New Books in Western European Studies

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Conor Lucey's book House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life (Four Courts Press, 2022) explores the everyday character and functions of domestic spaces in Georgian Ireland. While the design and decoration of the country pile and the aristocratic town house enjoys a long and distinguished literature, to date there has been no sustained examination of how rooms were habitually occupied and experienced, or how different social demographics--not least the burgeoning 'middling sorts'--might have informed approaches to spatial design and functionality. Drawing on recent pioneering research, the topics and themes addressed here range widely from comfort, privacy, and multiple occupancy to sociability, maternity, and piety. Focusing on how different species of domestic spaces were used and inhabited, from mansions and merchant houses to lodgings and farm house cabins, this book expands our understanding of house and home in Ireland in the long eighteenth century.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resisters of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context he was very much interested in: the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in, and this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works.This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022). Working through Sartre’s output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there, it works to his later works, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempt suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

A rich and indulgent history, English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables (William Collins, 2022) by Dr. Diane Purkiss will change the way you view your food and understand your past.Dr. Purkiss uses the story of food as a revelatory device to chart changing views on class, gender, and tradition through the ages. Sprinkled throughout with glorious details of historical quirks – trial by ordeal of bread, a fondness for ‘small beer’ and a war-time ice-cream substitute called ‘hokey pokey’ made from parsnips – this book is both an education and an entertainment.English Food explores the development of the coffee trade and the birth of London’s coffee houses, where views were exchanged on politics, art, and literature. Dr. Purkiss introduces the first breeders of British beef and reveals how cattle triggered the terrible Glencoe Massacre. We are taken for tea, to the icehouse, the pantry, and the beehive. We learn that toast is as English as the chalk cliffs. We bite into chicken, plainly poached or exotically spiced. We join bacon curers and fishermen at work. We follow the scent of apples into ancient orchards.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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 experiences of the Irish in France during the war were overshadowed by the threat of internment or destitution. Up to 2,000 Irish people were stuck in occupied France after the defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. This population consisted largely of governesses and members of religious orders, but also the likes of Samuel Beckett, as well as a few individuals who managed to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in internment camps (or worse). Isadore Ryan's book No Way Out: The Irish in Wartime France, 1939–1945 (Mercier Press, 2018) examines the engagement of the Irish in various forms of resistance. It also reveals that the attitude of some of the Irish towards the German occupiers was not always as clear-cut as politically correct discourse would like to suggest.There are fascinating revelations, most notably that Ireland’s diplomatic representative in Paris sold quantities of wine to Hermann Göring; that Irish passports were given out very liberally (including to a convicted British rapist); that, in the early part of the war, some Irish ended up in internment camps in France and, through the slowness of the Irish authorities to intervene, were subsequently sent to concentration camps in Germany; and that a couple of Irish people faced criminal proceedings in France after the Liberation because of their wartime dealings with the Germans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023).Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of colonialism to the pan-European movement that grew out of the first world war and peace project (or was it?) that emerged from the second.Not only is pro-Europeanism “analogous to nationalism - something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale," Kundani argues, but the EU itself has “become a vehicle for imperial amnesia" thereby promoting and privileging “whiteness”.Hans Kundnani is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations Workshop, an associate scholar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and a visiting scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research. From 2018-22, he was a full-time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe Programme. Before that, he was a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, the Transatlantic Academy, and the European Council on Foreign Relations. In 2014, he published The Paradox of German Power.*The author's own book recommendations are Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006 - first published in 1956)Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2016) explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance.Al Coppola is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New YorkMorteza 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

After his dramatic rise to power in the summer of 2019 amid the Brexit deadlock, Boris Johnson presided over the most turbulent period of British history in living memory. Beginning with the controversial prorogation of Parliament in August and the historic landslide election victory later that year, Johnson was barely through the door of No. 10 when Britain was engulfed by a series of crises that will define its place in the world for decades to come. From the agonising upheaval of Brexit and the devastating Covid-19 pandemic to the nerve-shredding crisis in Afghanistan, the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the Partygate scandal, Johnson’s government ultimately unravelled after just three years.Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell's book Johnson at 10: The Inside Story (Atlantic Books, 2023) maps Johnson’s time in power from start to finish and sheds new light on the most divisive Prime Minister to have led the United Kingdom since Thatcher. Based on more than 200 interviews with key aides, allies and insiders, Johnson at 10 gives the first full account of Johnson’s premiership, the shockwaves of which are still felt today.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In 1686 in Geneva, a single mother named Jeanne Catherine Thomasset is charged with poisoning two young children: her own illegitimate daughter and the son of a rural wet nurse. So begins a harrowing criminal trial during which authorities interrogate Jeanne Catherine several times, sometimes with torture, to determine the truth.Sara Beam's The Trial of Jeanne Catherine: Infanticide in Early Modern Geneva (University of Toronto Press, 2021) is a suspenseful historical mystery that offers students the opportunity to learn about motherhood, child rearing, gender, religion, local politics, and the practice of criminal justice in early modern Europe. This edition provides the complete trial transcript as well as the deliberations of the Genevan authorities and relevant correspondence.Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Focusing on gender relations, family formation, and marriage patterns in areas peripheral to the England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Christian Raffensperger and Joanna Drell argue for a more inclusive understanding of medieval Europe. Their conversation dwells on Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but also the present state of medieval history and the importance of thinking beyond Western Europe and talking across language and geographical divides. Raffensperger is author of Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus in the Medieval World, 988-1146 (Harvard UP, 2012). Joanna Drell is the author of Kinship and Conquest: Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period, 1077-1194 (Cornell UP, 2002). Her recent article “The Luxuriant Southern Scene: Textiles as Reflections of Power in the Kingdom of Southern Italy and Sicily” is also a focus of conversation. It is published in Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily: Maritime Violence, Cultural Exchange, and Imagination in the Mediterranean, 800-1700.Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies