front cover of Persophilia
Persophilia
Persian Culture on the Global Scene
Hamid Dabashi
Harvard University Press, 2015

From the Biblical period and Classical Antiquity to the rise of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, aspects of Persian culture have been integral to European history. A diverse constellation of European artists, poets, and thinkers have looked to Persia for inspiration, finding there a rich cultural counterpoint and frame of reference. Interest in all things Persian was no passing fancy but an enduring fascination that has shaped not just Western views but the self-image of Iranians up to the present day. Persophilia maps the changing geography of connections between Persia and the West over the centuries and shows that traffic in ideas about Persia and Persians did not travel on a one-way street.

How did Iranians respond when they saw themselves reflected in Western mirrors? Expanding on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, and overcoming the limits of Edward Said, Hamid Dabashi answers this critical question by tracing the formation of a civic discursive space in Iran, seeing it as a prime example of a modern nation-state emerging from an ancient civilization in the context of European colonialism. The modern Iranian public sphere, Dabashi argues, cannot be understood apart from this dynamic interaction.

Persophilia takes into its purview works as varied as Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Handel’s Xerxes and Puccini’s Turandot, and Gauguin and Matisse’s fascination with Persian art. The result is a provocative reading of world history that dismantles normative historiography and alters our understanding of postcolonial nations.

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Pet Revolution
Animals and the Making of Modern British Life
Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange
Reaktion Books, 2023
A history of pets and their companions in Britain from the Victorians to today.
 
Pet Revolution tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries. As pets have entered our homes and joined our families, they have radically changed our world. Historians Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange show how the pet economy exploded—increasing the availability of pet foods, medicines, and shops—and reshaped our modern lives in the process. A history of pets and their human companions, this book reimagines the “pet revolution” as one among many other revolutions—industrial, agricultural, and political—that made possible contemporary life.
 
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Peter Mundy, Merchant Adventurer
Edited by R. E. Pritchard
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

Peter Mundy was an English merchant trader of the seventeenth century who spent most of his life traveling the world, including western Europe, Poland, and Istanbul. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity about the world around him, Mundy kept a detailed account of his travels, illustrated throughout with his own lively drawings of the people and animals he encountered.

Drawing on the unique manuscript held by the Bodleian Library, Peter Mundy, Merchant Adventurer collects Mundy’s vivid accounts of the Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, and Russian Empires, as well as his reports of the first, difficult contact between Britain and China, of exhausting journeys through famine-devastated northern India, and of the troubled times in London following the Restoration of Charles II.
 
Historians and lovers of travel literature will find this extraordinary account of one man’s encounters with very different, early modern cultures an invaluable resource and a compelling read.
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Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations
Peter of Cornwall
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2013

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Petrarch
Everywhere a Wanderer
Christopher S. Celenza
Reaktion Books, 2022
An enlightening study of the contradictory character of this canonical fourteenth-century Italian poet.

Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private.

In this biography, Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike.
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The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture
James Cracraft
Harvard University Press, 2004

The reforms initiated by Peter the Great transformed Russia not only into a European power, but into a European culture--a shift, argues James Cracraft, that was nothing less than revolutionary. The author of seminal works on visual culture in the Petrine era, Cracraft now turns his attention to the changes that occurred in Russian verbal culture.

The forceful institutionalization of the tsar's reforms--the establishment of a navy, modernization of the army, restructuring of the government, introduction of new arts and sciences--had an enormous impact on language. Cracraft details the transmission to Russia of contemporary European naval, military, bureaucratic, legal, scientific, and literary norms and their corresponding lexical and other linguistic effects. This crucial first stage in the development of a "modern" verbal culture in Russia saw the translation and publication of a wholly unprecedented number of textbooks and treatises; the establishment of new printing presses and the introduction of a new alphabet; the compilation, for the first time, of grammars and dictionaries of Russian; and the initial standardization, in consequence, of the modern Russian literary language. Peter's creation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the chief agency advancing these reforms, is also highlighted.

In the conclusion to his masterwork, Cracraft deftly pulls together the Petrine reforms in verbal and visual culture to portray a revolution that would have dramatic consequences for Russia, and for the world.

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Petrograd, 1917
Witnesses to the Russian Revolution
John Pinfold
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2017
The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution irrevocably changed the course of history, with consequences still being felt a century later. This book offers a dramatic depiction of the chaotic events of the revolution, drawn from selected firsthand accounts.

Assembling extracts from letters, journals, diaries, and memoirs from a remarkably diverse cast of both Russians and foreign nationals who were there when the revolution broke, Petrograd, 1917 is a strikingly close-up account of these world-shaking events. Each entry is supplemented with a short introductory note that sets it in context, and the book is rounded out with more than seventy illustrations, including photographs of the Romanovs and the violence in the streets as well as propaganda posters, postcards to loved ones, and more. In these pages, the drama and terror of those days comes to life once more, a century on.
 
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Philippe Aries and the Politics of French Cultural History
Patrick H. Hutton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004
The author of Centuries of Childhood and other landmark historical works, Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) was a singular figure in French intellectual life. He was both a political reactionary and a path-breaking scholar, a sectarian royalist who supported the Vichy regime and a founder of the new cultural history—popularly known as l'histoire des mentalités—that developed in the decades following World War II. In this book, Patrick H. Hutton explores the relationship between Ariès's life and thought and evaluates his contribution to modern historiography, in France and abroad.

According to Hutton, the originality of Ariès's work and the power of his appeal derived from the way he drew together the two strands of his own intellectual life: his enduring ties to the old cultural order valued by the right-wing Action Française, and a newfound appreciation for the methodology of the leftist Annales school of historians. A demographer by training, he pioneered a new route into the history of private life that eventually won him a wide readership and in late life an appointment to the faculty of the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. At the same time, he fashioned himself as a man of letters in the intellectual tradition of the Action Française and became a perspicacious journalist as well as a stimulating writer of autobiographical memoirs. In Hutton's view, this helps explain why, more than any other historian, Philippe Ariès left his personal signature on his scholarship.
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Philosopher On Dover Beach
Roger Scruton
St. Augustine's Press, 2017
“It is a great pity that we in the United States do not have our own Roger Scruton. As              his . . . collection of essays reminds us, he is an accomplished philosopher who writes    trenchantly about many important political, social and religious issues, who cares
passionately about art and culture and who is also a brilliant conservative polemicist. . . .
     “Mr. Scruton has two great virtues as a critic. One is his ability to combine a delicate appreciation of culture with the robust analytical skills of a trained philosopher. . . .
     “Mr. Scruton’s other great virtue is his habit of assessing things from the inside,
taking them on their own terms. If his judgments are often harsh, one nevertheless comes away feeling that he has made the best case possible for his subject. This makes his        criticism more devastating yet also more generous than the criticism of most other        commentator.” – Roger Kimball, New York Times Book Review

“Each essay has been constructed with considerable care, and the positions taken are    clearly stated and soundly argued. . . . He shows . . . that the philosopher-critic is alive          and well. . . . Recommended for all academic libraries.” – Library Journal

“[Scruton] writes eloquently of the way in which social bonds, if refashioned in contractual form. ‘become profane, a system of façade, a Disneyland version of what was formerly 
dignified and monumental.’” – Peter Clarke, London Review of Books


 
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A Philosopher's Economist
Hume and the Rise of Capitalism
Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Reconsiders the centrality and legacy of Hume’s economic thought and serves as an important springboard for reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of economics.

Although David Hume’s contributions to philosophy are firmly established, his economics has been largely overlooked. A Philosopher’s Economist offers the definitive account of Hume’s “worldly philosophy” and argues that economics was a central preoccupation of his life and work. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind show that Hume made important contributions to the science of economics, notably on money, trade, and public finance.  Hume’s astute understanding of human behavior provided an important foundation for his economics and proved essential to his analysis of the ethical and political dimensions of capitalism. Hume also linked his economic theory with policy recommendations and sought to influence people in power. While in favor of the modern commercial world, believing that it had and would continue to raise standards of living, promote peaceful relations, and foster moral refinement, Hume was not an unqualified enthusiast. He recognized many of the underlying injustices of capitalism, its tendencies to promote avarice and inequality, as well as its potential for political instability and absolutism.
 
Hume’s imprint on modern economics is profound and far-reaching, whether through his close friend Adam Smith or later admirers such as John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Schabas and Wennerlind’s book compels us to reconsider the centrality and legacy of Hume’s economic thought—for both his time and ours—and thus serves as an important springboard for reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of economics.
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The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel
Aviezer Tucker
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000

A critical study of the philosophy and political practice of the Czech dissident movement Charter 77. Aviezer Tucker examines how the political philosophy of Jan Patocka (1907–1977), founder of Charter 77, influenced the thinking and political leadership of Vaclav Havel as dissident and president.

Presents the first serious treatment of Havel as philosopher and Patocka as a political thinker. Through the Charter 77 dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, opponents of communism based their civil struggle for human rights on philosophic foundations, and members of the Charter 77 later led the Velvet Revolution. After Patocka’s self-sacrifice in 1977, Vaclav Havel emerged a strong philosophical and political force, and he continued to apply Patocka’s philosophy in order to understand the human condition under late communism and the meaning of dissidence. However, the political/philosophical orientation of the Charter 77 movement failed to provide President Havel with an adequate basis for comprehending and responding to the extraordinary political and economic problems of the postcommunist period.

In his discussion of Havel's presidency and the eventual corruption of the Velvet Revolution, Tucker demonstrates that the weaknesses in Charter 77 member's understanding of modernity, which did not matter while they were dissidents, seriously harmed their ability to function in a modern democratic system. Within this context, Tucker also examines Havel’s recent attempt to topple the democratic but corrupt government in 1997–1998. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel will be of interest to students of philosophy and politics, scholars and students of Slavic studies, and historians, as well as anyone fascinated by the nature of dissidence.

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Philosophy in the Renaissance
An Anthology
Paul Richard Blum
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
The Renaissance was a period of great intellectual change and innovation as philosophers rediscovered the philosophy of classical antiquity and passed it on to the modern age. Renaissance philosophy is distinct both from the medieval scholasticism, based on revelation and authority, and from philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who transformed it into new philosophical systems. Despite the importance of the Renaissance to the development of philosophy over time, it has remained largely understudied by historians of philosophy and professional philosophers. This anthology aims to correct this by providing scholars and students of philosophy with representative translations of the most important philosophers of the Renaissance. Its purpose is to help readers appreciate philosophy in the Renaissance and its importance in the history of philosophy. The anthology includes translations from philosophers from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and it ranges from works on moral and political philosophy, to metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy, thereby providing historians and students of philosophy with a sense for the nature, breadth, and complexity of philosophy in the Renaissance. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction by a historian of Renaissance philosophy, as well as select secondary sources, in order to encourage further study. This anthology is a companion to Philosophers of the Renaissance, edited by Paul Richard Blum and published by Catholic University of America Press in 2010, which included essays on the writings of the same group of philosophers of the Renaissance: Raymond Llull, Gemistos Plethon, George of Trebizond, Basil Bessarion, Lorenzo Valla, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Pomponazzi, Niccolò Machiavelli, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Juan Luis Vives, Philipp Melanchthon, Petrus Ramus, Bernardino Telesio, Jacopo Zabarella, Michel de Montaigne, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Francisco Suàrez, Tommaso Campanella.
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Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean
Carolina López-Ruiz
Harvard University Press, 2021

“An important new book…offers a powerful call for historians of the ancient Mediterranean to consider their implicit biases in writing ancient history and it provides an example of how more inclusive histories may be written.”
—Denise Demetriou, New England Classical Journal

“With a light touch and a masterful command of the literature, López-Ruiz replaces old ideas with a subtle and more accurate account of the extensive cross-cultural exchange patterns and economy driven by the Phoenician trade networks that ‘re-wired’ the Mediterranean world. A must read.”
—J. G. Manning, author of The Open Sea

“[A] substantial and important contribution…to the ancient history of the Mediterranean. López-Ruiz’s work does justice to the Phoenicians’ role in shaping Mediterranean culture by providing rational and factual argumentation and by setting the record straight.”
—Hélène Sader, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Imagine you are a traveler sailing to the major cities around the Mediterranean in 750 BC. You would notice a remarkable similarity in the dress, alphabet, consumer goods, and gods from Gibraltar to Tyre. This was not the Greek world—it was the Phoenician. Propelled by technological advancements of a kind unseen since the Neolithic revolution, Phoenicians knit together diverse Mediterranean societies, fostering a literate and sophisticated urban elite sharing common cultural, economic, and aesthetic modes.

Following the trail of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Atlantic coast of Iberia, Carolina López-Ruiz offers the first comprehensive study of the cultural exchange that transformed the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinians, Iberians, and others adopted a Levantine-inflected way of life, as they aspired to emulate Near Eastern civilizations. López-Ruiz explores these many inheritances, from sphinxes and hieratic statues to ivories, metalwork, volute capitals, inscriptions, and Ashtart iconography.

Meticulously documented and boldly argued, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean revises the Hellenocentric model of the ancient world and restores from obscurity the true role of Near Eastern societies in the history of early civilizations.

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Phoenix
A Father, a Son, and the Rise of Athens
David Stuttard
Harvard University Press, 2021

A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year

A vivid, novelistic history of the rise of Athens from relative obscurity to the edge of its golden age, told through the lives of Miltiades and Cimon, the father and son whose defiance of Persia vaulted Athens to a leading place in the Greek world.

When we think of ancient Greece we think first of Athens: its power, prestige, and revolutionary impact on art, philosophy, and politics. But on the verge of the fifth century BCE, only fifty years before its zenith, Athens was just another Greek city-state in the shadow of Sparta. It would take a catastrophe, the Persian invasions, to push Athens to the fore. In Phoenix, David Stuttard traces Athens’s rise through the lives of two men who spearheaded resistance to Persia: Miltiades, hero of the Battle of Marathon, and his son Cimon, Athens’s dominant leader before Pericles.

Miltiades’s career was checkered. An Athenian provincial overlord forced into Persian vassalage, he joined a rebellion against the Persians then fled Great King Darius’s retaliation. Miltiades would later die in prison. But before that, he led Athens to victory over the invading Persians at Marathon. Cimon entered history when the Persians returned; he responded by encouraging a tactical evacuation of Athens as a prelude to decisive victory at sea. Over the next decades, while Greek city-states squabbled, Athens revitalized under Cimon’s inspired leadership. The city vaulted to the head of a powerful empire and the threshold of a golden age. Cimon proved not only an able strategist and administrator but also a peacemaker, whose policies stabilized Athens’s relationship with Sparta.

The period preceding Athens’s golden age is rarely described in detail. Stuttard tells the tale with narrative power and historical acumen, recreating vividly the turbulent world of the Eastern Mediterranean in one of its most decisive periods.

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Physiologus
A Medieval Book of Nature Lore
Translated by Michael J. Curley
University of Chicago Press, 2009

One of the most popular and widely read books of the Middle Ages, Physiologus contains allegories of beasts, stones, and trees both real and imaginary, infused by their anonymous author with the spirit of Christian moral and mystical teaching.  Accompanied by an introduction that explains the origins, history, and literary value of this curious text, this volume also reproduces twenty woodcuts from the 1587 version. Originally composed in the fourth century in Greek, and translated into dozens of versions through the centuries, Physiologus will delight readers with its ancient tales of ant-lions, centaurs, and hedgehogs—and their allegorical significance.

“An elegant little book . . . still diverting to look at today. . . . The woodcuts reproduced from the 1587 Rome edition are alone worth the price of the book.”—Raymond A. Sokolov, New York Times Book Review

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Piazza San Marco
Iain Fenlon
Harvard University Press, 2009

The Piazza San Marco, one of the most famous and instantly recognizable townscapes in the West, if not the world, has been described as a stage set, as Europe’s drawing room, as a painter’s canvas. This book traces the changing shape and function of the piazza, from its beginnings in the ninth century to its present day ubiquity in the Venetian, European, as well as global imagination.

Through its long history, the Piazza San Marco has functioned as civic space that was used for such varied activities as public meetings; animal-baiting; executions; state processions; meat and produce markets; a performance venue for rock concerts; as well as, more recently, a cafe to enjoy a leisurely Campari. Constantly alert to the question of function, this book recreates not only rituals of the past but also activities of the present, from the coronation of the doge to the legendary Pink Floyd concert of 1989, with much fanfare in between. Iain Fenlon recreates the dynamic, colorful, and noisy history of the piazza—a history that is also the history of Venice and, indeed, of Europe.

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The Picts Re-Imagined
Julianna Grigg
Arc Humanities Press, 2018
Pictish studies is undergoing significant revision and invigoration, with recent archaeological discoveries and new methodologies in archaeology, cultural geography and art history prompting a re-assessment of Pictish cultural and social development. We can now say more about the cultural and political lives of the Picts than ever before, and these new findings are enabling a fresh perspective on the wider development of Early Medieval polities across the Latin west. This short book provides an exciting and informed synthesis of our current understanding of Pictish history and material remains.
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Picturing Empire
Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire
James R. Ryan
Reaktion Books, 1998
Coinciding with the extraordinary expansion of Britain's overseas empire under Queen Victoria, the invention of photography allowed millions to see what they thought were realistic and unbiased pictures of distant peoples and places. This supposed accuracy also helped to legitimate Victorian geography's illuminations of the "darkest" recesses of the globe with the "light" of scientific mapping techniques.

But as James R. Ryan argues in Picturing Empire, Victorian photographs reveal as much about the imaginative landscapes of imperial culture as they do about the "real" subjects captured within their frames. Ryan considers the role of photography in the exploration and domestication of foreign landscapes, in imperial warfare, in the survey and classification of "racial types," in "hunting with the camera," and in teaching imperial geography to British schoolchildren.

Ryan's careful exposure of the reciprocal relation between photographic image and imperial imagination will interest all those concerned with the cultural history of the British Empire.
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Picturing Empire
Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire
James R. Ryan
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Coinciding with the extraordinary expansion of Britain's overseas empire under Queen Victoria, the invention of photography allowed millions to see what they thought were realistic and unbiased pictures of distant peoples and places. This supposed accuracy also helped to legitimate Victorian geography's illuminations of the "darkest" recesses of the globe with the "light" of scientific mapping techniques.

But as James R. Ryan argues in Picturing Empire, Victorian photographs reveal as much about the imaginative landscapes of imperial culture as they do about the "real" subjects captured within their frames. Ryan considers the role of photography in the exploration and domestication of foreign landscapes, in imperial warfare, in the survey and classification of "racial types," in "hunting with the camera," and in teaching imperial geography to British schoolchildren.

Ryan's careful exposure of the reciprocal relation between photographic image and imperial imagination will interest all those concerned with the cultural history of the British Empire.
[more]

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Picturing the Book of Nature
Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany
Sachiko Kusukawa
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visual argument for the scientific study of nature.

 
To set the stage, Kusukawa begins with a survey of the technical, financial, artistic, and political conditions that governed the production of printed books during the Renaissance. It was during the first half of the sixteenth century that learned authors began using images in their research and writing, but because the technology was so new, there was a great deal of variety of thought—and often disagreement—about exactly what images could do: how they should be used, what degree of authority should be attributed to them, which graphic elements were bearers of that authority, and what sorts of truths images could and did encode. Kusukawa investigates the works of Fuchs, Gessner, and Vesalius in light of these debates, scrutinizing the scientists’ treatment of illustrations and tracing their motivation for including them in their works. What results is a fascinating and original study of the visual dimension of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century.
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Picturing the Cosmos
A Visual History of Early Soviet Space Endeavor
Iina Kohonen
Intellect Books, 2017
Space is the ultimate canvas for the imagination, and in the 1950s and ’60s, as part of the space race with the United States, the solar system was the blank page upon which the Soviet Union etched a narrative of exploration and conquest. In Picturing the Cosmos, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena, Iina Kohonen maps the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship during the Cold War.

Kohonen ably examines each image, elucidating how visual media helped to anchor otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization within the Soviet Union. The USSR mapped and named the cosmos, using new media to stake a claim to this new territory and incorporating it into the daily lives of its citizens. Soviet cosmonauts, meanwhile, were depicted as prototypes of the perfect Communist man, representing modernity, good taste, and the aesthetics of the everyday. Across five heavily illustrated chapters, Picturing the Cosmos navigates and critically examines these utopian narratives, highlighting the rhetorical tension between propaganda, censorship, art, and politics.
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Pierre Simon Laplace, 1749–1827
A Determined Scientist
Roger Hahn
Harvard University Press, 2005

Often referred to as the Newton of France, Pierre Simon Laplace has been called the greatest scientist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He affirmed the stability of the solar system and offered a powerful hypothesis about its origins. A skillful mathematician and popular philosopher, Laplace also did pioneering work on probability theory, in devising a method of inverse probabilities associated with his classic formulation of physical determinism in the universe. With Lavoisier and several younger disciples, he also made decisive advances in chemistry and mathematical physics.

Roger Hahn, who has devoted years to researching Laplace's life, has compiled a rich archive of his scientific correspondence. In this compact biography, also based in part on unpublished private papers, Hahn follows Laplace's journey from would-be priest in the provinces to Parisian academician, popularizer of science during the French Revolution, religious skeptic, and supporter of Napoleon. By the end of his life, Laplace had become a well-rewarded dean of French science.

In this first full-length biography, Hahn illuminates the man in his historical setting. Elegantly written, Pierre Simon Laplace reflects a lifetime of thinking and research by a distinguished historian of science on the fortunes of a singularly important figure in the annals of Enlightenment science.

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Piers Plowan
The A Version, Revised Edition
William Langland
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
Passionate about trying to create social justice in a time of crisis after the Black Plague, William Langland spent his entire life working on Piers Plowman, an epic study of the human quest for truth, justice, and community. The "A Version," the first and shortest of the three versions he crafted, is wonderfully relatable and completely teachable to a modern student audience. Piers Plowman is becoming ever more relevant to students and scholars in English studies. Perhaps because the poem involves culture, religion, community, and work and engages explicitly with the histories of government and popular revolt, this allegorical tale of a wandering Christian named "Will," searching for truth with the aid of a humble plowman named Piers, has found new critical and pedagogic life in the last 20 years. Currently there are no translations of the A-version of Piers Plowman in print, so readers, scholars and teachers have been longing for an affordable, student-centered translation. The apparatus includes a 30-page historical and critical introduction, footnotes, a bibliography, a note on translation theory and practice, and samplings of the original text in Middle English, with a guide to pronunciation of that language. Piers Plowman is an extraordinary important document about the issues dramatically relevant to this day. It confronts poverty and inequity in 14th-century England and explores the need for virtue and social justice, encouraging its readers to create equality with open access for people of all classes and abilities. Though a Christian poem, Piers addresses issues of inclusivity, social responsibility and communal duty, as the poem’s protagonist wanders about the world, facing injustice and persecution as he looks for truth and salvation. Michael Calabrese, author of An Introduction to Piers Plowman and director of the Chaucer Studio’s Middle English recording of the poem, brings Piers Plowman to life for 21st-century students and for all readers interested in the history of society, virtue, faith and salvation.
[more]

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Piers Plowman
The A Version
William Langland
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
Passionate about trying to create social justice in a time of crisis after the Black Plague, William Langland spent his entire life working on Piers Plowman, an epic study of the human quest for truth, justice, and community. The “A Version,” the first and shortest of the three versions he crafted, is wonderfully relatable and completely teachable to a modern student audience. Piers Plowman is becoming ever more relevant to students and scholars in English studies. Perhaps because the poem involves culture, religion, community, and work and engages explicitly with the histories of government and popular revolt, this allegorical tale of a wandering Christian named “Will,” searching for truth with the aid of a humble plowman named Piers, has found new critical and pedagogic life in the last 20 years. Currently there are no translations of the A-version of Piers Plowman in print, so readers, scholars and teachers have been longing for an affordable, student-centered translation. The apparatus includes a 30-page historical and critical introduction, footnotes, a bibliography, a note on translation theory and practice, and samplings of the original text in Middle English, with a guide to pronunciation of that language. Piers Plowman is an extraordinary important document about the issues dramatically relevant to this day. It confronts poverty and inequity in 14th-century England and explores the need for virtue and social justice, encouraging its readers to create equality with open access for people of all classes and abilities. Though a Christian poem, Piers addresses issues of inclusivity, social responsibility and communal duty, as the poem’s protagonist wanders about the world, facing injustice and persecution as he looks for truth and salvation. Michael Calabrese, author of An Introduction to Piers Plowman and director of the Chaucer Studio’s Middle English recording of the poem, brings Piers Plowman to life for 21st-century students and for all readers interested in the history of society, virtue, faith and salvation.
[more]

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Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature
Elizabeth Alice Honig
Reaktion Books, 2022
A fresh account of the life, ideas, and art of the beloved Northern Renaissance master.

In sixteenth-century Northern Europe, during a time of increasing religious and political conflict, Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel explored how people perceived human nature. Bruegel turned his critical eye and peerless paintbrush to mankind’s labors and pleasures, its foibles and rituals of daily life, portraying landscapes, peasant life, and biblical scenes in startling detail. Much like the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bruegel questioned how well we really know ourselves and also how we know, or visually read, others. His work often represented mankind’s ignorance and insignificance, emphasizing the futility of ambition and the absurdity of pride.

This superbly illustrated volume examines how Bruegel’s art and ideas enabled people to ponder what it meant to be human. Published to coincide with the four-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Bruegel’s death, it will appeal to all those interested in art and philosophy, the Renaissance, and Flemish painting.
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Pieter Geyl and Britain
Encounters, Controversies, Impact
Edited by Stijn van Rossem and Ulrich Tiedau
University of London Press, 2022
An examination of the work and influence of historian Pieter Geyl.
 
Pieter Geyl (1887—1966) was undoubtedly one of the most internationally renowned Dutch historians of the twentieth century, but also one of the most controversial. Having come to the United Kingdom as a journalist, he started his academic career at the University of London in the aftermath of World War I and played an important role in the early days of the Institute of Historical Research. Known in this time for his reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs that challenged existing historiographies of both Belgium and the Netherlands but was also linked to his political activism in favor of the Flemish movement in Belgium, Geyl left his stamp on the British perception of Low Countries history before moving back to his country of origin in 1935. Having spent World War II in German hostage camps, he famously coined the adage of history being “a discussion without end” and reengaged in public debates with British historians after the war, partly conducted on the airwaves of the BBC. A prolific writer and an early example of a public intellectual, Geyl remains one of the most influential thinkers on history of his time. The present volume reexamines Geyl’s relationship with Britain (and the Anglophone world at large) and sheds new light on his multifaceted work as a historian, journalist, homme de lettres, and political activist.
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Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence
John Henderson
University of Chicago Press, 1997
John Henderson examines the relationship between religion and society in late medieval Florence through the vehicle of the religious confraternity, one of the most ubiquitous and popular forms of lay association throughout Europe. This book provides a fascinating account of the development of confraternities in relation to other communal and ecclesiastical institutions in Florence. It is one of the most detailed analyses of charity in late medieval Europe.

"[A] long-awaited book. . . . [It is] the most complete survey of confraternities and charity, not only for Florence, but for any Italian city state to date. . . . This book recovers more vividly than other recent works what it meant to be a member of a confraternity in the late middle ages."—Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Economic History Review

"Henderson offers new and fascinating information. . . . A stimulating and suggestive book that deserves a wide readership." —Gervase Rosser, Times Higher Education Supplement

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Piip, Meierovics & Voldemaras
The Baltic States
Charlotte Alston
Haus Publishing, 2010
Conflict on the borders of the Russian 'Empire', whatever the complexion of the government controlling it, has been a constant feature of the past 90 years, most recently with Russia's brief war with Georgia in August 2008. In 1919, as the smaller nations on Russia's borders sought self-determination while the Civil War raged between the Whites and the Bolsheviks, the Paris Peace Conference struggled with a situation complicated by mutually exclusive aims. The Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were seen by both the Russians and the Western Allies as a protective buffer for their own territory, which led to the curious situation that the Peace Conference requested German troops to remain temporarily in the Baltic territory they had occupied during the First World War to block the westward spread of the Bolshevik Revolution. The ongoing civil war in Russia further complicated the issue, because if the Whites should win and restore the 'legitimate' Russian government, the Peace Conference could not divide up the territory of a power that had been one of the original members of the Entente. The US politician Herbert Hoover described Russia as 'Banquo's ghost' at the Paris Peace Conference, an invisible but influential presence, and nowhere can this be more clearly seen than in the deliberations over the Baltic States.
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Pilgrimage and Pogrom
Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria
Mitchell B. Merback
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the late Middle Ages, Europe saw the rise of one of its most virulent myths: that Jews abused the eucharistic bread as a form of anti-Christian blasphemy, causing it to bleed miraculously. The allegation fostered tensions between Christians and Jews that would explode into violence across Germany and Austria. And pilgrimage shrines were built on the sites where supposed desecrations had led to miracles or to anti-Semitic persecutions. Exploring the legends, cult forms, imagery, and architecture of these host-miracle shrines, Pilgrimage and Pogrom reveals how they not only reflected but also actively shaped Christian anti-Judaism in the two centuries before the Reformation.
 
Mitchell B. Merback studies surviving relics and eucharistic cult statues, painted miracle cycles and altarpieces, propaganda broadsheets, and more in an effort to explore how accusation and legend were transformed into propaganda and memory. Merback shows how persecution and violence became interdependent with normative aspects of Christian piety, from pilgrimage to prayers for the dead, infusing them with the ideals of crusade. Valiantly reconstructing the cult environments created for these sacred places, Pilgrimage and Pogrom is an illuminating look at Christian-Jewish relations in premodern Europe.
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Pilgrimage to the End of the World
The Road to Santiago de Compostela
Conrad Rudolph
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Traveling two and a half months and one thousand miles along the ancient route through southern France and northern Spain, Conrad Rudolph made the passage to the holy site of Santiago de Compostela, one of the most important modern-day pilgrimage destinations for Westerners. In this chronicle of his travels to this captivating place, Rudolph melds the ancient and the contemporary, the spiritual and the physical, in a book that is at once travel guide, literary work, historical study, and memoir.
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The Pinocchio Effect
On Making Italians, 1860-1920
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Soon after the disparate states of the Italian peninsula unified in the 1860s to create a single nation, the nationalist Massimo D’Azeglio is said to have remarked, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.” The Pinocchio Effect draws on a remarkably broad array of sources to trace this making of a modern national identity in Italy, a subject that remains strikingly understudied in the English-speaking world of Italian studies.

Taking as her guiding metaphor the character of Pinocchio—a national icon made famous in 1881 by the eponymous children’s book—Susan Stewart-Steinberg argues that just like the renowned puppet, modern Italians were caught in a complex interplay between freely chosen submission and submission demanded by an outside force. In doing so, she explores all the ways that identity was constructed through newly formed attachments, voluntary and otherwise, to the young nation. Featuring deft readings of the period’s most important Italian cultural and social thinkers—including the theorist of mass psychology Scipio Sighele, the authors Matilde Serao and Edmondo De Amicis, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, and the pedagogue Maria Montessori—Stewart-Steinberg’s richly multidisciplinary book will set a new standard in Italian studies.
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Pious and Rebellious
Jewish Women in Medieval Europe
Avraham Grossman
Brandeis University Press, 2004
This volume, an amazing act of historical recovery and reconstruction, offers a comprehensive examination of Jewish women in Europe during the High Middle Ages (1000–1300). Avraham Grossman covers multiple aspects of women’s lives in medieval Jewish society, including the image of woman, the structure of the family unit, age at marriage, position in family and society, her place in economic and religious life, her education, her role in family ceremonies, violence against women, and the position of the divorcée and the widow in society. Grossman shows that the High Middle Ages saw a distinct improvement in the status of Jewish women in Europe relative to their status during the Talmudic period and in Muslim countries. If, during the twelfth century, rabbis applauded women as "pious and pure" because of their major role in the martyrdom of the Crusades of 1096, then by the end of the thirteenth century, rabbis complained that women were becoming bold and rebellious. Two main factors fostered this change: first, the transformation of Jewish society from agrarian to "bourgeois," with women performing an increasingly important function in the family economy; and second, the openness toward women in Christian Europe, where women were not subjected to strict limitations based upon conceptions of modesty, as was the case in Muslim countries. The heart of Grossman’s book concerns the improvement of Jewish women’s lot, and the efforts of secular and religious authorities to impede their new-found status. Bringing together a variety of sources including halakhic literature, biblical and talmudic exegesis, ethical literature and philosophy, love songs, folklore and popular literature, gravestones, and drawings, Grossman’s book reconstructs the hitherto unrecorded lives of Jewish women during the Middle Ages.
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The Pipes of Pan
Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton
Thomas K. Hubbard
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Departing from conventional views of the pastoral genre as an Arcadian escape from urban sophistication, The Pipes of Pan highlights its genesis in the allusive and polemical literary cultures of Alexandria and Rome. Both cities placed great emphasis upon learned invocation and reformulation of poetic models. The pastoral metaphor provided Theocritus and Vergil with tools for representing the contests and confrontations of poets and genres, the exchange of ideas among poets, and poets' reflections on the efficacy of their works.
Pastoral poetry highlights the didactic relationship of older and younger shepherds, whether as rivals or as patron and successor. As such it is an ideal form for young poets' self-representation vis-à-vis their elders, whose work they simultaneously appropriated and transformed, even as the elder poets were represented in the new texts. This influence is reenacted in every generation: Theocritus vs. his Alexandrian forebears, Vergil vs. Theocritus, Calpurnius vs. Vergil, Nemesianus vs. Vergil and Calpurnius, Petrarch vs. Vergil, Boccaccio vs. Petrarch, Spenser vs. Vergil, along with Chaucer and Milton vs. Spenser.
The Pipes of Pan combines multiple strands of contemporary intertextual theory with reception aesthetics and Harold Bloom's theory of intersubjective conflict between generations of poets. It also provides one of the first systematic studies of intertextual and intersubjective dynamics within a whole genre.
This work will be of interest to classicists, students of literary theory, comparative literature, medieval and Renaissance literature, Italian humanism, and English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All texts are translated.
Thomas Hubbard is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin.
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Piracy
The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
Adrian Johns
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.

Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

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Place and Politics in Modern Italy
John A. Agnew
University of Chicago Press, 2002
How do the places where people live help structure and restructure their sociopolitical identities and interests? In this book, renowned political geographer John A. Agnew presents a theoretical model that addresses the relation of place to politics and applies it to a series of historicogeographical case studies set in modern Italy.

For Agnew, place is not just a static backdrop against which events occur, but a dynamic component of social, economic, and political processes. He shows, for instance, how the lack of a common "landscape ideal" or physical image of Italy delayed the development of a sense of nationhood among Italians after unification. And Agnew uses the post-1992 victory of the Northern League over the Christian Democrats in many parts of northern Italy to explore how parties are replaced geographically during periods of intense political change.

Providing a fresh new approach to studying the role of space and place in social change, Place and Politics in Modern Italy will interest geographers, political scientists, and social theorists.
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The Place of Enchantment
British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
Alex Owen
University of Chicago Press, 2004
By the end of the nineteenth century, Victorians were seeking rational explanations for the world in which they lived. The radical ideas of Charles Darwin had shaken traditional religious beliefs. Sigmund Freud was developing his innovative models of the conscious and unconscious mind. And anthropologist James George Frazer was subjecting magic, myth, and ritual to systematic inquiry. Why, then, in this quintessentially modern moment, did late-Victorian and Edwardian men and women become absorbed by metaphysical quests, heterodox spiritual encounters, and occult experimentation?

In answering this question for the first time, The Place of Enchantment breaks new ground in its consideration of the role of occultism in British culture prior to World War I. Rescuing occultism from its status as an "irrational indulgence" and situating it at the center of British intellectual life, Owen argues that an involvement with the occult was a leitmotif of the intellectual avant-garde. Carefully placing a serious engagement with esotericism squarely alongside revolutionary understandings of rationality and consciousness, Owen demonstrates how a newly psychologized magic operated in conjunction with the developing patterns of modern life. She details such fascinating examples of occult practice as the sex magic of Aleister Crowley, the pharmacological experimentation of W. B. Yeats, and complex forms of astral clairvoyance as taught in secret and hierarchical magical societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Through a remarkable blend of theoretical discussion and intellectual history, Owen has produced a work that moves far beyond a consideration of occultists and their world. Bearing directly on our understanding of modernity, her conclusions will force us to rethink the place of the irrational in modern culture.

“An intelligent, well-argued and richly detailed work of cultural history that offers a substantial contribution to our understanding of Britain.”—Nick Freeman, Washington Times

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Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean
Nükhet Varlik
Arc Humanities Press, 2017
This book discusses diseases that affected human and non-human populations in areas stretching from the Red Sea and Egypt to Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Black Sea, in the early modern and modern eras. It tackles various questions of historiography and sources, tests new interdisciplinary methodologies, and asks new questions while revisiting older ones. It contributes to Ottoman studies, the history of medicine, Mediterranean and European history, as well as global studies on the role of epidemics in history.
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Plague and Pleasure
The Renaissance World of Pius II
Arthur White
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
Plague and Pleasure is a lively popular history that introduces a new hypothesis about the impetus behind the cultural change in Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance coincided with a period of chronic, constantly recurring plague, unremitting warfare and pervasive insecurity. Consequently, people felt a need for mental escape to alternative, idealized realities, distant in time or space from the unendurable present but made vivid to the imagination through literature, art, and spectacle.
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Plague Writing in Early Modern England
Ernest B. Gilman
University of Chicago Press, 2009

During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation.

Ernest B. Gilman argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. Gilman also trains his critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, he posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague. Ultimately, Plague Writing in Early Modern England is more than a compendium of artifacts of a bygone era; it holds up a distant mirror to reflect our own condition in the age of AIDS, super viruses, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and the hovering threat of a global flu pandemic.

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Plant Collectors in Angola
Botany, Exploration, and History in South-Tropical Africa
Estrela Figueiredo and Gideon F. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An authoritative treatise on the history of botanical studies and exploration in Angola.
 
For any region, cataloging, interpreting, and understanding the history of botanical exploration and plant collecting, and the preserved specimens that were amassed as a result, are critically important for research and conservation. In this book, published in cooperation with the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, Estrela Figueiredo and Gideon F. Smith, both botanists with expertise in the taxonomy of African plants, provide the first comprehensive, contextualized account of plant collecting in Angola, a large country in south-tropical Africa. An essential book for anyone concerned with the biodiversity and history of Africa, this authoritative work offers insights into the lives, times, and endeavors of 358 collectors. In addition, the authors present analyses of the records that accompanied the collectors’ preserved specimens. Illustrated in color throughout, the book fills a large gap in the current knowledge of the botanical and exploration history of Africa.
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Platonic Theology
Marsilio FicinoEnglish translation by Michael. J. B. AllenLatin text edited by James Hankins with William Bowen
Harvard University Press, 2005

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

This is the fifth of a projected six volumes.

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The Platypus and the Mermaid
And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination
Harriet Ritvo
Harvard University Press

"Cats is 'dogs,' and rabbits is 'dogs,' and so's parrots; but this `ere 'tortis' is a insect," a porter explains to an astonished traveler in a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not the only British institution to schematize the world. This enormously entertaining book captures the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying itself.

The experts (whether calling themselves naturalists, zoologists, or comparative anatomists) agreed on their superior authority if nothing else, but the laymen had their say--and Ritvo shows us a world in which butchers and artists, farmers and showmen vied to impose order on the wild profusion of nature. Sometimes assumptions or preoccupations overlapped; sometimes open disagreement or hostility emerged, exposing fissures in the social fabric or contested cultural territory. Of the greatest interest were creatures that confounded or crossed established categories; in the discussions provoked by these mishaps, monstrosities, and hybrids we can see ideas about human society--about the sexual proclivities of women, for instance, or the imagined hierarchy of nations and races.

A thoroughly absorbing account of taxonomy--as zoological classification and as anthropological study--The Platypus and the Mermaid offers a new perspective on the constantly shifting, ever suggestive interactions of scientific lore, cultural ideas, and the popular imagination.

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Playing Dirty
Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy
Will Stockton
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stockton—with humor and dry wit—reads psychoanalytic theory through early modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body.

Noting that psychoanalysis has traditionally operated in a paranoid framework that relentlessly produces evidence of the same “truths,” Stockton turns to a minority practice in psychoanalysis—associated with Jean Laplanche—to develop a more “playful” analytic for literary studies. This analytic brings together different discourses of sexuality and the body and allows individual writings to reform psychoanalytic wisdom about sexuality, waste, and comedy. Through original explorations of works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir John Harington, Thomas Nashe, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Stockton further encourages the reconciliation of psychoanalysis and queer historicism. He focuses in large part on the less-often-read texts of the early modern English canon, assessing the ways in which these books have been purged from the canon in the name of generic purity.

Playing Dirty builds on recent calls by Renaissance and medieval queer scholars for a method of literary analysis that is less constrained by the boundaries of periodicity and the supposed exigencies of historicism. To take Playing Dirty seriously is to accept its invitation to “play”—to queerly disrupt the modern divide in moving promiscuously between texts past and present.
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The Playing Fields of Eton
Equality and Excellence in Modern Meritocracy
Mika LaVaque-Manty
University of Michigan Press, 2009

"Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, The Playing Fields of Eton takes us on a three-century tour of modern mental and physical life. We visit gymnasiums and dueling fields, murderball courts and Olympic venues, and while immersed in thought-provoking stories of people wrestling with the twin pursuit of equality and excellence, we find ourselves learning what it might mean to be modern. With equal measures of erudition and gentle humor, Mika LaVaque-Manty convincingly refutes the view that egalitarian progress forecloses possibilities for human excellence."
---Elisabeth Ellis, Texas A&M University

"A very insightful and clearly written philosophical inquiry into the nature of sport."
---Marion Smiley, Brandeis University

"A marvelously original analysis of the tensions---and interdependence---between equality and excellence in modern political life. From eighteenth-century dueling to contemporary doping in sports, LaVaque-Manty illuminates the bodily life of democracy at play, and challenges us to think in new ways about the connections between achievement and autonomy. The Playing Fields of Eton is an important book that pushes liberal and democratic theory in fruitful new directions."
---Sharon Krause, Brown University

Can equality and excellence coexist? If we assert that no person stands above the rest, can we encourage and acknowledge athletic, artistic, and intellectual achievements? Perhaps equality should merely mean equality of opportunity. But then how can society reconcile inherent differences between men and women, the strong and the weak, the able-bodied and the disabled?

In The Playing Fields of Eton, Mika LaVaque-Manty addresses questions that have troubled philosophers, reformers, and thoughtful citizens for more than two centuries. Drawing upon examples from the eighteenth-century debate over dueling as a gentleman's prerogative to recent controversies over athletes' use of performance-enhancing drugs, LaVaque-Manty shows that societies have repeatedly redefined equality and excellence. One constant remains, however: sports provide an arena for working out tensions between these two ideals.

Just as in sports where athletes are sorted by age, sex, and professional status, in modern democratic society excellence has meaning only in the context of comparisons among individuals who are, theoretically, equals. LaVaque-Manty's argument will engage philosophers, and his inviting prose and use of familiar illustrations will welcome nonphilosophers to join the conversation.

