ethic, social organization, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity.

Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250, Medicine, Power and Religion (Boydell and Brewer, 2021), provides a radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength, and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialized others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, and ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.

Claire Weeda is a cultural historian at the Institute for History at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her main fields of interest include ethnic stereotyping, the history of the body, Greco-Arabic medicine, and organic politics in Europe, 1100-1500.

Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matthew Kadane, "The Enlightenment and Original Sin" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 1 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Matthew Kadane, Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, talks about his just new book, The Enlightenment and Original Sin (University of Chicago Press, 2024). An eloquent microhistory that argues for the centrality of the doctrine of original sin to the Enlightenment. What was the Enlightenment? This question has been endlessly debated. In The Enlightenment and Original Sin, historian Matthew Kadane advances the bold claim that the Enlightenment is best defined through what it set out to accomplish, which was nothing short of rethinking the meaning of human nature. Kadane argues that this project centered around the doctrine of original sin and, ultimately, its rejection, signaling the radical notion that an inherently flawed nature can be overcome by human means. Kadane explores these ambitious, wide-ranging themes through the story of the largely unknown Pentecost Barker, an eighteenth-century "purser" and wine merchant. Examining Barker's diary and correspondence with a Unitarian minister, Kadane tracks the transformation of Barker's consciousness from a Puritan to an Enlightenment outlook, revealing in one man's transformation large-scale shifts in self-understanding whose philosophical reverberations would (and have continued to) shape debates on human nature for centuries.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Polo B. Moji, "Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives" (Routledge, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 31 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Polo B. Moji's book Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022) approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces.

Moji adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and shipwrecked migrants to analyse the spatiality of blackness in the everyday. It argues that the material-discursive framing of black flânerie, as both relational and embodied movements, renders visible a politics of place embedded in everyday micro-struggles of raced-sexed subjects.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Eileen M. Hunt, "The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 28 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the concluding text in political theorist Eileen M. Hunt’s trilogy of books focusing on the work of Mary Shelley. All three books have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and they weave together Shelley’s novels (Frankenstein, The Last Man) and her short stories, as well as her journals and other writings. Hunt is currently continuing her work on Shelley by annotating Shelley’s The Last Man and her Journal of Sorrow, both of which were written side by side in the mid-1820s. Hunt’s writing of The First Last Man reflects Shelley’s own approach to writing, which integrates her own experiences into her imagined universes to explore humanity and our thinking. Thus, The First Last Man is a pivotal analysis of Shelley’s iconic work of plague fiction or pandemic novels and Hunt researched and wrote the book during our contemporary experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. While Shelley’s Frankenstein may loom large in the background of The Last Man, the focus of the novel is on the legacy of disease, of mass death, of war and conflict, and how to move forward in a destroyed world. Hunt’s thesis about postapocalyptic literature, especially Shelley’s work in this regard, is that the thread of hope that comes through all of this death and destruction is what sustains us as humans. And this is also what sustained Shelley in the face of her own tragedies, which included the loss of a number of her own children, the tragic drowning death of her beloved husband, and the loss of other family members. For Shelley, plague was a metaphor for her, both literally and figuratively having to contend with all of these experiences that were outside of her control.

Hunt explains that Shelley’s pandemic novel is well positioned within the extended literature that focuses on plagues and pandemics. Shelley is deeply read—in literature, political theory, the Bible, classical work, and the like—and her work reflects these various genres and the ways in which they wrestle with the ideas of apocalypses and what happens after such destructive events. But Shelley’s work is not just situated among these writings on plagues; she actually creates a new form of this kind of work that brings in love and hope while opening up new vistas and beginnings, compelling people to think about what happens in the aftermath of plagues or pandemics. This leads us to post-apocalyptic thinking, compelling the focus on what happens next. Hunt suggests that Mary Shelley is a kind of modern-day Sophocles, a great tragic thinker who helps guide our wrestling with these more eternal questions and does so through fictional prose creations. Such creations push on our imaginations and compel us to think about worlds that may be different than our own, but certainly reflects back our very existences.

The First Last Man is a beautiful book, weaving together Mary Shelley’s work, her journals and personal experiences, and commentary on her work at the time of the publications. Into this, Hunt brings some of her own journal entries from her research excursions during the Covid pandemic, and her own experiences with tragedy in her own life, honoring Shelley’s many skills as a writer in so many different genres and capacities.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Iris Moon, "Melancholy Wedgwood" (MIT Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 26 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024) is an experimental biography of the ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood that reveals the tenuous relationship of eighteenth-century England to late-capitalist modernity. It traces the multiple strands in the life of the ceramic entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) to propose an alternative view of eighteenth-century England's tenuous relationship to our own lives and times, amid the ruins of late-capitalist modernity. Through intimate vignettes and essays, and in writing at turns funny, sharp, and pensive, Iris Moon chips away at the mythic image of Wedgwood as singular genius, business titan, and benevolent abolitionist, revealing an amorphous, fragile, and perhaps even shattered life. In the process the book goes so far as to dismantle certain entrenched social and economic assumptions, not least that the foundational myths of capitalism might not be quite so rosy after all, and instead induce a feeling that could only be characterized as blue.

Iris Moon is Associate Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Luxury after the Terror and coeditor with Richard Taws of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France. She teaches at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher interested in modern Jewish thought, critical theories of mourning, and the boundaries of biographical writing.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Helen J. Nicholson, "Women and the Crusades" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 25 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The crusade movement needed women: their money, their prayer support, their active participation, and their inspiration.

Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades but the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, it also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of western Europe and the Muslims of the Middle East, and compares relations between Latin Christians and Muslims with relations between Muslims and other Christian groups.

Helen J. Nicholson is Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published extensively on the crusades, the military orders, and various related subjects, including a translation of a chronicle of the Third Crusade and an edition of the Templar trial proceedings in Britain and Ireland. She has just completed a history of Queen Sybil of Jerusalem (1186-1190).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Adam Zientek, "A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 24 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Adam Zientek, Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Beginning in the fall of 1914, every French soldier on the Western Front received a daily ration of wine from the army. At first it was a modest quarter litre, but by 1917 it had increased to the equivalent of a full bottle each day. The wine ration was intended to sustain morale in the trenches, making the men more willing to endure suffering and boredom. The army also supplied soldiers with doses of distilled alcohol just before attacks to increase their ferocity and fearlessness. This strategic distribution of alcohol was a defining feature of French soldiers’ experiences of the war and amounted to an experimental policy of intoxicating soldiers for military ends.

A Thirst for Wine and War explores the French army’s emotional and behavioral conditioning of soldiers through the distribution of a mind-altering drug that was later hailed as one of the army’s “fathers of victory.” The daily wine ration arose from an unexpected set of factors including the demoralization of trench warfare, the wine industry’s fear of losing its main consumers, and medical consensus about the benefits of wine drinking. The army’s related practice of distributing distilled alcohol to embolden soldiers was a double-edged sword, as the men might become unruly. The army implemented regulations and surveillance networks to curb men’s drinking behind the lines, in an attempt to ensure they only drank when it was useful to the war effort. When morale collapsed in spring 1917, the army lost control of this precarious system as drunken soldiers mutinied in the thousands. Discipline was restored only when the army regained command of soldiers’ alcohol consumption.

Drawing on a range of archives, personal narratives, and trench journals, A Thirst for Wine and War shows how the French army’s intoxication of its soldiers constituted a unique exercise of biopower deployed on a mass scale.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange, "Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 23 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Jane Hamlett & Dr. Julie-Marie Strange tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries, showing how the kinds of pets we keep, as well as how we relate to and care for them, has changed radically. The book describes the growth of pet foods and medicines, the rise of pet shops, and the development of veterinary care, creating the pet economy. Most importantly, pets have played a powerful emotional role in families across all social classes, creating new kinds of relationships and home lives.

For the first time, through a history of companion animals and the humans who lived with them, this book puts the story of the ‘pet revolution’ alongside other revolutions – industrial, agricultural, political – to highlight how animals contributed to modern British life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jason A. Kerr, "Milton's Theological Process: Reading de Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost" (Oxford UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 21 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

This volume proposes a method for reading Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as an artifact of his process of theological thinking rather than as a repository of his doctrinal views. Jason A. Kerr argues that reading in this way involves attention to the complex material state of the manuscript along with Milton's varying modes of engagement with scripture and various theological interlocutors, and reveals that Milton's approach to theology underwent significant change in the course of his work on the treatise. Initially, Milton set out to use Ramist logic to organize scripture in a way that drew out its intrinsic doctrinal structure. This method had two unintended consequences: it drove Milton to an antitrinitarian understanding of the Son of God, and it obliged him to reflect on his own authority as an interpreter and to develop an ecclesiology capable of sifting divine truth from human error.

Consequently, Milton's Theological Process: Reading de Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the complex interplay between Milton's preconceived theological ideas and his willingness to change his mind as it develops through the layers of revision in the manuscript. Kerr concludes by considering Paradise Lost as a vehicle for Milton's further reflection on the foundations of theology--and by showing how even the epic presents challenges to the fruits of these reflections. Reading Milton theologically means more than working to ascertain his doctrinal views; it means attending critically to his messy process of evaluating and rethinking the doctrinal views to which his prior study had led him.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nicholas Underwood, "Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France" (Indiana UP, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 21 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar Paris (Indiana University Press, 2022) is a captivating study of the culture and politics of the vibrant community of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Making their way to the French capital from various sites in Eastern Europe, members of this Jewish community developed their own cultural institutions, including theatre companies, musical groups, and choruses. Left-leaning in their politics, these newly French Jews typically understood their cultural and community work as expressions of a Socialist or Communist politics. This political orientation also drew non-Yiddish-speaking and non-Jewish audiences to the work of these organizations and artists, establishing forms of solidarity across cultural and religious groups and classes, in Yiddish and in French.

Throughout the book, Underwood examines closely the history of key cultural organizations that brought Yiddish speakers in Paris together and worked to disseminate Yiddish language and culture throughout a wider community in France. Understanding their efforts as profoundly modern, even avant-garde, these cultural and political actors forged and expressed a Jewish diaspora nationalism they regarded as compatible with French republicanism. France was a space of multicultural possibility that seemed the perfect place to build the future.

Taking the reader through the work of various figures and groups, Underwood follows the solidarity, performances, and pluralism of the Yiddish community in interwar Paris up to the eve of the Second World War. Attentive to the devastating experiences that awaited so many French and European Jews after 1939, the book remains focused on the present of the interwar period throughout, emphasizing the community's hopes for an inclusive French society respectful of forms of religious, racial, cultural, and linguistic difference.

Drawing on a wealth of archival materials the author pursued in sites in multiple countries, the book includes some very real and moving stories. Apart from the historical actors Underwood sought out directly and through family members, the lives and experiences of so many actors, singers, musicians, and engaged community members spring off many of the book's pages. It's a compelling book that will be of great interest to scholars across subfields and disciplines, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremy Black, "In Fielding's Wake" (St. Augustine's Press, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 21 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the second volume of The Weight of Words Series, In Fielding's Wake (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), Jeremy Black continues his efforts to present and preserve Britain's literary genius. Its intelligence and enduring influence is in large part reliant on the underlining conservatism that has motivated authors such as Agatha Christie (Black's earlier subject) and Henry Fielding alike.

Fielding's epic comic novel, Tom Jones, is unforgettable for many reasons, but the author must be credited with an aptitude for documenting contemporary cultural history and his contribution to a new species of writing. Black's treatment of Fielding draws to the fore a man who was of his time but not confined to it. "Philosophy in practice encompassed his stance as a man of action as well as a reflective writer of genius." Fielding is shown to provide across the breadth of his work extensive and invaluable commentary on issues as diverse as law and order, marriage, women, and the interplay of urban and rural life. Black, an historian, is here a student of storytelling and recovers Fielding's rich descriptions of the human heart and call to defy the vices with which circumstances might taunt it.

Black has done a service along many fronts at once: the science of the novel and genre, the history of a people and the figure of a memorable writer.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alexandra Paulin-Booth, "Time and Radical Politics in France: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War" (Manchester UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 19 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

People experience and comprehend time in different fashions in response to events occurring around them. The experience of time and the speed at which change is perceived to occur may alter during eras of crisis. Time can feel compressed for some and broad or flat for others. These comprehensions of time in turn give form to political views and provide impetus for actions in the political sphere. Political reforms may seem to fast and without foundation for some and not nearly fast enough for those desperately seeking change. Using French thinkers and activists of the radical left and right between the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War as a case study, Dr. Alexandra Paulin-Booth argues that time provides an important means of exploring how concepts such as nationalism, revolution, and social change were understood at the turn of the century.

In her latest work, Time and Radical Politics in France: from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2023) Dr. Paulin-Booth argues French political and intellectual figures differed in opinion as to whether a glorious future was within their grasp or perhaps the past promised salvation for the embattled French Third Republic.

