New Books In European Studies

When it comes to the development of Western Europe there was religion and then there was science. That is how the story is generally told but Anna Gryzmala Busse believes that modern Europe owes more to the religious part of that than is generally appreciated. She has written Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton UP, 2023) and talks to Owen Bennett Jones about religion and the European state. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Today’s guest is Kevin Killeen whose new monograph, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable, has just been published by Stanford University Press. This monograph gathers together a range of early modern sources including the mystic Jacob Boehme, the poet and radical John Milton, the writer and royalist Margaret Cavendish, and the prophet Anna Trapnel. Taken together, these chapter offer a vibrant picture of literary culture’s engagements (sometimes critical, sometimes appreciative) of that which can’t quite be understood by the mind, language, or theology. Kevin Killeen is Professor of English at the University of York. His previous books are the monograph, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and the Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700 (2015), co-edited with Helen Smith and Rachel Judith Willie. Kevin also is the editor of the journal Renaissance Studies. John Yargo is Visiting Assist

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual dimension to these discussions in what amounts to the first large-scale comparative analysis of sodomitical themes in medieval literary and visual art, built around an impressive range of texts and artworks from high and late medieval England, France, and Italy.  As Mills shows, sodomy does enter the field of vision in certain contexts, despite being associated with a rhetoric of unmentionability. He shows why sodomy appears when it does and in which media and genres (e.g., commentaries on the Bible and Ovid s Metamorphoses, in manuscript illuminations and sculpture); how it shifts categories as a means of becoming v

Between September 1793 and July 1794, the French politicians and even the general public seemed positively overcome by the urge to denounce their peers: helping so-called crimes, devious machinations, and secret plots come to light. When the so-called “Reign of Terror” ended, however, liberal, radical, and conservative critics of the era alike continued to suggest that the problem was not an excess of public denunciations, but so many shadowy dealings that had yet to be revealed. By early nineteenth century France, transparency had taken hold as an almost necessary precondition to government legitimacy and public trust. In her new book, Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Nicole Bauer traces the emergence of this discourse and the rejection of secrecy over the course of the eighteenth century. Bauer’s cultural and political history of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France argues that while secrecy was at first envisioned as a

In the dying light of the nineteenth century, the world came to know and fear terrorism. Much like today, this was a time of progress and dread, in which breakthroughs in communications and weapons were made, political reforms were implemented and immigration waves bolstered the populations of ever-expanding cities. This era also simmered with political rage and social inequalities, which drove nationalists, nihilists, anarchists and republicans to dynamite cities and discharge pistols into the bodies of presidents, police chiefs and emperors. This wave of terrorism was seized upon by an outrage-hungry press that peddled hysteria, conspiracy theories and, sometimes, fake news in response, convincing many a reader that they were living through the end of days. Against the backdrop of this world of fear and disorder, The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Terrorism (Manchester UP, 2023) chronicles the journeys of the men and women who evoked this panic and created modern terrorism - revolutionary philosoph

Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 (Brill, 2022) does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735. Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity, and greed.” Marco Caboara is the Digital Scholarship & Archives Manager at the Lee Shau Kee Library at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In this interview, Marco and I talk about this project, what it says about how Europeans understood China, and his favorite maps in the collection. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Regnum Chinae. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global m

Who is believed in our mediated world? In Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023),  Sarah Banet-Weiser, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Kathryn Claire Higgins, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication, examine this question by introducing the conception of an economy of believability governing who is, and who is not, believed or doubted. Written in the wake of #MeToo, the book engages directly with key contexts such as post-truth and the commodification of sexual violence. Thinking through questions of race and class, the analysis ranges widely, covering representations of sexual violence in fiction and non-fiction media, contemporary controversies and court cases, and the backlash from men in positions of power.

Today I talked to Danny Orbach about his book Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War (Pegasus Books, 2022). Shrouded in government secrecy, clouded by myths and propaganda, the enigmatic tale of Nazi fugitives in the early Cold War has never been properly told—until now. In the aftermath of WWII, the victorious Allies vowed to hunt Nazi war criminals “to the ends of the earth.” Yet many slipped away to the four corners of the world or were shielded by the Western Allies in exchange for cooperation. Most prominently, Reinhard Gehlen, the founder of West Germany's foreign intelligence service, welcomed SS operatives into the fold. This shortsighted decision nearly brought his cherished service down, as the KGB found his Nazi operatives easy to turn, while judiciously exposing them to threaten the very legitimacy of the Bonn Government. However, Gehlen was hardly alone in the excessive importance he placed on the supposed capabilities of former Nazi agents; his American sponsors did much th

In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine.  Through unusually close ethnographic work in West African migrant communities in Amsterdam, Apostolos Andrikopoulos reveals the unseen dynamics of kinship through shared papers, the tensions of race and gender that develop in mutually beneficial marriages, and the vast, informal networks of people, information, and documentation on which migrants rely. Thro

Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed social

Almost every student that will enroll in a college Shakespeare course can expect two things. Students will have to engage with the style and themes of texts that were composed over four hundred years old. And students will have to submit a piece of original writing that is well-organized, has a fresh argument, and cites early modern sources correctly. Rarely do these two tracks of the course inform each other. Adhaar Noor Desai’s new book, Blotted Lines: Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition (Cornell University Press, 2023) seeks to address this disjunction. As Desai shows, the early modern archive proposed strategies and ideas about writing that students and teachers might profitably learn—and sometimes unlearn. The innovative structure of Blotted Lines has an introduction, a coda, and five chapters that pair a topic from early modern poetics with a key writer: style (George Gascoigne), invention (Philip Sidney), revision (John Davies of Hereford), editing (Anne Southwell) and per