Mika LaVaque-Manty is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

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Plotting Gothic
Stephen Murray
University of Chicago Press, 2015
A historian of medieval art and architecture with a rich appreciation of literary studies, Stephen Murray brings all those fields to bear on a new approach to understanding the great Gothic churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Plotting Gothic positions the rhetoric of the Gothic as a series of three interlocking plots: a spatial plot tied to the material construction of the churches, a social plot stemming from the collaborative efforts that made Gothic output possible, and a rhetorical plot involving narratives that treat the churches as objects of desire. Drawing on the testimony of three witnesses involved in church building—Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, Gervase of Canterbury, and the image maker Villard de Honnecourt—and a range of secondary sources, Murray traces common patterns in the way medieval buildings were represented in words and images. Our witnesses provide vital information about the way the great churches of Gothic were built and the complexity of their meanings. Taking a fresh approach to Gothic architecture, Plotting Gothic offers an invigorating new way to understand some of the most lasting achievements of the medieval era.
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Pocket Magna Carta
1217 Text and Translation
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016
Magna Carta, or “Great Charter,” is one of the most important documents in legal history. Originating in 1215 as a peace treaty between King John and a group of rebellious barons at Runnymede, it put into law the concept of individual liberty and transformed the role of the monarch toward the people. Magna Carta was subsequently revised and reissued throughout the thirteenth century, and the ideas it expressed have had a profound influence, including on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Pocket Magna Carta reproduces the 1217 reissue of this landmark document, including both the original Latin text and a modern translation, as well as an accessible introduction that traces the background of Magna Carta’s signing and subsequent revisions throughout the centuries. It also explains how the text has become an enduring symbol of freedom in Britain and the wider world. A clear and concise introduction to one of the most important documents in legal history, Pocket Magna Carta will be welcomed by those with an interest in British history or the wider history of Britain in the world.
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Poems
Michael Marullus
Harvard University Press, 2012

Michael Marullus (c. 1453/4–1500), born in Greece, began life as a mercenary soldier but became a prominent Neo-Latin poet and scholar who worked in Florence and Naples. He married the beautiful and learned Alessandra Scala, daughter of the humanist Bartolomeo Scala, chancellor of Florence, and his Epigrams bring alive the circle of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici. Among Marullus’ influences were ancient Greek texts such as the Homeric and Orphic hymns, the Corpus Hermeticum, the hymns of Proclus, Cleanthes, and Callimachus, and Julian the Apostate’s Hymn to the Sun. Marullus was particularly important, however, as one of the first Renaissance poets to imitate the works of Lucretius, and one witness reported that, after his death by drowning, a copy of the Roman poet’s works was found in his saddlebag. Later poets imitated him in vernacular love poetry, especially Ronsard; he even appears as a shadowy figure in the pages of George Eliot’s Romola, where he is depicted as a confirmed pagan.

This edition contains Marullus’ complete Latin poetry. All of these works appear in English translation for the first time.

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The Poems of Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous
Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous; edited and translated by Floris Bernard and Christopher Livanos
Harvard University Press, 2018
The witty and self-assertive poetry of Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous provides unique snapshots of eleventh-century Constantinople at the height of its splendor and elegance. Their collections, aptly called “various verses,” greatly range in length and style—including epigrams, polemics, encomia, and more—and their poems were written for a broad range of social occasions such as court ceremonies, horse races, contests between schools, and funerals. Some were inscribed on icons and buildings. Many honored patrons and friends, debunked rivals, or offered satirical portraits of moral types in contemporary society. In some remarkable introspective poems, Mauropous carefully shaped a narrative of his life and career, while Christopher’s body of work is peppered with riddles and jocular wordplay. This volume is the first English translation of these Byzantine Greek collections.
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Poems of Guido Gezelle
A Bilingual Anthology
Edited by Paul Vincent
University College London, 2016
The Bruges-born poet-priest Guido Gezelle(1830–1899) is generally considered one of the masters of 19th-century European lyric poetry. At the end of his life and in the first two decades of the 20th century, Gezellewas hailed by the avant-garde as the founder of modern Flemish poetry. His unique voice was belatedly recognised in the Netherlands and often compared with his English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). In this bilingual anthology, award-winning translator Paul Vincent selects a representative picture of Gezelle’soutput, from devotional through narrative, to celebratory and expressionistic. Gezelle’sfavourite themes are childhood, the Flemish landscape, friendship, nature, religion and the Flemish vernacular, and his apparently simple poems conceal a sophisticated prosody and a dialogue with spiritual and literary tradition. However, an important barrier to wider international recognition of his lyric genius up to now has been the absence of translations that do justice to the vigour and musicality of Gezelle’sWest Flemish idiom. Two of the translations included go some way to redressing the balance: ‘TheWatter-Scriever’ by Scotland’s national poet Edwin Morgan and ‘A Little Leaf . . .’ by Francis Jones. Both translators make brilliant use of their own vernaculars (Glaswegian and North Yorkshire respectively) to bring Gezelleto life for the non-Dutch-speaking reader.
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The Poet and the Publisher
The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street
Pat Rogers
Reaktion Books, 2021
“Drawing on deep familiarity with the period and its personalities, Rogers has given us a witty and richly detailed account of the ongoing war between the greatest poet of the eighteenth century and its most scandalous publisher.”—Leo Damrosch, author of The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
 
“What sets Rogers’s history apart is his ability to combine fastidious research with lucid, unpretentious prose. History buffs and literary-minded readers alike are in for a punchy, drama-filled treat.”—Publishers Weekly

The quarrel between the poet Alexander Pope and the publisher Edmund Curll has long been a notorious episode in the history of the book, when two remarkable figures with a gift for comedy and an immoderate dislike of each other clashed publicly and without restraint. However, it has never, until now, been chronicled in full. Ripe with the sights and smells of Hanoverian London, The Poet and Publisher details their vitriolic exchanges, drawing on previously unearthed pamphlets, newspaper articles, and advertisements, court and government records, and personal letters. The story of their battles in and out of print includes a poisoning, the pillory, numerous instances of fraud, and a landmark case in the history of copyright. The book is a forensic account of events both momentous and farcical, and it is indecently entertaining.
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Poetic Relations
Intimacy and Faith in the English Reformation
Constance M. Furey
University of Chicago Press, 2017
What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God.

As Furey demonstrates, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others describe inner lives that are surprisingly crowded, teeming with human as well as divine companions. The same early modern writers who bequeathed to us the modern distinction between self and society reveal here a different way of thinking about selfhood altogether. For them, she argues, the self is neither alone nor universally connected, but is forever interactive and dynamically constituted by specific relationships. By means of an analysis equally attentive to theological ideas, social conventions, and poetic form, Furey reveals how poets who understand introspection as a relational act, and poetry itself as a form ideally suited to crafting a relational self, offer us new ways of thinking about selfhood today—and a resource for reimagining both secular and religious ways of being in the world.
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Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany
On fire
Mererid Puw Davies
University College London, 2023
An examination of the largely forgotten anti-war writing from West Germany spurred by the Vietnam War.
 
Though the Vietnam War did not directly involve West Germany, it was nonetheless a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements in that country, and it gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. Poetry and poetic writing were key to anti-war work. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in West Germany, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of that rich artistic production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical, or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. The book also offers a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.
 
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Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs
The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius
Michael Roberts
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Prudentius' Peristephanon is a collection of martyr texts from a vital period for the growth of martyr cult in the West. Building on recent work on the cult of the saints and on the sacralization of the space and time, Roberts demonstrates how the Peristephanon relates to developments in late fourth century spirituality.
The author examines how Prudentius creates an idiom to express devotion to the martyrs, particularly in the structuring of narrative and the use of poetic language. Roberts concludes by demonstrating how Prudentius employs the model of martyr cult to articulate the status of Christian literature, the role of the bishop in the Christian community, and the symbolic status of Rome in the Christian West.
Michael Roberts is Robert Rich Professor of Latin, Wesleyan University.
Jacket art: Gold-glass vase, after A.D. 350. By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.
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Poetry and the Police
Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Robert Darnton
Harvard University Press, 2012

Listen to "An Electronic Cabaret: Paris Street Songs, 1748–50" for songs from Poetry and the PoliceAudio recording copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

In spring 1749, François Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an “abominable poem about the king.” So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense?

In this captivating book, Robert Darnton follows the poems as they passed through several media: copied on scraps of paper, dictated from one person to another, memorized and declaimed to an audience. But the most effective dispersal occurred through music, when poems were sung to familiar tunes. Lyrics often referred to current events or revealed popular attitudes toward the royal court. The songs provided a running commentary on public affairs, and Darnton brilliantly traces how the lyrics fit into song cycles that carried messages through the streets of Paris during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society.

This lucid and entertaining book reminds us of both the importance of oral exchanges in the history of communication and the power of “viral” networks long before our internet age.

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Poetry in a World of Things
Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis
Rachel Eisendrath
University of Chicago Press, 2018
We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a “mental space” between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as “things in themselves”—things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance “discovery” of the observable world.

In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.
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A Poetry Precise and Free
Selected Madrigals of Guarini
Nicholas R. Jones
University of Michigan Press, 2018
A Poetry Precise and Free collects 150 lyric poems by the Renaissance Italian poet Giovanni Battista Guarini in new translations, accompanied by the Italian originals and commentary that will enlighten and engage both scholars and general readers.  Guarini’s madrigals provide insight into northern Italian court culture of the late Renaissance, when poetry and music were enjoyed as companion arts. Hundreds of composers of Guarini’s day set his lyric poems to music. Primarily known today in their vocal settings, most famously those of Claudio Monteverdi, the poems merit appreciation in their own right.

This volume is organized into ten sections, grouping the madrigals around themes such as the anguish of passion, the asymmetry of desire, the incursions of jealousy, and the possibility of mutual bliss. Nicholas R. Jones renders Guarini’s poetry into accessible contemporary English verse that nevertheless stays true to the substance and form of the original texts, reflecting their roots in the Petrarchan poetic tradition and displaying the emotion and musicality that made these lyrics so popular from the start. A substantive introduction provides cultural context for the madrigals and their musical settings; brief commentaries follow each translation to illuminate aspects of poetic and rhetorical craft. An extensive appendix lists the madrigal compositions that set these lyrics for vocal performance.

The book fills a major gap in the scholarship on Guarini’s literary legacy. It will appeal to scholars of literature, Renaissance studies, and musicology, early-music performers, and general readers interested in poetry and classical music.
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Poets Laureate in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1668-1813
Leo Shipp
University of London Press, 2022
A history of the development and importance of the office of poet laureate of Britain.

The office of the poet laureate of Britain was a highly prominent, relevant, and respectable institution throughout the long eighteenth century. First instituted for John Dryden in 1668, the laureateship developed from an honorific into a functionary office with a settled position in court, and in 1813 was bestowed upon Robert Southey, whose tenure transformed the office. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the office’s institutional changes and public reception, the mechanics of each laureate’s appointment, and the works produced by the laureates before and after their appointments. It argues that the laureateship played a key part in some of the most vital trends in eighteenth-century culture.
 