Professor Alexandra Paulin-Booth is a Postdoctoral Researcher & Academic Coordinator with Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Dr. Paulin-Booth completed her Masters degrees at Durham University before studying for Ph.D. in History at the University of Oxford. She has also taught at Balliol College, Oxford and Durham University.

Rick Northrop is an undergraduate student of History in Calgary, Alberta.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kate Morgan, "The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History" (Mudlark, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 19 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.' So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?

The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History (Mudlark, 2024) is a vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction. In it, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.

We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’.

Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Daniel R. Schwartz, "Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich: Seven Studies" (de Gruyter, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 19 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Apart from an opening survey of modern study of ancient Jewish history, which emphasizes the foundational role of German-Jewish scholars, the studies united in Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich: Seven Studies (de Gruyter, 2024) apply philological methods to the writings of four of them: Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Heinemann, Elias Bickerman(n), and Abraham Schalit. In each case, it is argued that some seemingly trivial anomaly or infelicity, in a publication about such ancient characters as Antiochus Epiphanes, Herod, and Josephus, points to the way in which the historian constructed, and revised, his understanding of the Jews’ situation under Greeks or Romans in light of his perception of the Jews’ situation under the Second or Third Reich. The collection also includes a study that focuses on a Jewish medievalist, Philipp Jaffé, and unravels the indirect but inexorable process that led from a scholarly feud about the editing of medieval Latin texts, in the 1860s, to the “Berlin Antisemitism Dispute” (Berliner Antisemitismusstreit) of 1879–1881, which is commonly viewed as the opening act of modern German antisemitism.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mari Takayanagi and Elizabeth Hallam Smith, "Necessary Women: The Untold Story of Parliament's Working Women" (The History Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 18 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

When suffragette Emily Wilding Davison hid overnight in the Houses of Parliament in 1911 to have her name recorded in the census there, she may not have known that there were sixty-seven other women also resident in Parliament that night: housekeepers, kitchen maids, domestic servants, and wives and daughters living in households. Necessary Women: the Untold Story of Parliament's Working Women (The History Press, 2023) is their story.

Women have touched just about every aspect of life in Parliament. From ‘Jane’, dispenser of beer, pies and chops in Bellamy’s legendary refreshment rooms; to Eliza Arscot, who went from reigning as Principal Housemaid at the House of Lords to Hanwell Asylum; to May Ashworth, Official Typist to Parliament for thirty years through marriage, war and divorce; and Jean Winder, the first female Hansard reporter, who fought for years to be paid the same as her male counterparts; the lives of these women have been largely unacknowledged – until now.

Drawing on new research from the Parliamentary Archives, government records and family history sources, historians and parliamentary insiders Dr. Mari Takayanagi and Dr. Elizabeth Hallam Smith bring these unsung heroes to life. They chart the changing context for working women within and beyond the Palace of Westminster, uncovering women left out of the history books – including Mary Jane Anderson, a previously unknown suffragette.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Priya Satia, "Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 18 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural and artisanal economy to one dominated by industry, ushering in unprecedented growth in technology and trade and putting the country at the center of the global economy. But the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution, anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses, overlooks the true root of economic and industrial expansion: the lucrative military contracting that enabled the country's near-constant state of war in the eighteenth century. Demand for the guns and other war materiel that allowed British armies, navies, mercenaries, traders, settlers, and adventurers to conquer an immense share of the globe in turn drove the rise of innumerable associated industries, from metalworking to banking.

Bookended by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2019) traces the social and material life of British guns over a century of near-constant war and violence at home and abroad. Priya Satia develops this story through the life of prominent British gun-maker and Quaker Samuel Galton Jr., who was asked to answer for the moral defensibility of producing guns as new uses like anonymous mass violence rose. Reconciling the pacifist tenet of his faith with his perception of the economic realities of the time, Galton argued that war was driving the industrial economy, making everyone inescapably complicit in it. Through his story, Satia illuminates Britain's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the government's role in economic development, and the origins of our own era's debates over gun control and military contracting.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of British History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (2009), and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, the Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anna Brinkman, "Balancing Strategy: Sea Power, Neutrality, and Prize Law in the Seven Years' War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 18 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

