New Books in Western European Studies

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to...

Today we are with Katherine Harvey, author of The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, 2021). An illuminating exploration of the surprisingly familiar sex lives of ordinary medieval people. The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much--or too little--sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal stat...

In The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales (John Murray, 2022), Nick Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Baba Yaga'. From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children's literatu...

A unique, illustrated book that aspires to bring medieval history closer to the general audience will change the way you see medieval history, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History (Icon Books, 2021) busts the myth of the ‘Dark Ages’, shedding light on the medieval period’s present-day relevance in a unique illustrated style. This history takes us through the rise and fall of empires, papacies, calip...

Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France-...

The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean (Cornell UP, 2021) considers how emotions propagate power by exploring whose lives are grieved and what kinds of grief are valuable within and eroticized by medieval narratives. Megan Moore argues that grief is not only routinely eroticized in medieval literature but that it is a foundational emotion of...

The past decade has been pivotal in the development of the European Union. The single currency has been tested to the limits by successive crises in the financial system, public-debt sustainability and public health. A migration crisis stress-tested the EU's free-travel area and its under-developed refugee and asylum policies. The Hungarian and Polish governments are backsliding on the union's fou...

Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900 (U Chicago Press...

In Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Brenna Moore takes us inside a global network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. With meticul...

Nicholas Canny is an Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland-Galway (NUIG). Since completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania he has pursued an influential publishing career spanning the early 1970s until today. He is the author or editor of 11 books and has written over 70 published papers. He was founding Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities an...

At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. For three centuries, the city attracted scholars, lawyers, craftsmen, and religious luminarie...

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people move through the Gare du Nord train station in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, the largest train station in Europe. Julie Kleinman's Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris (University of California Press, 2019) delves into the contemporary life of the station, and especially the lives and social world of the West African...

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With t...

In the fourth century, clerics began to distinguish themselves from members of the laity by virtue of their augmented claims to holiness. Because clerical celibacy was key to this distinction, religious authorities of all stripes—patristic authors, popes, theologians, canonists, monastic founders, and commentators—became progressively sensitive to sexual scandals that involved the clergy and devel...

Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance: The Varieties of Architectural Experience (Cambridge UP, 2021) is the first study of Renaissance architecture as an immersive, multisensory experience that combines historical analysis with the evidence of first-hand accounts. Questioning the universalizing claims of contemporary architectural phenomenologists, David Karmon emphasizes the inf...

The late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe were times of intense technological, social and political change and transformation, and so it’s no surprise that much of the art and literature of this period was equal in its innovative intensity, attempting to make sense of times that were radically out of joint. Traditional scholarship on this period has focused on the alienation and disassociat...

What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968 (Princeton UP, 2021), Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latte...

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. In Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films,...

In this episode, Howard Burton talks with Ester Salgarella, Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, University of Cambridge, about her groundbreaking work on the intriguing relationship between Linear A and Linear B and its consequent sociohistorical implications. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.c...

The astronomer's chair is a leitmotif in the history of astronomy, appearing in hundreds of drawings, prints, and photographs from a variety of sources. Nineteenth-century stargazers in particular seemed eager to display their observing chairs--task-specific, often mechanically adjustable observatory furniture designed for use in conjunction with telescopes. But what message did they mean to send...

Lucie Fremlova's book Queer Roma (Routledge, 2021) offers in-depth insight into the lives of queer Roma, thus providing rich evidence of the heterogeneity of Roma. The lived experiences of queer Roma, which are very diverse regionally and otherwise, pose a fundamental challenge to one-dimensional, negative misrepresentations of Roma as homophobic and antithetical to European and Western modernity....

Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn Books, 2021) provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book exp...

Luis Lobo-Guerrero is one of the three editors of this volume—Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires—and one of the six contributing authors. He wrote the preface, “Poseidonians and the Tragedy of Mapping European Empires,” and the first two chapters, “Mapping and the Making of Imperial European Connectivity” and “Mapping and the Invention of the Early ‘Spanish’ Empire.” In this...

Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: Could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live...

Generous welfare states are losing their key characteristics, not least in Sweden, where privatisation of funding has proceeded privatisation of provision, beginning in the 1990s. Supplementary exclusionary sources of welfare in healthcare, education, and social care, have proliferated throughout European welfare states under the neoliberal agenda that has dominated debate across the developed wor...