New Books In European Studies

What’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Paris” and “photography”? Is it a famous photo, perhaps an Atget, Brassai, or Doisneau? In her new book, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970 (Oxford UP, 2018), Catherine Clark explores the history of how and why photographic images have been central to understanding and imagining the city’s present and past, figuring profoundly in the representation and documentation of change over time in the French capital. In this beautifully illustrated and fascinating book, Clark recounts and analyzes the story of the collection, mobilization, and recollection of photographs as historical documents, a visual archive of urban transformation and memory. From the inauguration of the city’s first photo archives at the Musée Carnavalet, to the illustrated “photohistory” books that used images as documentary evidence, to the photographic museum exhibits, commemoration, and even a citywide contest, in which past and pictures were

In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. She argues that this conception of interpreters as a universal community established biblical readers as a coherent collective. In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in En

Wonderfully concise and very readable, A Brief History of Spain (Robinson, 2019), is perfect for travelers as well as the discerning reader. Professor of History at Exeter University Jeremy Black’s book is a ‘must read’. This is an extraordinary tale of Spain, from early tribalism and Roman rule to the Moorish conquest in the 8th century, Spain's eighteenth-century revival under the Bourbons, the Peninsular War and revolution in Spanish America right up to the horrendous civil war and Generalissimo Francisco Franco's regime. A leitmotif running from Columbus's first voyage in 1492 was Spain's trans-oceanic empire which was central to the country's global impact and to a degree self-understanding. And the story continues with a look at contemporary Spain, not least Catalonia, and its future. Professor Black excels in covering not only political and military history, but also environmental and cultural factors. He looks, too, at what makes Spain's regions distinct, and how the history of the Iberian peninsula,

Since Marcel Mauss published his foundational essay "The Gift" in 1925, many anthropologists and specialists of international relations have seen in the exchange of gifts, debts, loans, concessions or reparations the sources of international solidarity and international law. Still, Mauss's reflections were deeply tied to the context of interwar Europe and the French colonial expansion. Their normative dimension has been profoundly questioned after the age of decolonization. A century after Mauss, Grégoire Mallard, Professor Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, asks: what is the relevance of his ideas on gift exchanges and international solidarity? By tracing how Mauss's theoretical and normative ideas inspired prominent thinkers and government officials in France and Algeria, from Pierre Bourdieu to Mohammed Bedjaoui, Mallard's Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2019), adds a building block to our comprehension of the role that

Gerry Milligan’s Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2018) takes as its subject the woman warrior in early modern Italy as she was and as she was represented across varied types of texts, both literary and historical. What emerges is a discursive construction of the role gender played in the concept of warfare during this time period. How are women depicted in relation to warfare? Are they non-combatant innocents protected by male warriors? If this is not (only) the case, how does the representation of the woman warrior illuminate men and masculinity in the Italian Renaissance? How are gender roles rewritten, challenged, and reaffirmed in the texts under consideration? How do the figures of the virago and the woman warrior resonate with 21st century gender norms? These are some of Milligan’s questions, as well as some of the topics, we consider in this podcast.Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor

In her new book, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Brittany Lehman examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1949 and 1992. Using West Germany as a case study to explore European trends, the book analyzes how the Council of Europe and European Community’s ideological goals were implemented for specific national groups. The book starts with education for displaced persons and exiles in the 1950s. Then it compares schooling for Italian, Greek, and Turkish labor migrants. Finally, the monograph circles back to asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans. For each group, the state entries involved tried to balance equal education opportunities with the right to personhood, an effort which became particularly convoluted due to implicit biases. When the European Union was founded in 1993, children’s access to education depended on a complicated mix of legal status and perception of cultural compatibility. Despite claims that all

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task.In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogate

After emerging victorious from their revolution against the British Empire, many North Americans associated commercial freedom with independence and republicanism. Optimistic about the liberation movements sweeping Latin America, they were particularly eager to disrupt the Portuguese Empire. Anticipating the establishment of a Brazilian republic that they assumed would give them commercial preference, they aimed to aid Brazilian independence through contraband, plunder, and revolution. In contrast to the British Empire's reaction to the American Revolution, Lisbon officials liberalized imperial trade when revolutionary fervor threatened the Portuguese Empire in the 1780s and 1790s. In 1808, to save the empire from Napoleon's army, the Portuguese court relocated to Rio de Janeiro and opened Brazilian ports to foreign commerce. By 1822, the year Brazil declared independence, it had become the undisputed center of U.S. trade with the Portuguese Empire. However, by that point, Brazilians tended to associate freer

Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) is rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the most comprehensive collection of Sámi oral tradition available in English to date. Collected by August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen in the 1880s from nearly two dozen storytellers from the arctic Aanaar (Inari) region of northeast Finland, the material reveals a complex web of social relations that existed both inside and far beyond the community.First published in 1918 only in the Aanaar Sámi language and in Finnish, this anthology is now available in a centennial English-language edition for a global readership. Translator Tim Frandy has added biographies of the storytellers, maps and period photos, annotations, and a glossary. In headnotes that contextualize the stories, he explains such underlying themes as Aanaar conflicts with neighboring Sámi and Finnish communities, the collapse of the wild reindeer pop

Despite the Roman Empire's 500-year reign over Europe, parts of Africa and the Middle East, Italy does not have the same long national history as states such as France or England. Divided for much of its history, Italy's regions have been, at various times, parts of bigger, often antagonistic empires, notably those of Spain and Austria. In addition, its challenging and varied terrain made consolidation of political control all the more difficult. This concise history covers, in very readable fashion, the formative events in Italy's past from the Etruscans all through a unified country in thrall to fascism in the first half of the twentieth century right up to Silvio Berlusconi and beyond.The birthplace of the Renaissance and the place where the Baroque was born, Italy has always been a hotbed of culture. Within modern Italy there is fierce regional pride in the cultures and identities that mark out Tuscany, Rome, Sicily and Venice to name just a few of Italy's many famous regions. Professor Jeremy Black, of t

What makes some people aid the persecuted while others just stand by?Questions about rescue and resistance have been fundamental to the field of genocide studies since its inception.  Mark Roseman offers a sophisticated and deeply human exploration of this question in his new book Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (Metropolitan Books, 2019). The book is a careful examination of a small organization called “League:  Community for Socialist Life.”  Generally referred to by its German shorthand, the Bund was founded in the 1920s to inspire Germans to create a new, more ethical and more communal world.  But the emergence of Nazi rule forced the Bund to consider how it could achieve its goals and even survive in a much different political climate than it faced originally.  As they did so, its members strove to discern what living their ideals meant in a Nazi world and how to do so safely.Members of the Bund responded in a complicated, contingent ways. 

How does civil war shape state building and national identity over the long term? What do the underlying conflicts between Hanoverians and the Prussian state reveal about the course of German history from 1866 up to the rise of Hitler? In his new book Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935(Cambridge University Press, 2017), Jasper Heinzen analyzes these questions over the long durée with transnational points of comparison. By examining key areas of patriotic activity, Jasper unearths long-term trends in emerging nations forged through civil war. Indeed, Heinzen reveals how political violence was either contained or expressed through centre-periphery interactions with implications for the rise of Nazism.Jasper Heinzen is a Lecturer in Modern History at University of York where he specialises in the history of modern European nationalism, the Napoleonic Wars, and prisoners of war. His research on these topics has been supported by the British

How did minorities fit into the new Greek state during the country’s transition from imperial rule to national sovereignty? How did the relationship between Greece and its Jewish minorities, in particular, shift as definitions of national belonging expanded, shrunk, and transformed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? These are the questions that Dr. Evdoxios Doxiadis, Associate Professor in History at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, seeks to answer in his new book, State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Grounding his arguments in Greek political and popular sources, as well as material from the local and international Jewish press, Doxiadis shows that the Greek state’s treatment of their Jewish minorities was anything but predictable. Rather, he paints a notably ambivalent picture of a state whose policies did not necessarily conform to the desires of the popular majority, and that treated Jews and other minorities differently depending on t

As the wife of a Macedonian king and the mother of three sons who would succeed him, Eurydice played an important role in Macedonia at an important moment in the kingdom’s history. In Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power(Oxford University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Donnelly Carney draws upon recent archaeological findings and other sources to reconstruct her role as queen and queen mother during this time. As Carney notes, many of the surviving materials of Eurydice conflict in their portrayal of her personality and actions. With her eldest son Alexander II barely old enough to rule when his father Amyntas III died in 370 BCE, Eurydice was bound to exert considerable influence on the throne, an influence that likely continued after Alexander’s succession by his brother Perdiccas III and even into the reign of Philip II as well. By analyzing the surviving works and detailing the available contemporary materials about Eurydice’s life, Connelly reveals the key role the queen played both in the reign of her so

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago, 2017).Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of

The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed of women who were determined to make their grievances known. Furious at the ever rising price and scarcity of bread, Parisian market women, known as Dames des Halles, joined with other revolutionaries to demand King Louis XVI distribute bread, address the suffering of his subjects, and approve revolutionary reforms. The king ultimately conceded to the market women’s demands. The success of the march symbolized commoners’ new power in politics, including their ability to influence the monarch himself. Although this was certainly watershed moment for the French Revolution, the impact of Dames des Halles went far beyond October 5.  As Dr. Katie Jarvis, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, argues in her new book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary F

From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the new Russian challenge to the existing world order. Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Chatham House, 2019), by Chatham House Senior Russian expert, Keir Giles provides the sophisticated and curious reader a primer to help explain Putin’s Russia.As per Giles, Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a “rational” Western nation—even though Russian leaders, Tsars, Commissars and Presidents alike for centuries have thought and acted based on their country’s much different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders from the Tsars to Putin almost always act in their own very predictable and rational ways. For Western leaders to try to engage wit

Bianca Premo’s award-winning book The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, makes a powerful yet seemingly simple claim: during the eighteenth century, illiterate ordinary litigants in colonial Spanish America created enlightened ideas and practices by suing their social superiors in higher numbers and with novel claims. By focusing on civil suits undertaken by women, indigenous groups, and the enslaved, Premo demonstrates a gradual shift from a justice-oriented system—focused on extralegal outcomes and casuistic jurisprudence—to a Enlightened law-oriented system—where ordinary litigants based their claims on natural rights, merit, and freedom. Such a transformation expanded through varied and diverse geographies; from metropolitan cities such as Mexico City and Lima, to rural indigenous regions of Oaxaca, and smaller, ethnically diverse, provincial cities such as Trujillo in Peru. As listeners will hear, The Enlightenme

Historians in the English-speaking world have long studied how European and American travelers and diplomats conceptualized China, but, especially in recent years, few scholars have attempted to thoroughly understand the reverse—how Qing envoys conceptualized the West. This is the starting point for Dr. Jenny Huangfu Day (Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College) in her new book, Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China. By studying the lives, careers, and writings of six Qing diplomat-travelers (Binchun, Zhigang, Zhang Deyi, Guo Songtao, Zeng Jize, Xue Fucheng) during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, she explores their heterogeneous efforts to understand and represent the West. Drawing from communication studies and literary analysis, Day offers a fresh take on Qing diplomacy that traces significant changes such as the establishment of the Zongli Yamen, permanent legations in Europe, and the use of the telegraph for diplomatic commu

Chocolate – nothing is more irresistible for a decadent treat or a rich drink to warm you on a cold winter’s evening.  In eighteenth-century Venezuela, cacao became a life source for the colony. Neglected by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. But, they found a solution in trading the highly coveted luxury good, cacao, for the necessities of life with contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean.  Establishing an intricate contraband network, an intricate contraband network, Venezuelans normalized their subversions to imperial law. Today, we’re pleased to welcome Jesse Cromwell to discuss his new book, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (published in 2018 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press). This incredibly well researched and beautifully written book explores how smuggling in the Spanish Atlantic became more