New Books in Western European Studies

Kathryn Smithies a medieval historian at the University of Melbourne, Australia, to talk about her new book, Introducing the Medieval Ass, out 2020 with the University of Wales Press.Introducing the Medieval Ass presents a lucid, accessible, and comprehensive picture of the enormous socioeconomic and cultural significance of the ass, or donkey, in the Middle Ages and beyond. In medieval times, the ass was a vital, utilitarian beast of burden, rather like ubiquitous white delivery vans today. At the same time, however, the ass had a rich, paradoxical reputation. Its hard work was praised but its obstinacy condemned. It exemplified the good Christian, humbly bearing Christ to Jerusalem, but also represented sloth, a mortal sin. It had a potent sexual reputation—in one literary work, an ass had sex with a woman—even as it was simultaneously linked to sterility. Over time, the ass also became synonymous with human idiocy, a comic figure representing foolish peasants, students too dull to learn, and their asinine teachers. This trope of foolishness was so prevalent that by the eighteenth century the word “ass” began to be replaced by “donkey.” Introducing the Medieval Ass offers a wide-ranging account of the importance, and often surprising cultural prevalence, of this common domesticated animal.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke.Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is ridiculous. Most everything that everybody believes in the sciences is stuff that they've been given to believe through reading papers, through education, through being told by their colleagues, through textbooks–––almost everything anybody in the sciences believes has come to them through trust. And the formats and genres through which a lot of that stuff comes to one's eyes matter a lot for generating that trust. Though, maybe one of the lessons of the book is that the formats and genres might matter a little less than you might at first think because there are other means, perhaps more important means, through which individuals come to trust a particular claim––and personal contacts matter a lot here. But clearly what is being discussed in a lot of the debates that I follow in this book are the means through which such trust can be established, guaranteed."Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

A short and entertaining narrative of France from prehistory to the present, recounting the great events and personalities that helped create France’s cultural and political influence today.Country and destination, nation and idea, France has a rich and complex history that fascinates the world and attracts millions of visitors each year to its chateaux and cathedrals, boulevards and vineyards. In this succinct and entertaining volume, Veteran historian Jeremy Black narrates how France’s past has created its distinct character and powerful artistic, intellectual, and political influence across the globe.In France: A Short History (Thames & Hudson, 2021), Black takes readers from the cave paintings of Lascaux and the origins of Gothic architecture, to Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and the Lumiere brothers, and even into the cataclysm of the 1789 revolution, the countercultural student protests of 1968, and the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) today. His account presents a vivid take on history that emphasizes the unexpected nature of events and unpredictable outcomes of a fragmented and crisis-prone nation.In retelling France’s story, Black explores some of its most famous philosophy, literature, art, and architecture—and ties them to the military, political, and cultural shifts that led to their development. With color illustrations, France is a short, easy-to-digest history of a vast subject, and a helpful guide to understanding France today.Charles Coutinho Ph. D. 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

"The populist radical right is by far the best-studied party family within political science”. Extremism expert Cas Mudde may be right but, as Léonie de Jonge argues in The Success and Failure of Right-Wing Populist Parties in the Benelux Countries (Routledge, 2021), less studied are the specific conditions under which right-wing populism succeeds and - just as importantly - fails. Why, for example, do these parties poll above 40% in Italy and France yet remain absent in Portugal and Ireland?Part of the answer to this puzzle could lie in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium (and more specifically in its Dutch- and French-speaking regions). "In the earlier phases of a party’s development", writes Professor de Jonge, the success and failure of right-wing populist parties depends to a large extent on exogenous factors – notably the degree of political and social ostracism they face in a given polity”.Léonie de Jonge graduated from Cornell College, Iowa, and the University of Cambridge, where she also obtained her PhD, and is now an Assistant Professor in European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen.*The author's book recommendations were Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right by Cynthia Miller-Idriss (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown (Allen Lane, 2019).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In July 2021, nine summers after its then president saved the euro with three choice words (“whatever it takes”), the European Central Bank published the results of a thoroughgoing review of its strategy.A policy framework built for times when inflation posed a modest upside challenge had coped – but only just – with successive financial, sovereign-debt, banking and health crises that threatened chronically weak inflation at best and deflation at worst.Essential to the review was research conducted to mark the 20th anniversary of the ECB in 2019 and now updated and published as a book: Monetary Policy in Times of Crisis: A Tale of Two Decades of the European Central Bank (Oxford UP, 2021) by Massimo Rostagno, Carlo Altavilla, Giacomo Carboni, Wolfgang Lemke, Roberto Motto, Arthur Saint Guilhem and Jonathan Yiangou.This exhaustive analytical history concludes that the ECB operated two policy regimes – one from 1999 to 2012 and a second crisis-informed strategy until the narrative ends before the onset of the pandemic. With its strategic review over, the history lessons from this book will be an essential guide to ECB thinking as it prepares a slow and careful unwinding of its emergency policy settings.Massimo Rostagno has been the ECB’s Director General Monetary Policy since August 2017 and has worked at the central bank since 1998. He has served as head of the Monetary Policy Strategy Division and Director Monetary Policy and, before that, worked at the Banca d’Italia and the International Monetary Fund. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. (Any views expressed are personal and not necessarily those of the ECB).*The author's own book recommendations are Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (Harvard University Press, 2014) and The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era by Barry Eichengreen (OUP USA, 2018).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global (Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (1194–1270), known in English as Nahmanides and by the acronym the Ramban, was one of the most creative kabbalists, one of the deepest and most original biblical interpreters, and one of the greatest Talmudic scholars the Jewish tradition has ever produced.Join us as we talk with Moshe Halbertal about his recent book: Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism (Yale UP, 2020), where he provides a broad, systematic account of Nahmanides’s thought, exploring his conception of halakhah and his approach to the central concerns of medieval Jewish thought, as well as the relationship between Nahmanides’s kabbalah and mysticism and the existential religious drive that nourishes them.Moshe Halbertal is the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at Hebrew University and Gruss Professor of Law at NYU Law School. He has also written Maimonides: Life and Thought.Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption(IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

