New Books in Intellectual History

As this book intriguingly explores, for those who would make Rome great again and their victims, ideas of Roman decline and renewal have had a long and violent history. The decline of Rome has been a constant source of discussion for more than 2200 years. Everyone from American journalists in the twenty-first century AD to Roman politicians at the turn of the third century BC have used it as a too...

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 peninsu...

Olga V. Solovieva's book The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently (Oxford UP. 2023) offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian...

A compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives.  In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-ce...

Uncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews. Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fra...

Vaiṣṇava Concepts of God: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2024) analyses the concepts of God in Vaiṣṇavism, which is commonly referred to as one of the great Hindu monotheistic traditions. Addressing the question of what attributes God possesses according to particular textual sources and traditions in Vaiṣṇavism, the book analyses Vaiṣṇava traditions and texts in order to locate them withi...

In addition to denying the existence of a substantial, enduring self, Buddhists are usually understood to deny the existence of a God or gods. However, in Classical Theism and Buddhism: Connecting Metaphysical and Ethical Systems (Bloomsbury, 2022), Tyler Dalton McNabb and Erik Baldwin argue that there is conceptual space to affirm both basic Buddhist metaphysical claims and Classical Theism witho...

Katlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2023) examines how debates over secrecy and transparency in politics during the eighteenth century shaped modern democracy. Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency wa...

Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press, 2023), Dr. Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have c...

In this interview the distinguished historian Jackson Lears talks about his latest book, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (FSG, 2023), which explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion,...

Over the past seven decades, Peter Brown has transformed our collective understanding of the late Roman Empire and the European Middle Ages alike, establishing Late Antiquity (ca. 250-800 CE) as a distinctive era of creative religious, social, and intellectual ferment. This was the time of the prophet Muhammad, of Augustine of Hippo, of Byzantium’s heyday. Peter Brown published his revolutionary l...

Pankaj Jain's book Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach (Springer, 2023) presents a substantive yet accessible introduction to the modern thought of Jainism. It examines the life and thought of some of the most influential 19th- and 20th-century Jain ascetic leaders that remain little known in the Western world. The book's first part provides a detailed philosophical overview of Jain thought base...

Welcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and I am speaking today to Prof. Tristan Brown about his book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton UP, 2023). Brown’s book considers fengshui, that is, the knowledge of orienting structures, such as graves and houses, in accordance with well-established cosmological pr...

What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adornol, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery....

Stephen Legg's Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite...

Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening. Invested: Invested: How Thr...

Race is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings – featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scene...

We often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity...

We all know many stories about how modernity came about. But what does it mean to be “modern”? This episode comes at the question through the test case of mountain climbing and rock climbing. Claims to becoming modern through climbing often point back to Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux in 1336, a climb that made him, according to many historians, “the first modern man.”...

In How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of journalistic storytelling dating back nearly two centuries. Literary journalism arose in the decades before the U.S. Civil War alongside the era's sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, lit...

If anything, the Imperfect Buddha Podcast has been a rallying cry for the disruption of the myths that abound in the world of Buddhism and meditation. David L. McMahan professor of religion at Franklin and Marshall College, has been something of a crusader himself, writing a much needed correction to many of the myths in western adoption of Buddhism in his seminal text, The Makings of Buddhist Mod...

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She th...

In his book Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus (Fortress Press, 2023), J. Christopher Edwards explores the early Christian teachings regarding who actually killed Jesus. Historians of early Christianity unanimously agree that Jesus was executed by Roman soldiers. This consensus extends to members of the general population who have seen a Jesus movie or an Easter...

Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea? From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, Transparency: the Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023) is the first to probe...

How can researchers study magic without destroying its mystery? Drawing on a collaborative project between the playwright Dr. Poppy Corbett, the poet Anna Kisby Compton, and the historian Dr. William G. Pooley, Creative Histories of Witchcraft: France, 1790–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) presents thirteen tools for creative-academic research into magic. These are illustrated through case...