New Books in Western European Studies

Custom was fundamental to mediaeval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the mediaeval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualised in writing.In Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Ada Maria Kuskowski uses French lawbooks known as coutumiers to trace the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism (Cornell UP, 2024) answers a straightforward question: how are refugees governed under capitalism in this moment of heightened global displacement? To answer this question, Ali Bhagat takes a dual case study approach to explore three dimensions of refugee survival in Paris and Nairobi: shelter, work, and political belonging. Bhagat's book makes sense of a global refugee regime along the contradictory fault lines of passive humanitarianism, violent exclusion, and organized abandonment in the European Union and East Africa. The book highlights the interrelated and overlapping features of refugee governance and survival in these seemingly disparate places. In its intersectional engagement with theories of racial capitalism with respect to right-wing populism, labor politics, and the everyday forms of exclusion, the book is a timely and necessary contribution to the field of migration studies and to political economy.Ali Bhagat is a PhD in Political Studies (Queen's University) and works largely on the topic of global displacement in relation to racial capitalism. As an international political economist, he is interested in the intersections of race, class, and sexuality and has worked on issues pertaining to LGBTQ+ refugees in particular. His work is based in qualitative methods drawing from interviews, policy analysis, and other ethnographic techniques. Ali’s work cuts across the everyday political economy of housing, work, finance, and political belonging.Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives (Reaktion, 2023) by Jad Adams chronicles the vibrant and passionate women who wrote for the 1890s journal The Yellow Book.During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book.For the first time, based on original research, Dr. Adams describes the lives and work of these vibrant and passionate women, from well-connected and fashionable aristocrats to the desperately poor. He narrates the challenges they faced in a literary marketplace, and within a society that overwhelmingly favoured men, showing how they were pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease and unwanted pregnancy.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

"Luddite" has become an insult and Brain Merchant wants to change that. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (Little, Brown, 2023) tells the story of when machines starting taking human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work--and how it explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech today. Two hundred years ago in rural England, working men and women rose up en masse rather than starve at the hands of the factory owners who were using machines to erase and degrade their livelihoods. Under the banner of a mythical General Loud, they organized guerrilla raids, smashed specific machines, and threatened wealthy machine owners. Luddites won the support of Lord Byron, inspired Mary Shelley, and enraged the louche Prince Regent and his bloodthirsty government. Before it was over, much blood would be spilled--of rich and poor, of the invisible and of the powerful. This deeply misunderstood class struggle nearly brought 19th century England to its knees. Currently many fear that big tech is dominating our lives and machines replacing human labor run high. We worry that technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are ousting workers from factories, and artificial intelligence will soon remove drivers from cars. Saving the movement from what E. P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity", Merchant finds inspiration in Luddism for our current crises.Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (2017, Little, Brown). His work has appeared in a variety of places including Wired and The Atlantic. He is a founder of VICE’s speculative fiction outlet Terraform and was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Untold Stories of the Spanish Civil War (Routledge, 2024) is the first scholarly volume to offer an insight into the less-known stories of women, children, and international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.Special attention is given to volunteers of different historical experiences, especially Jews, and voices from less-researched countries in the context of the Spanish war, such as Palestine and Turkey. Of an interdisciplinary nature, this volume brings together historians and literary scholars from different countries. Their research is based on newly found primary sources in both national and private archives, as well as on post-essentialist methodological insights for women’s history, Jewish history, and studies on belonging. By bringing together a group of emerging and senior scholars from different countries, we highlight the polyphony of voices of diverse individuals drawn into the Spanish Civil War. Contributors to this volume have explored new or little-researched primary sources found in archives and documentary centers, including papers held by relatives of the people we study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Several decades of scholarship have demonstrated that Roman thinkers developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer many perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy explores a range of such Roman philosophical perspectives through thirty-four newly commissioned essays. Where Roman philosophy has long been considered a mere extension of Hellenistic systems of thought, this volume moves beyond the search for sources and parallels and situates Roman philosophy in its distinctive cultural context.The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy (Oxford UP,  2023) emphasizes four features of Roman philosophy: aspects of translation, social context, philosophical import, and literary style. The authors adopt an inclusive approach, treating not just systematic thinkers such as Cicero and Augustine, but also poets and historians. Topics covered include ethnicity, cultural identity, literary originality, the environment, Roman philosophical figures, epistemology, and ethics.Myrto Garani is Associate Professor of Latin Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is the author of Empedocles Redivivus, co-editor with David Konstan of The Philosophizing Muse, and co-editor with A. N. Michalopoulos and S. Papaioannou of Intertextuality in Seneca's Philosophical Writings.David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University. He is the author of Friendship in the Classical World, Beauty, In the Orbit of Love, and The Origin of Sin.Gretchen Reydams-Schils is Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame and holds concurrent appointments in Classics, Philosophy, and Theology. She is the author of The Roman Stoics and Calcidius on Plato's Timaeus.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Historian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail--namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture. In The Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture, 1750-1900 (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), Black notes that the Gothic novel is also very much about "morality and deploying history accordingly." The true interest of the Gothic novel is more remarkable than it is grisly: the featured darkness and macabre are not meant to usurp heroism and purity, but will fall hard under the over-ruling hand of Providence and certainty of retribution.Black's understanding of the Gothic writer is a remarkable contribution to the legacy of British literature and the novel at large. Once again, in Black thoroughness meets fidelity and the reader is overcome with his own insights into the period on the merit of Black's efforts.In The Weight of Words Series, Black is devoted to the preservation of the memory of British literary genius, and in so doing he is carving out a niche for himself. As in the Gothic novel where landscapes give quarter to influences that seem to interact with the human fates that freely wander in, reading Black is an experience of suddenly finding oneself in possession of an education, and his allure takes a cue from the horrific Gothic tempt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The most heinous Soviet crimes - the Red Terror, brutal collectivization, the Great Famine, the Gulag, Stalin's Great Terror, mass deportations, and other atrocities - were treated in the West as a controversial topic. With the Cold War dichotomy of Western democracy versus Soviet communism deeply imprinted in our minds, we are not always aware that these crimes were very often questioned, dismissed, denied, sometimes rationalized, and even outright glorified in the Western world. Facing a choice of whom to believe -the survivors or Soviet propaganda- many Western opinion leaders chose in favor of Soviet propaganda. Even those who did not believe it behaved sometimes as if they did.Blissful Blindness: Soviet Crimes under Western Eyes (Indiana UP, 2023) explores Western reactions (and lack thereof) to Soviet crimes from the Bolshevik revolution to the collapse of Soviet communism in order to understand ideological, political, economic, cultural, personal, and other motivations behind this puzzling phenomenon of willful ignorance. But the significance of Dariusz Tolczyk's book reaches beyond its direct historical focus. Written for audiences not limited to scholars and specialists, this book not only opens one's eyes to rarely examined aspects of the twentieth century but also helps one see how astonishingly relevant this topic is in our contemporary world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Carmen Fracchia's book Black But Human': Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700 (Oxford UP, 2019) is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves.The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers, and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragón, and Portugal. The 'Black but Human' topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a 'black nation' forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings, and sketches for costume books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and thought-provoking. The composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) created a new practice in which the expressive materials of music and poetry were placed in concert. This innovative new study of Monteverdi's literary personality integrates musical and poetic analysis to create an approach to text-music relations that addresses scholars of both literature and music. Roseen Giles' book Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates how experiments in language and perception at the turn of the seventeenth century were influenced and informed by the work of musicians of that era. Giles provides a new perspective on the music and poetry of Monteverdi's madrigals through the poetics of the marvellous. In his madrigals, Monteverdi created a reciprocity between poetry and music which encouraged audiences to contemplate their interactions, and, consequently, to listen differently.Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the cultures of diplomacy and reception. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies