New Books in Western European Studies

The Salt Roads: How Fish Made a Culture (Birlinn, 2022) by John Goodlad is the extraordinary story of how salt fish from Shetland became one of the staple foods of Europe, powered an economic boom and inspired artists, writers and musicians. It ranges from the wild waters of the North Atlantic, the ice-filled fjords of Greenland and the remote islands of Faroe to the dining tables of London’s midd...

In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. The Slaves of the Churches: A History (Oxford UP, 2020), the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem. Mary E. Sommar examines...

On Easter Day 1916, more than a thousand Irishmen stormed Dublin city center, seizing the General Post Office building and reading the Proclamation for an independent Irish Republic. The British declared martial law shortly afterward, and the rebellion was violently quashed by the military. In a ten-day period after the event, fourteen leaders of the uprising were executed by firing squad. In New...

In Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Between Phenomenology and Dialectic (Northwestern University Press, 2022), Robert J. Dostal provides a comprehensive and critical account of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy, arguing that Gadamer’s enterprise is rooted in the thesis that “being that can be understood is language.” He defends Gadamer against charges of linguistic idealism and emphasizes langu...

This week on International Horizons, David Abraham from the University of Miami discusses the origins of social democratic parties in Europe and the parallels with similar movements in the US. Following his teacher Adam Przeworski, Abraham argues that Keynesianism boosted social democracy by convincing people that the state could manage economic growth. For a time, the iron curtain heightened soli...

In 1524, a man named David Reubeni appeared in Venice, claiming to be the ambassador of a powerful Jewish kingdom deep in the heart of Arabia. In this era of fierce rivalry between great powers, voyages of fantastic discovery, and brutal conquest of new lands, people throughout the Mediterranean saw the signs of an impending apocalypse and envisioned a coming war that would end with a decisive Chr...

Beginning in the twelfth century, Jewish moneylenders increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of European authorities, who denounced the evils of usury as they expelled Jews from their lands. Yet Jews were not alone in supplying coin and credit to needy borrowers. Across much of Western Europe, foreign Christians likewise engaged in professional moneylending, and they too faced repeated th...

The Jewish Reformation: Bible Translation and Middle-Class German Judaism as Spiritual Enterprise (Oxford University Press, 2021) was the 2022 winner of the AHA’s Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in the history of Jewish diaspora. In it, Michach Gottlieb looks at Bible translations by Mendelssohn, Leopold Zunz, and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Gottlieb argues that each translator sought a "reformation" of Judais...

Today we are joined by Matthew Taylor, Professor of History at De Montfort University, and author of Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-1945 (Routledge, 2022). In our conversation, we discussed why studies of British sport histories have frequently neglected the Second World War, how various arms of the British state attempted to mobilize sport during the conflict, and how and...

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart tak...

Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 (Viking, 2022) to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain's most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the "last imperial war," with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the terr...

When she was chosen as the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP) in 2009, Catherine Ashton admits she "felt no exhilaration", fearing she had "few obvious credentials and lukewarm support". On leaving office five years later - 19 months before the Brexit referendum - this former British minister had confounded her inner doubter. A new European External Acti...

When she was chosen as the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP) in 2009, Catherine Ashton admits she "felt no exhilaration", fearing she had "few obvious credentials and lukewarm support". On leaving office five years later - 19 months before the Brexit referendum - this former British minister had confounded her inner doubter. A new European External Acti...

Curtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly addr...

How did Britain become a global superpower? Historian and classicist Ian Morris thinks geography has a lot to do with it. Prof. Morris discusses his latest book, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) which traces the long history of Britain's complex relationship with the European continent. He draws surprising parallels between charac...

Nicole Archambeau, associate professor of history at Colorado State University, talks about her book, Souls under Siege: Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence (Cornell University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercena...

Virginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at home oppresses women in ways that resemble those of fascism abroad. Two great Woolf experts, Professor Anne Fernald, editor of two editions of Mrs. Dalloway which she movingly discusses on another Think About It episode, and Rajgopal Saikumar, who is c...

Angela Vanhaelen's The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths (Penn State University Press, 2022) opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of laby...

Irish vegan studies are poised for increasing relevance as climate change threatens the legitimacy and longevity of animal agriculture and widespread health problems related to animal product consumption disrupt long held nutritional ideologies. Already a top producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union, Ireland has committed to expanding animal agriculture despite impending crisis....

What does it mean to be Black in Scotland today? How are notions of nationhood, Scottishness, and Britishness implicated in this? Why is it important to archive and understand Black Scottish history? In Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2022) Dr. Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill explore the history and contemporary lives of Black people in Scotland; reflecting on the pas...

The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton UP, 2010) documents the process, and relative ease, with which institutions of higher learning and the religious establishment, can be corrupted by political ideology and power. In Germany of the 1930’s the thin cloak of religion covered and sanitized the murderous evil of Naziism. Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Re...

Maimonideanism, the intellectual culture inspired by Maimonides’ writings, has received much recent attention. Yet a central aspect of Maimonideanism has been overlooked: the formal reception of the Guide of the Perplexed through commentary. In Rewriting Maimonides: Early Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed (de Gruyter, 2018), Igor H. De Souza offers a comprehensive analysis of six early ph...

It can be easy to think of colonies as having two populations: colonial subjects, and colonial overlords from Europe. It’s an easy narrative: one has power, status and privilege, the other does not. But in practice, European colonies created many populations in-between: groups who benefited from imperial power, yet not one of the elite. Britain’s almost two-and-a-half centuries-long presence in In...

Hell on Earth: The 30 Years War and the Violent Birth of Capitalism is a new 10-part series from the creators of Hell of Presidents — one of Entertainment Weekly’s best podcasts of 2021 — and Chapo Trap House, the political podcast that they claim has made more people angrier than any other podcast. Hell on Earth tells the story of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. Including the long crisis of the...

Southern Italy was conquered by the Norman Hauteville dynasty in the late eleventh century after over five hundred years of continuous Byzantine rule. At a stroke, the region's Greek Christian inhabitants were cut off from their Orthodox compatriots in Byzantium and became subject to the spiritual and legal jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic popes. Nonetheless, they continued to follow the religio...