What is the relationship between seapower, law, and strategy? In Balancing Strategy: Seapower, Neutrality, and Prize-Law in the Seven Years' War (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Anna Brinkman uses in-depth analysis of cases brought before the Court of Prize Appeal during the Seven Years' War to explore how Britain worked to shape maritime international law to its strategic advantage. Within the court, government ofﬁcials and naval and legal minds came together to shape legal decisions from the perspectives of both legal philosophy and maritime strategic aims. As a result, neutrality and the negotiation of rights became critical to maritime warfare. Balancing Strategy unpicks a complex web of competing priorities: deals struck with the Dutch Republic and Spain; imperial rivalry; mercantilism; colonial trade; and the relationships between metropoles and colonies, trade, and the navy. Ultimately, influencing and shaping international law of the sea allows a nation to create the norms and rules that constrain or enable the use of seapower during war.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Marc McMenamin, "Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies" (Gill Books, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 17 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Marc McMenamin's Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies (Gill Books, 2022) is a thrilling account of the true extent of Irish-Allied co-operation during World War II. It reveals strategic Nazi intentions for Ireland and the real role of leading government figures of the time, placing Dan Bryan and G2 - the military intelligence branch of the Irish Defence Forces - firmly at the centre of the country's battle against Nazi Germany.

With the help of over thirty-five hours of previously unpublished audio recordings that were held in storage in northern California for over fifty years, McMenamin reveals the extraordinary unheard history of WWII in Ireland, told from the point of view of the main protagonists.

Fascinating and entertaining, Ireland's Secret War reassesses the legacy of the Irish contribution to the Allied war effort through the voices of those involved at the time.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ambereen Dadabhoy, "Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds" (Routledge, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 17 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds (Routledge, 2024) investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeare’s canon. While many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people. This erasure is striking given the popularity of this topic in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

By exploring the limited ways in which Shakespeare uses Islamic and Muslim tropes and topoi, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Associate Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College, argues that Islam and Muslim cultures function as an alternate or shadow text in his works, ranging from his staged Mediterranean plays to his histories and comedies. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European, and non-Christian Others, which belied the reality of the world in which he lived. Focusing on the Muslims at the margins of Shakespeare’s works, Dadabhoy reveals that Islam and its cultures informed the plots, themes, and intellectual investments of Shakespeare’s plays.

In our conversation we discussed Shakespeare’s worldmaking and the social and political worlds of western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Ottoman empires, famous plays, such as The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and Othello, the figure of the “Moor,” and the threat of turning “Turk,” the intersection of race and geography in Shakespeare’s works, disrupting Anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia through critical reading, and Muslim adaptations of Shakespeare.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Christopher Ewing, "The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany After 1970" (Cornell UP, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany After 1970 (Cornell UP, 2024) tells the story of how, in the aftermath of gay liberation, race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German politics. Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, Christopher Ewing charts both the entrenchment of racisms within white, queer scenes and the formation of new, antiracist movements that contested overlapping marginalizations.

Far from being discrete political trajectories, racist and antiracist politics were closely connected, as activists worked across groups to develop their visions for queer politics. Ewing describes not only how AIDS workers, gay tourists, white lesbians, queer immigrants, and Black feminists were connected in unexpected ways but also how they developed contradictory concerns that comprised the full landscape of queer politics. Out of these connections, which often exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic, arose new forms of queer fascism as well as their multiple, antiracist contestations. Both unsettled the appeals to national belonging, or "homonationalism," on which many white queer activists based their claims. Thus, the story of the making of homonationalism is also the story of its unmaking.

The Color of Desire explains how the importance of racism to queer politics cannot—and should not—be understood without also attending to antiracism. Actors worked across different groups, making it difficult to chart separable political trajectories. At the same time, antiracist activists also used the fractures and openings in groups that were heavily invested in the logics of whiteness to formulate new, antiracist organizations and, albeit in constrained ways, shifted queer politics more generally.

Christopher Ewing is Assistant Professor at Purdue University. His research focuses on the intersections of queer history and the history of race in modern Germany.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Karen Sullivan, "Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Karen Sullivan of Bard College talks to Jana Byars about her recent book, Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (U Chicago Press, 2023). A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "It was said" or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired.

