New Books in Western European Studies

On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument?Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Fiona Smyth tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians who set out to answer this question. Beginning at the turn of the century, their innovative experiments, which took place at sites ranging from Herbert Baker's Assembly Chamber in Delhi to Abbey Road Studios and a disused munitions factory near Perivale, would come to define the field of 'architectural acoustics'. They culminated in 1951 with the opening of the Royal Festival Hall - the first building to be designed for musical tone.Deeply researched and richly illustrated, Pistols in St Paul's brings to light a scientific quest spanning half a century, one that demonstrates the power of international cooperation in the darkest of times.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024) by Dr. Ramie Targoff, discover the lives and work of four ambitious Renaissance women who, against all odds, made themselves heard-and read-in the time of ShakespeareIn an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Dr. Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist, who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England's most infamous inheritance battles.These women had husbands and children to care for and little support for their art, yet against all odds they defined themselves as writers, finding rooms of their own where doors had been shut for centuries. Dr. Targoff flings them open to uncover the treasures left by these extraordinary women; in the process, she helps us see the Renaissance in a fresh light, creating a richer understanding of history and offering a much-needed female perspective on life in Shakespeare's day.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Owen Ware (Routledge, 2024) takes the reader on a tour through the reception of Yoga philosophies in nineteenth-century German and the early twentieth century. European luminaries like Schlegel, Hegel, von Günderrode, Schelling, Humbolt, and Müller all engaged with works like the Bhagavad Gītā and Yogā Sūtras, though in very different ways, some reading yogic thought as entailing a threatening nihilism, others lauding it as superlatively philosophical. Ware shows how their responses to Indian thought illuminates our understanding of post-Kantian philosophy and its anxieties over pantheism indebted to Spinoza. He concludes with two chapters on a range of Indian scholars from Swami Vivekananda to K. C. Bhattacharyya, exploring how their work engages with this history of European readings, grappling with themes of freedom, morality, and devotion in yoga. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, "another world." During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival. When the city fell on hard times following the collapse of the Republic in 1797, a darker vision of Venice as a place of decay, disease, and death took hold. Today tourists from around the globe flock to the world heritage site as rising sea levels threaten its very foundations.Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City (Oxford UP, 2023) reveals the adaptations to its geographic setting that have been a constant feature of living on water from Venice's origins to the present. It examines the lives of the women and men, noble and common, rich and poor, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, who built not only the city but also its vast empire that stretched from Northern Italy to the eastern Mediterranean. It details the urban transformations that Venice underwent in response to environmental vulnerability, industrialization, and mass tourism. Alongside the city's commercial prominence has been its dramatically changing political role, including its power as a city-state, regional stronghold, and overseas empire, as well as its impact on the development of fascism. Throughout, Dennis Romano highlights the city's cultural achievements in architecture, painting, and music, particularly opera.This richly illustrated volume offers a stunning portrait of this most singular of cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England. But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Baer reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Dr. Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history.Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The European Union has a big problem—a potentially fatal one. How should it deal with a member state or states that reject democracy and the rule of law?So far, not even Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has turned full-blown authoritarian. However, his 14 unbroken years of “illiberal democracy”, his constitution rewriting, creeping media control, challenges to judicial independence, and calls for popular resistance against the EU are becoming less easy to ignore or accommodate.Yet, the EU’s tools to address democratic backsliding are blunt and its institutions are reluctant to use them. Above all, while a member state can leave the union, the union itself has no power to expel a club member that breaks its core democratic rules.In Protecting Democracy in Europe: Pluralism, Autocracy and the Future of the EU (Hurst, 2024), Tom Theuns looks back at the history of this design fault and how to put it right. He writes: "EU member states cannot both permit a frankly autocratic state to continue to be a member state of the Union and at the same tie pretend to be committed to democracy"Tom Theuns is a Senior Assistant Professor of Political Theory and European Politics at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science and an Associate Researcher at Sciences Po in Paris.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at twenty4two on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (Cambridge UP, 2024), Lucian Staino-Daniles uses the transnational story of a single regiment to examine how ordinary soldiers, military women, and officers negotiated their lives within the chaos and uncertainty of the seventeenth century. Raised in Saxony by Wolf von Mansfeld in spring 1625 in the service of the King of Spain, the Mansfeld Regiment fought for one and a half years in northern Italy before collapsing, leaving behind a trail of dead civilians, murder, internal lawsuits...and copious amounts of paperwork. Their story reveals the intricate social world of seventeenth-century mercenaries and how this influenced how they lived and fought. Through this rich microhistorical case study, Lucian Staiano-Daniels sheds new light on key seventeenth-century developments like the military revolution and the fiscal-military state, which is supported by statistical analysis drawn from hundreds of records from the Thirty Years War. This pathbreaking book unifies the study of war and conflict with social history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state's desire to control its citizens.Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education (Princeton UP, 2024), Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or fueled by democratic ideals, or even aimed at eradicating illiteracy or improving skills. It was motivated instead by elites' fear of the masses--and the desire to turn the "savage," "unruly," and "morally flawed" children of the lower classes into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws.Drawing on unparalleled evidence from two centuries of education provision in Europe and the Americas, and deploying rich data that capture the expansion of primary education and its characteristics, this sweeping book offers a political history of primary schools that is both broad and deep. Paglayan shows that governments invested in primary schools when internal threats heightened political elites' anxiety around mass violence and the breakdown of social order.Two hundred years later, the original objective of disciplining children remains at the core of how most public schools around the world operate. The future of education systems--and their ability to reduce poverty and inequality--hinges on our ability to understand and come to terms with this troubling history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema (Indiana UP, 2024) traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze. Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Breathless and La Jetée, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema.Here's the link to Astourian's essay on Jean Rouch's Moi, Un Noir discussed in the podcast.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies