New Books In European Studies

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historian Conor McCabe brings together Connolly's earliest articles, letters, and speeches, many of which have remained unpublished or inaccessible for over a century.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'

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

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, t

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 researc

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 loo

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 in

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

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 histor

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 th

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 histor

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

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 W

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

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 tha

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 eco

For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-1190). John Freed fills this gap with his new book, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth (Yale University Press, 2016), which offers readers both an account of Frederick’s life and his posthumous image as a German ruler. Freed begins by describing the historical background of 12th century Germany, setting Frederick’s succession to the throne within the context of medieval dynastic politics. From there he recounts Frederick’s campaigns against both the papacy and the Italian communes, his subsequent efforts to strengthen his rule in Germany, and his death in the Near East while participating in the Third Crusade. Though an undercurrent of frustrated ambition ran throughout many of his efforts, Frederick nonetheless became a symbol of a united Germany by the 19th century and, in the process, achieved a stature as a sovereign that belied the complicated rea

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 ph

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 untimel

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

Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 2017), Thomas Weber highlights the years between 1918 and 1926 as the period in which Hitler’s worldview developed. Challenging Hitler’s own narrative, as well as the received wisdom it engendered, Weber puts paid to the idea that the future dictator was radicalized in Vienna or during the First World War. Instead, he portrays Hitler as someone whose ideas were constantly evolving up to and even after he wrote his political testament, Mein Kampf. Using an array of previously untapped sources, Weber offers a nuanced picture of Hitler, presenting him not only as a rabid ideologue, but as a careful and strategic thinker who was prepared to adapt his behavior, even his ideas, should the circumstances require it. Thomas Weber is Professor of History and International Affairs at Aberdeen University. His twitter handle is @Th