While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveal about this queen and about life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. This book paints a fresh portrait of a singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world. The conversation gets into the idea of how we know what we know, and what we can possibly know about a woman this famous.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lauren Horn Griffin, "Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England: History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity" (Brill, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England: History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity (Brill, 2023) argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants reimagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder-saints who spread Christianity in England, this book offers a theoretical framework for the study of origin narratives. Analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past, this book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding figures. Serving as a timely example of the dependence of national identity on key religious resources, Griffin shows how origin narratives – particularly the founding figures that anchor them – function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of regional and national identity.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Siân E. Grønlie, "The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 13 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The historical narratives of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible have much in common with Icelandic saga literature: both are invested in origins and genealogy, place-names, family history, sibling rivalry, conflict and its resolution. Yet the comparison between these two literatures is rarely made, and biblical translations in Old Norse-Icelandic have been neglected as a focus of literary study.

The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Dr. Siân E. Grønlie aims to redress this neglect. It shows how the likeness between biblical narrative and saga narrative has shaped the reception of the Old Testament in medieval Iceland, even through multiple layers of translation and exegesis.

It draws on a wide variety of texts, including homilies, saints' lives, world histories, encyclopaedic works, and the biblical translations collectively known as Stjórn, to explore how medieval Icelanders engaged with Old Testament narrative in the light of their own vernacular tradition of storytelling. And above all, it argues that the medieval Icelanders understood and recognised in these well-known biblical stories a narrative art that was strikingly akin to their own.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hippokratis Kiaris, "The End of the Western Civilization?: The Intellectual Journey of Humanity to Adulthood" (Vernon Press, 2022)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 11 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Hippokratis Kiaris about his book The End of the Western Civilization?: The Intellectual Journey of Humanity to Adulthood (Vernon Press, 2022).

The podcast episode delves into the intellectual and philosophical exploration of the Western civilization's journey from its inception to its current "adulthood" stage, guided by the insightful narrative and analysis of Professor Hippokratis Kiaris. Framing the development of Western civilization in stages akin to human development, Kiaris articulates how each phase of societal advancement mirrors the cognitive and moral growth phases from childhood towards adulthood, as seen through the lenses of intellectual history. He stretches this analogy from the explorative and question-driven "toddler" years characteristic of the Greek civilization era, through the rigid yet foundational "childhood" of the Middle Ages, moving onto the rebellious "teenage" years of the Enlightenment period, and finally arriving at the responsible yet crisis-ridden "adulthood" of contemporary times. Professor Kiaris's exploration doesn't solely reminisce on the past milestones but rather seeks to understand the inherent responsibilities, limitations, and existential dilemmas facing the West today, particularly those related to sustainability, technological reliance, and the urgent reevaluation of values towards more qualitative, rather than quantitative, societal growth. Through discussing the shifting paradigms towards expertise and technocracy, and the concurrent depersonalization and dehumanization of society, Kiaris offers a critical perspective on the Western civilization’s current challenges and questions the path forward, advocating for a balance between technological progress and maintaining a critical, human-centric approach to societal development.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joanne Edge, "Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death" (York Medieval Press, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sat, 11 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

When will I die? What is the sex of my unborn child? Which of two rivals will win a duel? As today, people in the later Middle Ages approached their uncertainties about the future, from the serious to the mundane, in a variety of ways. One of the most commonly surviving prognostic methods in medieval manuscripts is onomancy: the branch of divination that predicts the future from calculations based on the numbers that correlate to the letters of personal names. However, despite its ubiquity, it has been relatively little studied.

Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death (York Medieval Press, 2024) by Dr. Joanne Edge analyses the intellectual and physical contexts of onomantic texts in some 65 manuscripts of British provenance between around 1150 and 1500, focusing on its two main varieties It demonstrates that onomancies were copied, owned and used by a people from a wide range of literate society in late medieval England: medical practitioners; the gentry and aristocracy; university scholars; and monks. And it seeks to answer the question of why a divinatory device, condemned in canon law as "Pythagorean necromancy", enjoyed such popularity in mainstream books of religion, medicine, and scholasticism.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman, "Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 10 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The British Army won a convincing series of victories between 1916 and 1918. But by 1939 the British Army was an entirely different animal. The hard-won knowledge, experience and strategic vision that delivered victory after victory in the closing stages of the First World War had been lost. In the inter-war years there was plenty of talking, but very little focus on who Britain might have to fight, and how.

Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman's book Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40 (Bloomsbury, 2023) clearly illustrates how the British Army wasn't prepared to fight a first-class European Army in 1939 for the simple reason that as a country Britain hadn't prepared itself to do so. The failure of the army's leadership led directly to its abysmal performance in Norway and France in 1940.

Victory to Defeat is a captivating history of the mismanagement of a war-winning army. It is also a stark warning that we neglect to understand who our enemy might be, and how to defeat him, at the peril of our country. The British Army is now to be cut to its smallest size since 1714. Are we, this book asks, repeating the same mistakes again?

General The Lord Dannatt GCB CBE MC DL is one of the UK's most respected military commentators. He was chief of the Defense Staff and Commander-in-chief, 2006-2009.

Robert Lyman is one of Britain's top military historians. He spent 20 years in the British Army and he is currently a Research Fellow at the Changing Face of War Centre, Pembroke College, University of Oxford.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mark Dooley, "Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Thu, 9 May 2024 04:00:00 +0000

Roger Scruton was one of the outstanding British philosophers of the post-war years. Why then was he at best ignored and at worst reviled? In Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Bloomsbury, 2024), Mark Dooley brilliantly illuminates Scruton's life and offers careful analysis of his work.

Considering how Scruton's conservative instinct was sharpened during the Paris riots of 1968, Dooley explores why Scruton set himself the task of stridently opposing what he termed 'the culture of repudiation' and how he accomplished it.

Covering Scruton's centrals ideas, such as his view of human nature, opposition of the social contract theory and criticisms of the European Union and United Nationals, Dooley argues that he was a prophet for our times - the one British intellectual who courageously rowed against the tide of liberal conviction and arrived at political conclusions the truth of which are becoming more and more obvious.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lucy Barnhouse, "Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 7 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Lucy Barnhouse of Arkansas State University talks with Jana Byars about her new book, Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland: Houses of God, Places for the Sick, out 2023 with Amsterdam University Press. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development of European hospitals was shaped by their claim to the legal status of religious institutions, with its attendant privileges and responsibilities. The questions of whom hospitals should serve and why they should do so have recurred -- and been invested with moral weight -- in successive centuries, though similarities between medieval and modern debates on the subject have often been overlooked. Hospitals' legal status as religious institutions could be tendentious and therefore had to be vigorously defended in order to protect hospitals' resources. This status could also, however, be invoked to impose limits on who could serve in and be served by hospitals. As recent scholarship demonstrates, disputes over whom hospitals should serve, and how, find parallels in other periods of history and current debates.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Javier Samper Vendrell, "The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Mon, 6 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Samper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement. By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications contributed to the idea that homosexual men were considered a threat to youth, doing little to change the views of the many people who believed in homosexual seduction – a homophobic trope that endured well into the twentieth century.

Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society" (Princeton UP, 2019)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 5 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism. Trivellato begins by explaining the development of bills of exchange in the Middle Ages as a means of transferring funds across long distances, ones which helped the expansion of international trade. Though used by both Christians and Jews, concerns about crypto-Judaism among converted Christians in the town of Bordeaux where Cleirac lived may have been key to his belief in their association with the bills. From Cheirac’s book the myth then spread throughout much of western and central Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was used both to support anti-Semitic views and as examples by philo-Semitic writers such as Montesquieu of the superior commercial ability of Jews.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac, "The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality" (Harvard UP, 2023)

caleb@newbooksnetwork.com (New Books Network) — Fri, 3 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In many countries, property law grants equal rights to men and women. Why, then, do women still accumulate less wealth than men? Combining quantitative, ethnographic, and archival research, The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (Harvard UP, 2023) explains how and why, in every class of society, women are economically disadvantaged with respect to their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The reasons lie with the unfair economic arrangements that play out in divorce proceedings, estate planning, and other crucial situations where law and family life intersect.

Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac argue that, whatever the law intends, too many outcomes are imprinted with unthought sexism. In private decisions, old habits die hard: families continue to allocate resources disproportionately to benefit boys and men. Meanwhile, the legal profession remains in thrall to assumptions that reinforce gender inequality. Bessière and Gollac marshal a range of economic data documenting these biases. They also examine scores of family histories and interview family members, lawyers, and notaries to identify the accounting tricks that tip the scales in favor of men.

Women across the class spectrum—from poor single mothers to MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos—can face systematic economic disadvantages in divorce cases. The same is true in matters of inheritance and succession in family-owned businesses. Moreover, these disadvantages perpetuate broader social disparities beyond gender inequality. As Bessière and Gollac make clear, the appropriation of capital by men has helped to secure the rigid hierarchies of contemporary class society itself.

Céline Bessière is Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-Dauphine.

Sibylle Gollac is a researcher in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.