After a turbulent political revolt against the military superpower of the early modern world, the tiny Dutch Republic managed to situate itself as the dominant printing and book trading power of the European market. The so-called Dutch Golden Age has long captured the attention of art historians, but for every one painting produced by the Dutch during the seventeenth century, at least 100 books were printed. In The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019), Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen present the untold story of how a group of family-owned businesses transformed the economics of printing and selling and conquered the European communications economy. This printing revolution helped to turn their pluralistic population into a highly literate and engaged society. Andrew Pettegree (@APettegree) is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication including Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010), The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014), and Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin, 2015). Arthur der Weduwen (@A_der_Weduwen) is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He researches and writes on the history of the Dutch Republic, books, news, libraries and early modern politics. He is the author of Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., Brill, 2017), and two books on early newspaper advertising in the Netherlands (both Brill, 2020). His latest project is The Library, A Fragile History, co-written with Andrew Pettegree and published by Profile in 2021.Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher 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

The world is in a midst of a renewable energy revolution, with the price of utility scale photo-voltaic solar power falling by nearly 90% between 2009 and 2019, and the price of wind power falling by 70% during the same period. Annual global investment in renewable electricity generation assets is now more than double that for fossil fuel and nuclear-powered generation facilities combined, and yet the pace of adoption varies greatly across countries.In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Assistant Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and coordinator of Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, moderates a discussion on the various barriers and opportunities countries in Asia and the Nordics face in trying to take advantage of this renewable energy revolution. He is joined by Paul Midford a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, in Yokohama, Japan, Espen Moe, a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and Eric Zusman, senior policy researcher and area leader at the Institute for Global Environmental Studies in Hayama, Japan.The talk focuses on two new books: New Challenges and Solutions for Renewable Energy: Japan, East Asia and Northern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), edited by Midford and Moe, and Aligning Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies in Asia (Springer, 2021), edited by Zusman with Hooman Farzaneh and Yeora Chae.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastAbout NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk 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 Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil’s Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex.Amy S. Kaufman is a scholar of medieval studies and popular culture.Paul B. Sturtevant is Editor in Chief of The Public Medievalist and a Visitor Research Specialist at The Smithsonian Institution.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The city that sits on the River Foyle on the North side of the Irish isle in many ways has stood as a microcosm of the conflicts in Northern Ireland, even to the contestation over the name of Derry/Londonderry. In Derry City: Memory and Political Struggle in Northern Ireland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), Margo Shea examines the popular and cultural identity formations in this emblematic city over the century leading up to the sectarian clash known commonly as as "The Troubles." Throughout the period Shea examines, Irish nationalist communities developed a cultural memory that fostered a social identity and shared heritage as an alternative to the loyalist sanctioned commemorations, festivals, and community histories. Shea's study models a fruitful method of reading cultural history, especially of communities without recourse to political power and the usual means of archival representation. This book will be of interest for those interested in the formation of cultural identity and the development of Northern Ireland.Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher 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