New Books in Western European Studies

What can we learn about Jewish history when we stop focusing on great rabbis and turn instead to ordinary people? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz speaks with historian Elisheva Baumgarten about the groundbreaking volume she edited, Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe (Cornell UP, 2026). Beyond the Elite invites readers into the everyday world of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe—not through the voices of famous scholars, but through the lives of ordinary people. Using four powerful lenses—people, spaces, objects, and rituals—the book reconstructs how non-elite Jews lived, worked, traveled, celebrated, and struggled within majority-Christian societies. Across topics as wide-ranging as orphanhood, river travel, local political conflicts, pawnbroking, architecture, weddings, and religious practice, the volume reveals how Jewish communities were deeply woven into the fabric of medieval towns while still marked as outsiders. These stories capture the rhythms of daily life during periods of relative stability—and help explain how, by the late thirteenth century, anti-Jewish persecution emerged both from within existing social systems and as a rupture of them. Together, Baumgarten and Katz explore what happens when historians shift their attention away from elites and toward the margins—and how recovering the lives of ordinary Jews reshapes our understanding of medieval Jewish identity, community, and survival. About the Guest Elisheva Baumgarten is Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading scholars of medieval Ashkenazic Jewish life. Her research focuses on the social and religious worlds of ordinary Jews, including women, families, and those outside the rabbinic elite. She led the multi-year collaborative research project that produced Beyond the Elite, bringing together scholars to reconstruct the daily lives of Jews across medieval northern Europe. About the Host Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with leading scholars, Katz brings cutting-edge academic scholarship into meaningful conversation with contemporary Jewish life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

This volume brings law to life through a free and lively dialogue on the new Model European Rules of Civil Procedure. In it, some of Europe's leading jurists engage in a free-wheeling discussion of the most important issues in procedural law today. With its elegant style and unconventional intellectual approach, Colloquies stands out as a rare gem of comparative legal literature. Marco de Benito holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Civil Procedure at IE University. His research focuses on comparative civil procedure, international arbitration, private law, and legal history. He arbitrates and advises on international matters. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher 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

Since the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of great power competition on the world stage, NATO has been in a period of transition to adapting to the new international security environment that is mark by great instability and violations of international law. These types of situation have in recent years have been labelled "grey-zone" style threats that can be dangerous but may avoid the official legal definition of warlike activity. To combat this concerning situation has arisen the concept of "Stability Policing" that helps ensure that the rule of law is established and preserved in the long run. This includes the effective cooperation between military and civil law enforcement together to achieving long-term stability in troubled areas. The NATO Stability Policing Centre Of Excellence commissioned its own extensive three volume study NATO Stability Policing: Beneficial Tool in Filling the Security Gap and Establishing the Rule of Law, and a Safe and Secure Environment (2024)edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera to investigate the nature and challenges of such stability operations. The three volumes are available online:The Stability Policing Trilogy Volume I – PastThe Stability Policing Trilogy Volume II – PresentThe Stability Policing Trilogy Volume III – Future Dr. Joanna Siekiera is an expert in international law, NATO consultant, trainer, and educator. She has previously been featured on the New Books Network for 21st Century as the Pacific Century. Culture and Security of Oceania States in Great Power Competition (Warsaw University Press, 2023), Evolution on Demand: The Changing Roles of the U.S. Marine Corps in Twenty-first Century Conflicts and Beyond (Marine Corps University Press, 2025), and International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025).  Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. 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 Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores the relationship between sensory experience, state ideology, and artistic form, examining literature and art inspired by comets that unsettled the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired. Guest Claire Goldstein Professor of French and Director of the Humanities Program at UC Davis. Her research in ancien régime French-language literature and culture has explored subjects such as garden design, art and architecture; theater, ballet, and fête performances; astronomy; early modern fashion accessories; and early journalism. Claire’s current projects include Jesuit school ballets; female itinerant clothing resellers; and the innovative and enterprising publishing practices of Nicholas de Blégny, a best-selling and long forgotten multi-hyphenate physician-author. Her scholarship is motivated by her abiding interests in visual and material culture, her curiosity about how the things people see, and the objects and material practices that they engage with, create cultural meanings. She is the author of In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth Century France (Northwestern UP, 2025) and Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents That Made Modern France (U Penn Press, 2007). Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Our guest today is Steffan Blayney, the author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body. In Health & Efficiency, Blayney explores a new model of health that emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health. Under this new "science of work," fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers' capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body. Steffan Blayney is a former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, where his work focused on the relations between health, the body, and society, and on histories of political activism in modern and contemporary Britain. He has taught at Birkbeck, Kent, and Sussex, was previously a member of the editorial team at History Workshop Online, and was a co-founder and organizer of History Acts - a radical history workshop and network connecting activists and historians. He also authored the book Long Live Southbank, which celebrates the history and culture of the Undercroft area of the South Bank - the oldest recognized and still existing skateboarding space in the world - and the community that has evolved there over the years. Today, he no longer works within the walls of academia; instead, he is out in the field as a labor organizer, utilizing his talents, knowledge, and expertise in his work with EQUITY, a performing arts and entertainment trade union based in London. My co-producer today is Drew Marczewski a student in the MA Program in Communication at Oakland University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today. David Bather Woods is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is coeditor with Timothy Stoll of The Schopenhauerian Mind. He has contributed chapters to The Proustian Mind, Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, and The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. 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: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In today’s world, it is almost impossible to go through the day without interacting with a bank—whether through a salary payment, a debit card, a credit card, or a digital ID used to access public services online. Yet this intimate relationship between households and banks is relatively recent. In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Orsi Husz, Professor at Uppsala University, about her book Bankminded: Banks as Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden. The book traces how, from the late 1950s onwards, banks gradually became embedded in the everyday routines of ordinary people. Through wage accounts, credit cards, financial advice, and identity documents, financial institutions reshaped how households handled money—and how they thought about finance itself. Drawing on rich archival research, Husz shows that this transformation was not simply a story of technology or markets. It involved cultural shifts around class, gender, morality, and identity, as well as the surprising role of the welfare state in expanding everyday banking. The result was what she calls the “bankification” of everyday life—a process that laid the groundwork for the financialised world we inhabit today. If you are interested in the history of banking, the culture of finance, or how modern financial habits emerged, this conversation offers a fascinating perspective on a transformation that most of us now take for granted. You can download the book for free (Open Access) here Listen to the episode to learn how banks became an intimate part of everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Few countries are more haunted by the darker aspects of their history than Germany. Nazi crimes continue to cast a long shadow at home and abroad. Germans have nevertheless managed to put their violent, genocidal past behind them, creating a peaceful and prosperous democracy at the heart of Europe. In this refreshing book Germany (Polity, 2025), Andrew I. Port tells the story of that extraordinary transformation, from the vilified, destitute and divided Germany of 1945 to the respected, wealthy and unified international power we recognize today. Tracing the histories of the eastern and western halves of postwar Germany in tandem, he highlights their obvious differences and unexpected commonalities. This novel approach explains not only the country’s many accomplishments since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also the challenges it has faced—from the difficulty of unifying two distinct societies to violent forms of xenophobia and the rise of extremist parties. Whether the Federal Republic remains a stable and successful power is the new “German Question” of the twenty-first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Maria A. Sanchez tackles a central tension in global governance: how international human rights courts balance their mandates with the imperative to respect national sovereignty. Despite having similar mandates, the world's three regional human rights courts—the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights—interpret their authority differently, leading to uneven regional enforcement of global human rights principles. Dr. Sanchez traces how the geopolitical dynamics of each court's founding moments have manifested in contemporary disparities across the courts' jurisprudences—focusing on disputes involving freedom of expression, personal integrity rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. Her findings expose a paradox: the courts that were founded in the most inhospitable environments for human rights have ended up asserting the most expansive authority over governments. Deeply researched and insightful, Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts speaks to when and how international institutions can leverage authority to intervene in domestic affairs. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Examining everything from popular novels to politics, an investigation of persistent fascination with Nazis—and where it might take us. We live in an age where Hitler and the Nazis dominate our cultural imagination, shaping values once defined by religion. Historian Alec Ryrie explores why society remains captivated by this struggle, from history and fiction to modern myths such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. He examines the costs of our Nazi obsession and questions what will come as our anti-Nazi moral consensus frays and both the Left and Right begin to move on. With a fresh take on modern history and pop culture, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (Reaktion, 2025) offers a thought-provoking look at the culture wars and our shifting political crises, challenging assumptions on both sides and asking what a new moral vision might look like. Alec Ryrie is professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University and a fellow of the British Academy. His previous books include Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. He lives in rural County Durham. 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: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies