New Books In European Studies

In 2020-21, the UK left first the EU and then the 30-nation European Economic Area. Much of the impact has been masked by the coronavirus pandemic but, as that lifts, there will be profound effects on patterns of employment, national strategic positioning, political cleavages and even on the continued cohesion of the kingdom itself. This did not have to be the case. Short of never leaving the EU, there were less disruptive exit models available. Why weren’t they taken and why did the Brexit process radicalise between 2016 and 2019? These are the questions Christopher Grey explores in Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Wanted (and Why They Were Never Going To) (Biteback, 2021). Emeritus Professor of Organisation Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, Chris Grey previously taught at Leeds, Cambridge and Warwick and is the author and co-author of nine other books. He stumbled into the Brexit debate during the referendum campaign and started writing a blog (Brexit and Beyond) that soon turned int

Since the 2008 financial crisis, complex capital flows have ravaged everyday communities across the globe. Housing in particular has become increasingly precarious. In response, many movements now contest the long-held promises and established terms of the private ownership of housing. Immigrant activism has played an important, if understudied, role in such struggles over collective consumption. In Dispossession and Dissent: Migrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid (Stanford UP, 2021), Sophie Gonick examines the intersection of homeownership and immigrant activism through an analysis of Spain's anti-evictions movement, now a hallmark for housing struggles across the globe. Madrid was the crucible for Spain's urban planning and policy, its millennial economic boom (1998–2008), and its more recent mobilizations in response to crisis. During the boom, the city also experienced rapid, unprecedented immigration. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Gonick uncovers the city's histories of h

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student

Rituality and Social (Dis)Order: The Historical Anthropology of Popular Carnival in Europe (Routledge, 2020) is the first comparative historical anthropology of popular European Carnival in the English language, with a focus on its symbolic, religious, and political dimensions and transformations throughout the centuries. It builds on a variety of theories of social change and social structures, questioning existing assumptions about what folklore is and how cultural gaps and differences take shape and reproduce through ritual forms of collective action. It also challenges recent interpretations about the performative and political dimension of European festive culture, especially in its carnivalesque declension. While presenting and exploring the most important features and characteristics of European pre-modern Carnival and discussing its origins and developments, Dr. Alessandro Testa offers fresh evidence and up-to-date analyses about its transversal and long-lasting significance in European societies. Dr.

During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly. Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 (PublicAffairs, 2021), by renowned author and former government official, Philip Zelikow, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed ho

On this episode of New Books in History, Jamie Kreiner, Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia, talks about her new book, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West, out in 2020 with Yale University Press. In the early medieval West, from North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture. In this fascinating book, Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them. In this world, even the smallest things could have far-reaching consequences. Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals—and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In th

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fu

John Calvin in Context (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers a comprehensive overview of Calvin's world. Including essays from social, cultural, feminist, and intellectual historians, each specially commissioned for this volume, the book considers the various early modern contexts in which Calvin worked and wrote. It captures his concerns for Northern humanism, his deep involvement in the politics of Geneva, his relationships with contemporaries, and the polemic necessities of responding to developments in Rome and other Protestant sects, notably Lutheran and Anabaptist. The volume also explores Calvin's tasks as a pastor and doctor of the church, who was constantly explicating the text of scripture and applying it to the context of sixteenth-century Geneva, as well as the reception of his role in the Reformation and beyond. Demonstrating the complexity of the world in which Calvin lived, John Calvin in Context serves as an essential research tool for scholars and students of early modern Europe. Zach McCulley (@zamccu

Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral (Columbia UP, 2020), Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that endures in our own time. Murray tells the cathedral’s story from the overlapping perspectives of the social groups connected to it, exploring the ways that the layfolk who visit the cathedral occasionally, the clergy who use it daily, and the artisans who created it have interacted with the building over the centuries. He considers the cycles of human activity around the cathedral and shows how groups of makers and users have been inextricably intertwined in collaboration and, occasionally, conflict. The book travels around and through the spaces of the cathedral, allowing us to re-create similar passages by our medi

In Duplex Regnum Christi: Christ's Twofold Kingdom in Reformed Theology (Brill, 2020), Jonathon D. Beeke surveys the development of thinking among early modern Reformed theologians about the relationship between religion and civil government. Taking cues from Calvin, but showing how the Reformed tradition variegates around his contribution, Beeke shows how the medieval ideas of two cities and two swords were brought into the "two kingdoms" ideas of the earlier magisterial reformers, and how later generations of protestants, especially among the Reformed, preferred to refer in the singular to the "two-fold kingdom" of Christ. Beeke's new work promises to add significant historical light to recent discussions among protestant theologians as to the relationship between church and state. What kinds of government did early modern Reformed theology prefer? Why was Calvin consistent in arguing that heretics who disturbed public peace should face the ultimate sanction? And why were these views so normative among Refo

With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social justice.  Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2021) sheds light on the emergence of social solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens and noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily, anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the material and affective well-being of society at large.  Megan A. Carney is Assistant Prof

Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the premodern era. Her art addressed issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic relationship to political power. Her powerful paintings with vigorous female protagonists chime with modern audiences, and she is celebrated by feminist critics and scholars. Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe (Reaktion Books, 2020) breaks new ground by placing the artist in the context of women’s political history. Mary D. Garrard, noted Gentileschi scholar, shows that the painter most likely knew or knew about contemporary writers such as the Venetian feminists Lucrezia Marinella and Arcangela Tarabotti. She discusses recently discovered paintings, offers fresh perspectives on known works, and examines the artist anew in the context of feminist history. This beautifully illustrated book gives for the first time a full portrait of a strong woman artist who fought back through her art. Allison Leigh is Assistant

Today we are joined by Martha Moffitt Peacock, Professor of Art History at Brigham Young University about her new book, Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives: Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age, out in 2020 with Brill. In Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives, Peacock provides a novel interpretive approach to the artistic practice of imaging women of consequence in the Dutch Golden Age. From the beginnings of the new Republic, visual celebrations of famous heroines who crossed gender boundaries by fighting in the Revolt against Spain or by distinguishing themselves in arts and letters became an essential and significant cultural tradition that reverberated throughout the long seventeenth century. This collective memory of consequential heroines who equaled, or outshone, men is frequently reflected in empowering representations of other female archetypes: authoritative harpies and noble housewives. Such enabling imagery helped in the structuring of gender norms that positively advanced a powerful fem

During the mid-sixteenth century, English reformers invited a group of continental Protestant refugees to London and surrounding provinces. The ecclesiastical authorities allowed them liberty to establish their own churches with relatively little oversight by the English church. These "Stranger Churches," many of whom still maintained close ties to their friends and families in the Low Countries, faced internal tensions about how to relate to the political and religious upheavals that would transform the Netherlands. In Shaping the Stranger Churches: Migrants in England and the Troubles in the Netherlands, 1547–1585 (Brill, 2020), Silke Muylaert traces the saga of how tensions back home agitated internal conflicts among these refugee churches. In her expertly researched study, Muylaert challenges the existing narratives of the Strangers' relations to the Dutch revolt and reformation. By paying closer attention to the disagreements among the Strangers in England, Muylaert suggests that these Protestant refugee

In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even

Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a history of chemistry at the dawn of modern industry, and a history of aristocratic consumption of porcelain as these stories open into an economic history of globalized markets, as well as a social history of sorts of Central Europe’s fledgling bourgeois and lower-class consumer public. Marchand traces these interlocking stories across three centuries, from the first European firing of porcelain in 1708 under the supervision of Johann Friedrich Böttger to the present day, where contemporary tastes threaten to consign the white tableware of Europe’s past to the flea markets of today. Porcelain in Marchand’s hands acts as something like an objet de memoire, to thi

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 litera

In this compelling history of the co-ordinated, transnational defence of medical experimentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rob Boddice explores the experience of vivisection as humanitarian practice. He captures the rise of the professional and specialist medical scientist, whose métier was animal experimentation, and whose guiding principle was 'humanity' or the reduction of the aggregate of suffering in the world. He also highlights the rhetorical rehearsal of scientific practices as humane and humanitarian, and connects these often defensive professions to meaningful changes in the experience of doing science. Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge UP, 2021) examines the strategies employed by the medical establishment to try to cement an idea in the public consciousness: that the blood spilt in medical laboratories served a far-reaching human good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pr

Between voting to leave the European Union in 2016 and doing it four years later, the British political and media classes debated what kind of relationship they should have with the EU after withdrawal. Should it be Norwegian, Canadian or even - said government spinners - Australian? Now the UK is outside both the EU and the wider 30-nation European Economic Area (EEA), Routledge has launched a four-book Dealing with Europe series edited by John Erik Fossum and Christopher Lord (University of Oslo) to explore the options. The series opens with Switzerland-EU Relations: Lessons for the UK after Brexit? (Routledge, 2021) edited by Paolo Dardanelli and Oscar Mazzoleni. Next year, it will be 30 years since the Swiss voted against joining the EEA, thereby launching three decades of bilateral negotiations to create a patchwork version of something close to the same thing. In this book, Professors Dardanelli, Mazzoleni and 10 other Swiss-EU specialists examine the background to the 1992 vote, the bilateral agreement

Today on New Books in History, Juergen Martschukat, professor of North American History at Universitat Erfurt, talks about his new book, The Age of Fitness: How the Body Became a Sign of Success and Performance (Polity Press, 2021), to celebrate its translation into and publication in English with Polity Press, this year, 2021. The book was originally published in 2019, by S. Fischer, in German. We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms, cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In this new book, Jurgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity's emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the p