Many early modern humanists would balk at the proposition that what they did amounted to housework. They were far more likely to reach for the heroic image of a farmer striving in the fields, as immortalized in the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. But, as shown in Katie Kadue’s book Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (University of Chicago, 2021), the domestic practice of preservation offered a powerful metaphor for the often-menial, often-overlooked labor. These labors from pickling to correcting to tempering were largely imperceptible but were essential to ward off disorder. Domestic Georgic offers fresh close readings of Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” Montaigne’s Essays, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Through these readings, this study provides a compelling new framework for our understanding of early modern poetics, gender, and labor. Katie Kadue is an incoming professor at SUNY Bing

Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image. Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and "exploratory" contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted--systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective--and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how viol

Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenștok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (and nonlingual) shouting, music, drumming, and calisthenics. Within a few years, Dada (largely driven by Tzara) became an international artistic movement, a rallying point for young artists in Paris, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. With TaTa Dada, Marius Hentea offers the first English-language biography of this influential artist. As the leader of Dada, Tzara created "the moment art changed forever." But, Hentea shows, Tzara and Dada were not coterminous. Tzara went on to publish more than fifty books; he wrote one of the great

Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England: The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first modern full-scale examination of the theology and life of the distinguished English Calvinist clergyman Daniel Featley (1582-1645). It explores Featley's career and thought through a comprehensive treatment of his two dozen published works and manuscripts and situates these works within their original historical context. A fascinating figure, Featley was the youngest of the translators behind the Authorized Version, a protégé of John Rainolds, a domestic chaplain for Archbishop George Abbot, and a minister of two churches. As a result of his sympathies with royalism and episcopacy, he endured two separate attacks on his life. Despite this, Featley was the only royalist Episcopalian figure who accepted his invitation to the Westminster Assembly. Three months into the Assembly, however, Featley was charged with being a royalist spy, was imprisoned by Parliament, and died shortly thereafter.

Before this century's first global financial crisis struck Europe in 2007-2012, only people in the Brussels bubble had heard of the Eurogroup. By then, finance ministers from countries using the euro had been meeting in this format every month for ten years but – as Joscha Abels writes in The Politics of the Eurogroup: Governing Crisis and Conflict in the European Union (Routledge, 2023) - “the group had been almost invisible to the public". Over the next decade – and especially during the most acute phase of the Greek debt crisis in 2015 – that all changed. Devised in the 1990s as an informal body without decision-making powers, from 2010 onwards the Eurogroup assumed political authority for negotiating and approving bailout loans and making sure the conditions for those loans were met. Many memoirs have been written about these fraught years – including duelling books by former Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem and short-lived Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – but Abels has written the first b

In her book, Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation (Intellect Books, 2023), Marie Arleth Skov examines the punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s. Through archival research, interviews, and an art historical analysis, Skov situates punk as an art movement. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld avant-garde, instead choosing to be the ‘rear-guard’. Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art protagonists from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, among others the members Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), members of Værkstedet Værst (The Workshop Called Worst), Nina Sten-Knudsen, Marc Miller, Diana Ozon, Hugo Kaagman, as well as email correspondence with Jon Savage, Anna Banana, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Skov covers events such as the Prostitution exhibition at the ICA in London in 1976 and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West-Berlin in 1981 and explores painting

We close Pride Month of 2023 with Jamie Staples talking about queer mysticism. This includes instances in medieval Christianity where an embodied and erotic experience of life, within and between persons, became the basis for an apprehension of divinity. The conversation particularly focuses on the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” by 16th century Spanish poet St. John of the Cross and the work of 14th-15th century English mystic Margery Kempe. Jamie shares his own story to show how queer mysticism can offer resources from within Christianity to build a personal and communitarian politics against fundamentalist discrimination and hatred. Starting this fall, Jamie Staples will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval English literature at Trinity College in Hartford. His research takes seriously the productive intersection of mystical theology and poetry in the development of alternative modes of critical thinking in the late Middle Ages. He's recently written two articles focused more specifically on the queer

The Great Schism divided Western Christianity between 1378 and 1417. Two popes and their courts occupied the see of St. Peter, one in Rome, and one in Avignon. Traditionally, this event has received attention from scholars of institutional history. In The Great Western Schism, 1378-1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity (Cambridge UP, 2022), by contrast, Joëlle Rollo-Koster investigates the event through the prism of social drama. Marshalling liturgical, cultural, artistic, literary and archival evidence, she explores the four phases of the Schism: the breach after the 1378 election, the subsequent division of the Church, redressive actions, and reintegration of the papacy in a single pope. Investigating how popes legitimized their respective positions and the reception of these efforts, Rollo-Koster shows how the Schism influenced political thought, how unity was achieved, and how the two capitals, Rome and Avignon, responded to events. Rollo-Koster's approach humanizes the Schism, enabling us to unde

Who are the English upper class? In The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945 (Manchester UP, 2023) Daniel Smith, a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University, offers an analysis of the role and power of the upper class in English society. Drawing on, and critiquing, sociology, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, the book uses a vast range of methods and examples to tell the story of the continued dominance of English elites. With examples ranging from fashion and bookshops, through fee-paying schools, to memoirs and money, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, and for anyone interested in understanding Britain’s current social, economic, and cultural crisis. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/