At the core of the book is a new research paradigm that Leo Shipp calls the conceptual geography of culture. It shows that Britons routinely used spatial concepts to understand culture throughout the period, which became increasingly abstract over time. As part of this, Shipp shows, the court evolved from a concrete space in London to an abstract space capable of hosting the entire British public. The laureateship was a dynamic office positioned at the interface of court and public, evolving in line with its audiences. An important intervention in eighteenth-century historiography, this book presents a nuanced understanding of eighteenth-century culture and society, in which the laureateship exemplified the enduring centrality of the court to the British conceptual geography of culture.
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The Poison Trials
Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science
Alisha Rankin
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story.

At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend.

The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.
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Polacos in Argentina
Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture
Mariusz Kalczewiak
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Winner of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Book Award 2020

An examination of the social and cultural repercussions of Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s

Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, following the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews seeking safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. In the period between 1918 and 1939, sixty thousand Polish Jews established new homes in Argentina. They formed a strong ethnic community that quickly embraced Argentine culture while still maintaining their unique Jewish-Polish character. This mass migration caused the transformation of cultural, social, and political milieus in both Poland and Argentina, forever shaping the cultural landscape of both lands.

In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture, Mariusz Kałczewiak has constructed a multifaceted and in-depth narrative that sheds light on marginalized aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies and Polish Jewish Studies. Based on archival research, Yiddish travelogues on Argentina, and the Yiddish and Spanish-language press, this study recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina.

Most studies on mass migration fail to acknowledge the role of the country of origin, but this innovative work approaches Jewish migration to Argentina as a continuous process that took place on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken as a whole, Polacos in Argentina enlightens the heterogeneous and complex issue of immigrant commitments, belongings, and expectations. Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina serves as a case study of how ethnicity evolves among migrants and their children, and the dynamics  that emerge between putting down roots in a new country and  maintaining commitments to the country of origin.
 
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Poles in Wisconsin
Susan Gibson Mikos
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012

In this all-new addition to the People of Wisconsin series, author Susan Mikos traces the history of Polish immigrants as they settled in America’s northern heartland. The second largest immigrant population after Germans, Poles put down roots in all corners of the state, from the industrial center of Milwaukee to the farmland around Stevens Point, in the Cutover, and beyond. In each locale, they brought with them a hunger to own land, a willingness to work hard, and a passion for building churches.

Included is a first person memoir from Polish immigrant Maciej Wojda, translated for the first time into English, and historical photographs of Polish settlements around our state.

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Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality
The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914
Joshua D. Zimmerman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
The Jewish experience on Polish lands is often viewed backwards through the lens of the Holocaust and the ethnic rivalries that escalated in the period between the two world wars. Critical to the history of Polish-Jewish relations, however, is the period prior to World War I when the emergence of mass electoral politics in Czarist Russia led to the consolidation of modern political parties. Using sources published in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, Joshua D. Zimmerman has compiled a full-length English-language study of the relations between the two dominant progressive movements in Russian Poland. He examines the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which sought social emancipation and equal civil rights for minority nationalities, including Jews, under a democratic Polish republic, and the Jewish Labor Bund, which declared that Jews were a nation distinct from Poles and Russians and advocated cultural autonomy. By 1905, the PPS abandoned its call for Jewish assimilation, and recognized Jews as a separate nationality. Zimmerman demonstrates persuasively that Polish history in Czarist Russia cannot be fully understood without studying the Jewish influence and that Jewish history was equally infused with the Polish influence.
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Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326
Gregory Roberts
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Medieval states are widely assumed to have lacked police forces. Yet in the Italian city-republics, soldiers patrolled the streets daily in search of lawbreakers. Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326 is the first book to examine the emergence of urban policing in medieval Italy and its impact on city life.Focusing on Bologna in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Gregory Roberts shows how police forces gave teeth to the communes' many statutes through a range of patrol activities. Whether seeking outlaws in the countryside or nighttime serenaders in the streets, urban police forces pursued lawbreakers energetically and effectively. They charged hundreds of individuals each year with arms-bearing, gambling, and curfew violations, convicting many of them in the process. Roberts draws on a trove of unpublished evidence from judicial archives, rich with witness testimony, to paint a vivid picture of policing in daily life and the capacity of urban governments to coerce.Breaking new ground in the study of violence, justice, and state formation in the Middle Ages, Police Power in the Italian Communes sheds fresh light on the question of how ostensibly modern institutions emerge from premodern social orders.
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POLICING THE CITY
CRIME & LEGAL AUTHORITY IN LONDON, 1780-1840
ANDREW T. HARRIS
The Ohio State University Press, 2004
In Policing the City, Harris seeks to explain the transformation of criminal justice, particularly the transformation of policing, between the 1780s and 1830s in the City of London. As utilitarian legal reformers argued that criminal deterrence ought to be based on certain and rational punishment rather than random execution, they also had to control the discretionary authority of enforcement. This meant in theory and practice the centralization of policing in the 1830s, and the end of local policing, which was seen as corrupt, inefficient, and unsuitable for rational criminal justice. Revolutionary changes in policing began locally, however, in the 1780s. Such local changes preceded and inspired national reforms, and local policing up to the centralizing measures of the 1830s remained dynamic, responsive, and locally accountable right until its demise. Anxiety about policing had as much to do with the social origins of the police as it did about the origins of criminality, and control over the discretionary authority of watchmen and constables played a larger role in criminal justice reform than the nature of crime. The national, metropolitan, and City police reforms of the late 1830s were thus the culmination of a contentious argument over the meanings of justice, efficiency, and order, rather than its beginning. Harris's evidence reveals how what we've come to think of as “modern” policing evolved out of local practice and reflects shifts in wider debates about crime, justice, and discretionary authority.
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Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe
Carole Rawcliffe
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, *Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe* offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment. Overturning many preconceptions about medieval dirt and squalor, it presents the most outstanding recent scholarship on how public health norms were enforced in the judicial, religious and socio-cultural sphere before the advent of modern medicine and the nation-state, crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries and engaging with factors such as spiritual purity, civic pride and good neighbourliness.
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Policy, People, and the New Professional
De-professionalisation and Re-professionalisation in Care and Welfare
Edited by Jan Willem Duyvendak, Trudie Knijn, and Monique Kremer
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
In recent decades, social and political pressures have forced a reevaluation of the roles of health and welfare professionals throughout Europe. Policy, People, and the New Professional examines those changes and their consequences. 

The volume reveals how public dissatisfaction with caregivers, financial pressures from government agencies, and attempts to cope with Europe’s increasingly multicultural population have led to changes in responsibilities and oversight for a wide range of practitioners. Though more changes are certain to come as Europe’s population ages—Policy, People, and the New Professional provides an essential explanation of the road traveled so far. 

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The Polish Peasant in Europe and America
A CLASSIC WORK IN IMMIGRATION HISTORY
William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki
University of Illinois Press, 1984
Focusing on the immigrant family, this new, abridged edition of the classic The Polish Peasant in Europe and America brings together documents and commentary that will be valuable in teaching United States history survey courses as well as immigration history and introductory sociology courses. It includes a new introduction and epilogue.
 
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Polish Theatre Revisited
Theatre Fans in the Nineteenth Century
Agata Luksza
University of Iowa Press, 2023
Polish Theatre Revisited explores nineteenth-century Polish theatre through the lens of theatre audiences. Agata Łuksza places special emphasis on the most engaged spectators, known as “theatremaniacs”—from what they wore, to what they bought, to what they ate. Her source material is elusive ephemera from fans’ lives, such as notes scribbled on a weekly list of shows in the Warsaw theatres, collections of theatre postcards, and recipes for sweets named after famous actors.

The fannish behavior of theatremaniacs was usually deemed excessive or in poor taste by people in positions of power, as it clashed with the ongoing embourgeoisement of the theatre and the disciplining of audiences. Nevertheless, the theatre was one of the key areas where early fan cultures emerged, and theatremaniacs indulged in diverse fan practices in opposition to the forces reforming the theatre and its spectatorship.
 
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Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War
Emmanuel Ringelblum
Northwestern University Press, 1992
A man of towering intellectual accomplishment and extraordinary tenacity, Emmanuel Ringelblum devoted his life to recording the fate of his people at the hands of the Germans. Convinced that he must remain in the Warsaw Ghetto to complete his work, and rejecting an invitation to flee to refuge on the Aryan side, Ringelbaum, his wife, and their son were eventually betrayed to the Germans and killed.

This book represents Ringelbaum's attempt to answer the questions he knew history would ask about the Polish people: what did the Poles do while millions of Jews were being led to the stake? What did the Polish underground do? What did the Government-in-Exile do? Was it inevitable that the Jews, looking their last on this world, should have to see indifference or even gladness on the faces of their neighbors? These questions have haunted Polish-Jewish relations for the last fifty years. Behind them are forces that have haunted Polish-Jewish relations for a thousand years.
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Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600
Hilde De Weerdt
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Based on a collaboration between historians of Chinese and European politics, this volume offers a first comprehensive overview of current research on political communication in middle-period European and Chinese history. The chapters present new work on the sources and processes of political communication in European and Chinese history partly through juxtaposing and combining formerly separate historiographies and partly through direct comparison. Contrary to earlier comparative work on empires and state formation, which aimed to explain similarities and differences with encompassing models and new theories of divergence, the goal is to further conversations between historians by engaging regional historiographies from the bottom up.
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front cover of The Political Culture of the Sister Republics, 1794-1806
The Political Culture of the Sister Republics, 1794-1806
France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy
Edited by Joris Oddens, Mart Rutjes, and Erik Jacobs
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
Leading historians of the French, Batavian, Helvetic, Cisalpine and Neapolitan revolutions bridge the gap between the historiographies of the so-called 'Sister' Republics. They explore political culture as a set of discourses or political practices. Parliamentary practices, the comparability of 'universal' political concepts, late-eighteenth century Republicanism, the relationship between press and politics, and the interaction between the Sister Republics and France are studied from a comparative, transnational perspective.
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Political Descent
Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England
Piers J. Hale
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Historians of science have long noted the influence of the nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Robert Malthus on Charles Darwin. In a bold move, Piers J. Hale contends that this focus on Malthus and his effect on Darwin’s evolutionary thought neglects a strong anti-Malthusian tradition in English intellectual life, one that not only predated the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species but also persisted throughout the Victorian period until World War I. Political Descent reveals that two evolutionary and political traditions developed in England in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act: one Malthusian, the other decidedly anti-Malthusian and owing much to the ideas of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck.            
           
These two traditions, Hale shows, developed in a context of mutual hostility, debate, and refutation. Participants disagreed not only about evolutionary processes but also on broader questions regarding the kind of creature our evolution had made us and in what kind of society we ought therefore to live. Significantly, and in spite of Darwin’s acknowledgement that natural selection was “the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms,” both sides of the debate claimed to be the more correctly “Darwinian.” By exploring the full spectrum of scientific and political issues at stake, Political Descent offers a novel approach to the relationship between evolution and political thought in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
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The Political Economy of Industrial Democracies
Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1987

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Political Epistemics
The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism
Andreas Glaeser
University of Chicago Press, 2011

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence.

Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.

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Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy
The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena
James Hankins
Harvard University Press, 2023

The first full-length study of Francesco Patrizi—the most important political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance before Machiavelli—who sought to reconcile conflicting claims of liberty and equality in the service of good governance.

At the heart of the Italian Renaissance was a longing to recapture the wisdom and virtue of Greece and Rome. But how could this be done? A new school of social reformers concluded that the best way to revitalize corrupt institutions was to promote an ambitious new form of political meritocracy aimed at nurturing virtuous citizens and political leaders.

The greatest thinker in this tradition of virtue politics was Francesco Patrizi of Siena, a humanist philosopher whose writings were once as famous as Machiavelli’s. Patrizi wrote two major works: On Founding Republics, addressing the enduring question of how to reconcile republican liberty with the principle of merit; and On Kingship and the Education of Kings, which lays out a detailed program of education designed to instill the qualities necessary for political leadership—above all, practical wisdom and sound character.

The first full-length study of Patrizi’s life and thought in any language, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy argues that Patrizi is a thinker with profound lessons for our time. A pioneering advocate of universal literacy who believed urban planning could help shape civic values, he concluded that limiting the political power of the wealthy, protecting the poor from debt slavery, and reducing the political independence of the clergy were essential to a functioning society. These ideas were radical in his day. Far more than an exemplar of his time, Patrizi deserves to rank alongside the great political thinkers of the Renaissance: Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Jean Bodin.

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The Political Message of the Shrine of St. Heribert of Cologne
Church and Empire after the Investiture Contest
Carolyn M. Carty
Arc Humanities Press, 2022
This is the first ever book in English solely devoted to one of the most important reliquary shrines of the Mosan Rhineland, the Heribert Shrine. Carolyn M. Carty investigates how liturgy, history, politics, and geography all converge to influence the creation and the message of a work of art in the aftermath of the Investiture Controversy between the Church and the Holy Roman Empire. She argues that the Heribert Shrine's images and inscriptions support the supremacy of the Church over the State with consequent implications for the shrine's intended viewers.
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The Political Orchestra
The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich
Fritz Trümpi
University of Chicago Press, 2016
This is a groundbreaking study of the prestigious Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics during the Third Reich. Making extensive use of archival material, including some discussed here for the first time, Fritz Trümpi offers new insight into the orchestras’ place in the larger political constellation.

Trümpi looks first at the decades preceding National Socialist rule, when the competing orchestras, whose rivalry mirrored a larger rivalry between Berlin and Vienna, were called on to represent “superior” Austro-German music and were integrated into the administrative and social structures of their respective cities—becoming vulnerable to political manipulation in the process. He then turns to the Nazi period, when the orchestras came to play a major role in cultural policies. As he shows, the philharmonics, in their own unique ways, strengthened National Socialist dominance through their showcasing of Germanic culture in the mass media, performances for troops and the general public, and fictional representations in literature and film. Accompanying these propaganda efforts was an increasing politicization of the orchestras, which ranged from the dismissal of Jewish members to the programming of ideologically appropriate repertory—all in the name of racial and cultural purity.

Richly documented and refreshingly nuanced, The Political Orchestra is a bold exploration of the ties between music and politics under fascism.
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Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna
Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897
John W. Boyer
University of Chicago Press, 1995
John Boyer offers a meticulously researched examination of the social and political atmosphere of late imperial Vienna. He traces the demise of Vienna's liberal culture and the burgeoning of a new radicalism, exemplified by the rise of Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist Party during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This important study paves the way for new readings of fin de siecle Viennese politics and their broader European significance.

"Offers a comprehensive, multicausal study of the rise of Christian Socialism in Vienna, that phenomenon which was experienced nowhere else in urban Central Europe and which culminated in the famous clash between the Austrian establishment and the colourful, domineering lead of the movement, Karl, Lueger."—R.J.W. Evans, History

"Boyer's analysis is masterful in terms of research, exposition, and organization. His use of available economic data is judicious, and his sense of the social structure of late nineteenth-century Vienna is formidable."—William A. Jenks, American Historical Review

"To understand Viennese and even imperial politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Boyer's book is absolutely essential.""—Robert Wegs, Review of Politics
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Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe
Jae-Jae Spoon
University of Michigan Press, 2015

It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems.

Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European Green Parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British Green Parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these parties have developed as organizations which run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties’ survival, Spoon asserts, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals.

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The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu
The Significant Chapters and Supporting Selections
Translated by Henry Bertram Hill
University of Wisconsin Press, 1964
“Hill has prepared an excellent translation of the more important parts of the Political Testament; his notes are clear, concise, informative, and accurate, and his short introduction will provide students who wish to delve into the French original with an indication of the road that is open to them.  .  .  .  Offers a window to the mind of the redoubtable Richelieu.”—American Historical Review
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Political Thought and Political Thinkers
Judith N. Shklar
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Ethics described Judith Shklar as "a towering presence" at Harvard for decades, an "influential teacher and mentor to many of the best known political theorists working today in the United States." One of this century's most important liberal scholars, she is remembered for her "sharp intellect, forceful personality, and passionate intellectual honesty and curiosity." Political Thought and Political Thinkers makes startlingly clear her role in the reinvigoration of liberal theory that has been taking place over the last two decades.

This second volume of Shklar's work—which follows the 1997 publication of Redeeming American Political Thought—brings together heretofore uncollected (and several unpublished) essays on a number of themes, including the place of the intellect in the modern political world and the dangers of identity politics. While many of these essays have been previously published, they remain far from accessible. In collecting the work scattered over the past forty years in journals and other publications, noted political theorist Stanley Hoffmann provides an essential guide to Shklar's thought, complemented by George Kateb's comprehensive introduction to her work. Hoffmann's selection, which includes Shklar's classic essay "The Liberalism of Fear," showcases her distinctive defense of liberalism and follows her explorations in this history of moral and political thought as she engages with Bergson, Arendt, and Rousseau.

Political Thought and Political Thinkers displays one of the century's most compelling and flexible intellects in action and is the definitive collection of her work on European history and thinkers.

"Shklar's legacy is an inspiring example of liberal thought at its arresting best, unflinchingly courageous and unmoved by the dreary and unmeaning harmonies conjured up by theories of justice and rights."—John Gray, Times Literary Supplement

Judith N. Shklar (1928-1992) was Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University and the author of nine books in political theory.
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Politics and War
European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler, Enlarged Edition
David Kaiser
Harvard University Press

David Kaiser looks at four hundred years of modern European history to find the political causes of general war in four distinct periods (1559–1659, 1661–1713, 1792–1815, and 1914–1945). He shows how war became a natural function of politics, a logical consequence of contemporary political behavior. Rather than fighting simply to expand, states in each war fought for specific political and economic reasons. The book illustrates the extraordinary power of politics and war in modern Western civilization, if not in history as a whole.

In a provocative and original new preface and chapter, Kaiser shows which aspects of four past areas of conflict do, and do not, seem relevant to the immediate future, and he sketches out some new possibilities for Europe.

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Politics as Development
The Emergence of Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Serbia
Gale Stokes
Duke University Press, 1990
Nineteenth-century Serbia was an economically and socially backward country with an urban population of approximately 3 percent and a literacy rate in the countryside of less than 10 percent. Still, during that century it created a functioning democracy with a constitution, independent courts, political parties, and civil liberties. The Serbian experience challenges the view that political structures fundamentally depend on socioeconomic ones, since Serbia created a modern political system without developing economically. Politics as Development analyzes one aspect of that process, the emergence of political parties in the 1870s and the 1880s, especially the creation of the Serbian Radical Party under the leadership of Nikola Pasic. By mobilizing the peasantry through organizing the countryside, the Radicals proved themselves the most original nineteenth-century Balkan political movement. Based on thorough research of primary documents, Stokes’s study supports the view that the state and its attending class constitute an independent variable in the developmental process.
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Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821
Jordana Dym
University Press of Colorado, 2007
Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821 examines how the Spanish policies known broadly as the Bourbon Reforms affected Central American social, economic, and political institutions. Although historians have devoted significant attention to the purpose and impact of these reforms in Spain and some of Spain's other New World colonies, this book is the first to explore their impact on Central America.

These reforms profoundly changed aspects of Central America's politics and society; however, these essays reveal that changes in the region were shaped both internally and externally and that they weakened the region's ties to metropolitan Spain as often as they reinforced them. Contributors focus on specific policy changes and their consequences as well as transformations throughout the region for which no direct Bourbon inspiration appears to be responsible. Together they demonstrate that whether or not the Crown achieved its primary goals of centralization and control, its policies nevertheless provided opportunities for evident, often subtle, and occasionally unintentional shifts in the colonial government's relationship to its constituent populations. Contributors include Christophe Belaubre, Michel Bertrand, Jordana Dym, Jorge H. González, Timothy Hawkins, Sajid Alfredo Herrera, Gustavo Palma, Eugenia Rodriguez, Doug Tompson, and Stephen Webre.
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Politics of Contemporary European Cinema
Mike Wayne
Intellect Books, 1995
How does contemporary European Cinema reflect the drive for political and economic integration and recent trends in globalisation, if at all? This book is a valuable excursion into the politics of European cinema and extensively addresses questions like this.

Mike Wayne identifies some key themes pertinent to a study of the contemporary cultural and political dynamics of European cinema from the mid-1980's, including the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet Empire.

Throughout the book, issues are raised that question European culture and the nature of national cinema, including;

• The cultural relationship with Hollywood;
• Debates over cultural plurality and diversity;
• The disintegration of nation states along the eastern flank;
• Postcolonial travels and the hybridisation of the national formation.
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The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist Czechoslovakia
Segregating in the Name of the Nation
Victoria Shmidt
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
By focusing on the politics of disability as a pillar of Czechoslovak identity, The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist Czechoslovakia: Segregating in the Name of the Nation reflects upon the vicissitudes of nation building over the twentieth century that led to extreme forms of institutional violence against minorities, mainly the Roma, such as forced sterilization. The authors trace the intersectionality of ethnicity and disability, which proliferated across diverse realms of public life, positioning the continuities and ruptures of interrogating propaganda and racial science during the interwar and post-war periods as establishing and reinforcing the border between a healthy Czech majority and a disabled Roma minority. The book critically revises this border that remains observable but unapproachable until it operates as a part of constructing the authenticity of a nation.
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The Politics of Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 1530s-1830s
Rafe Blaufarb
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Rafe Blaufarb examines the interwoven problems of taxation and social privilege in this treatment of the contention over fiscal privilege between the seigneurial nobility and the tax-payers of Provence
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The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic
Edward Dickinson
Harvard University Press, 1996

The model of the development of child welfare policy presented here illuminates the complexity of the struggles from which modern social policy emerged, and accounts for the ways in which similar policies could be adapted to changing political systems--monarchical, republican, or fascist. Following a period of policy innovation, rapid institutional expansion, and intensifying ideological conflict before the First World War, Dickinson shows, the period from 1918 to 1961 saw a succession of efforts to reconcile competing policy agendas within different political contexts: the corporatist-democratic compromise worked out in the early years of the Weimar Republic, which broke down in the economic and political crisis at the end of the 1920s; the disastrous Nazi synthesis of authoritarianism and racism; and a revitalized corporatist-democratic framework, stabilized on the basis of the antitotalitarian consensus and of psychotherapeutic theory and practice, after 1949.

Historians of modern Germany and of the welfare state will find this a challenging and illuminating approach to important theoretical and historical questions.

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Politics of James Connolly
Kieran Allen
Pluto Press, 1990
Born in 1868 and executed by the British in 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising, the work of Irish national hero James Connolly has long been misunderstood. From Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, to conservative Irish nationalists and the Church, many groups have claimed Connolly as their own, his ideas and strategies used and distorted to justify particular political positions.

Kieran Allen breaks this mould, assessing the founder of the Irish Marxist movement ideas from a revolutionary socialist perspective. Allen considers the strengths and weaknesses of Connolly’s revolutionary strategy, the effect of his commitment to international socialism on his nationalist loyalties and arguing that, ultimately, Connolly's enduring relevance derives from his anti-imperialism. Any socialist movement today ignores this book at its peril.
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The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe
Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
For sixty years, different groups in Europe have put forth interpretations of World War II and their respective countries’ roles in it consistent with their own political and psychological needs. The conflict over the past has played out in diverse arenas, including film, memoirs, court cases, and textbooks. It has had profound implications for democratization and relations between neighboring countries. This collection provides a comparative case study of how memories of World War II have been constructed and revised in seven European nations: France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and the USSR (Russia). The contributors include scholars of history, literature, political science, psychology, and sociology. Country by country, they bring to the fore the specifics of each nation’s postwar memories in essays commissioned especially for this volume. The use of similar analytical categories facilitates comparisons.

An extensive introduction contains reflections on the significance of Europeans’ memories of World War II and a conclusion provides an analysis of the implications of the contributors’ findings for memory studies. These two pieces tease out some of the findings common to all seven countries: for instance, in each nation, the decade and a half between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s was the period of most profound change in the politics of memory. At the same time, the contributors demonstrate that Europeans understand World War II primarily through national frames of reference, which are surprisingly varied. Memories of the war have important ramifications for the democratization of Central and Eastern Europe and the consolidation of the European Union. This volume clarifies how those memories are formed and institutionalized.

Contributors. Claudio Fogu, Richard J. Golsan, Wulf Kansteiner, Richard Ned Lebow, Regula Ludi, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, Heidemarie Uhl, Thomas C. Wolfe

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The Politics of Rape
Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage
Jennifer L. Airey
University of Delaware Press, 2013
The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture. Beginning with an examination of rape scenes in English Civil War propaganda, The Politics of Rape argues that Roundhead authors described acts of rape and atrocity to demonize their enemies, the Irish, the Catholics, and the Cavaliers. After the Restoration, propagandists and playwrights on each side of every political conflict would follow suit, altering the rhetoric of sexual violence in response to each new moment of political upheaval: The Restoration of Charles II, the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of William and Mary. The study offers an intensive look at British propaganda culture, gathering together a wealth of understudied pamphlet texts, and identifying a series of stock figures that recur throughout the century: The demonic Irishman, sexually violent villain of the 1641 Irish Rebellion tracts; the debauched Cavalier, the secretly Catholic royalist rapist; the poisonous Catholic bride, the malignant consort who encourages the rapes of Protestant women; the cannibal father, the evil patriarch who rapes his daughters-in-laws before ingesting his own sons as a symbol of monarchical overreach; and the ravished monarch, the male rape victim whose sexual violation protests his political disenfranchisement. The study also traces the appearance of these figures on the British stage, examining well-known works by Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Lee, and Shadwell, alongside lesser-known plays by Orrery, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Pix, Cibber, and Brady. The Politics of Rape thus offers a new method for understanding of the geo-political implications of theatrical sexual violence.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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The Politics of Sociability
Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840-1918
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
University of Michigan Press, 2007

An ambitious, original work, The Politics of Sociability is Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann's exploration of the social and political significance of Freemasonry in German history. Drawing on de Tocqueville's theory that without civic virtue there is no civil society, and that civic virtue unfolds only through the social interaction between citizens, Hoffmann examines the critical link between Freemasonry and the evolution of German civil society in the late nineteenth century. The practice of Masonic sociability reflected an enlightened belief in the political significance of moral virtue for civil society, indeed, for humanity. Freemasons' self-image as civilizing agents, acting in good faith and with the unimpeachable idea of universal brotherhood, was contradicted not only by their heightened sense of exclusivity; Freemasons unintentionally exacerbated nineteenth-century political conflicts---for example, between liberals and Catholics, or Germans and French---by employing a universalist language.

Using a wealth of archival sources previously unavailable, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann shows how Freemasonry became a social refuge for elevated and liberal-minded bourgeois men who felt attracted to its secret rituals and moral teachings. German Freemasons sought to reform self and society but, Hoffmann argues, ultimately failed to balance modern politics with a cosmopolitan ethos. Hoffmann illuminates a capacious history of the political effects of Enlightenment concepts and practices in a century marked by nationalism, social discord, and religious conflict.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Assistant Professor of Modern History at Ruhr-University Bochum. The German edition of this book, Die Politik der Geselligkeit: Freimaurerlogen in der deutschen Bürgergesellschaft, 1840-1918 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), won the Association of German Historians' 2002 Hedwig Hintze Prize for Best First Book.

Tom Lampert was born in Boston in 1962 and grew up in northern California. He received a BA in political science from Stanford University (1986) and a PhD in government from Cornell (1998). His book, Ein einziges Leben (Hanser Verlag 2001) was published as One Life by Harcourt in 2004, which he translated himself. Lampert has worked as a freelance translator since 1998. He currently lives in Bad Kreuznach, Germany.

Cover Image: Monument of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, erected between 1898 and 1913 by German Freemasons, Barbarossa-Head by Christian Behrens, located next to the stairs leading to the monument. The German mythical figure of the Kaiser Barbarossa is depicted as a sphinx, which in Masonic symbolism protects the Masonic secret from profanation. Courtesy of the Deutsche Bücherei, Leipzig.

"This is an exemplary study of the role of Freemasonry in the German Bürgergesellschaft (civil society) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concise, comprehensive, and well written. It combines social profiling with a careful examination of contemporary concepts in a long-term diachronic study, based on an impressive amount of primary material. . . . Hoffmann's empirically and methodologically convincing study is not only a major contribution to our understanding of Freemasonry in the German Bürgergesellschaft. It also reflects the complex social and political transformation of German society in the nineteenth century and the difficulties contemporaries faced in responding to it."
---German History

"Hoffmann's arguments are theoretically informed, supported by a wealth of archival sources. . . . Indeed, in many ways this is the best combination of painstaking social history and well-argued Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). . . . One of the great virtues of this book is that Hoffmann does not shy away from the contradictions in the Freemasons' rhetoric and actions. Such contradictions, in fact, are key to the Mason's importance, because they force us to rethink some of our assumptions about Imperial Germany. . . . This is an important book that encourages us to rethink many of our characterizations of the German Kaiserreich and our assumptions about civil society."
---Central European History

"Based on a rich variety of sources. . . . Hoffmann explores the evolving relationship between Freemasonry and the monarchy, state, and church, and he also scrutinizes the internal practices and discourse of these notoriously secretive and cosmopolitan societies. . . . Hoffmann engages fruitfully with a wide historiography covering themes such as masculinity and racism, he dissects the complex attitude of Freemasonry to Jews and Catholics, and he scrutinizes the attacks of its conservative, clerical, and antisemitic critics."
---Journal of Modern History

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Politics of the Sword
Dueling, Honor, and Masculinity in Modern Italy
Steven C. Hughes
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
            Following its creation as a country in 1861, Italy experienced a wave of dueling that led commentators to bemoan a national “duellomania” evidenced by the sad spectacle of a duel a day. Pamphlets with titles like “Down with the Duel” and “The Shame of the Duel” all communicated the passion of those who could not believe that a people supposedly just returned to the path of progress and civilization had wholeheartedly embraced such a “barbaric” custom. Yet these critics were consistently countered by sober-minded men of rank and influence who felt that the duel was necessary for the very health of the new nation.
            Steven C. Hughes argues that this extraordinary increase in chivalric combat occurred because the duel played an important role in the formation, consolidation, and functioning of united Italy. The code of honor that lay at the heart of the dueling ethic offered a common model and bond of masculine identity for those patriotic elites who, having created a country of great variety and contrast for often contradictory motives, had to then deal with the consequences. Thus dueling became an iconic weapon of struggle during the Risorgimento, and, as Italy performed poorly on the stage of great power politics, it continued to offer images of martial valor and manly discipline. It also enhanced the social and political power of the new national elites, whose monopoly over chivalric honor helped reinforce the disenfranchisement of the masses. Eventually, the duel fed into the hypermasculinity and cult of violence that marked the early fascist movement, but in the end it would prove too individualistic in its definition of honor to stand up to the emerging totalitarian state. Although Mussolini would himself fight five duels at the start of his career, the duel would disappear along with the liberal regime that had embraced it.
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The Politics of Utopia
A New History of John Law's System, 1695–1795
Arnaud Orain
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A fascinating retelling of the first banking and financial collapse in eighteenth-century France.
 
The Scottish economist John Law has been described as the architect of modern central banking. His “System,” established in Regency France between 1716 and 1720, saw the founding of a bank issuing paper money and the establishment of state commercial and colonial enterprises aimed at consolidating public debt. What at first seemed like financial wizardry, however, resulted in rampant speculation and, ultimately, economic collapse. In The Politics of Utopia, historian Arnaud Orain offers a provocative rereading of this well-known episode.
 
Starting his story in the seventeenth century, Orain reconstructs the figures and ideas, long predating Law, that anticipated and laid the groundwork for the System, which, he argues, is best understood as a failed social utopia aimed at the total transformation of society. Overturning familiar narratives of this seismic event, this book rewrites a stunning chapter in economic history by dealing with the cultural, colonial, religious, and political dimensions of the (in)famous System up to the French Revolution, revealing new lessons for today’s fraught financial landscape.
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The Politics of Women's Suffrage
Local, National and International Dimensions
Edited by Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins
University of London Press, 2021
A history of the early twentieth-century movement for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. 
 
In the United Kingdom, the question of women’s suffrage represented the most substantial challenge to the constitution since 1832, seeking not only to expand but to redefine definitions of citizenship and power. At the same time, it was inseparable from other urgent contemporary political debates—the Irish question, the decline of the British Empire, the Great War, and the increasing demand for workers’ rights.  

This collection positions women’s suffrage as central to, rather than separate from, these broader political discussions, demonstrating how they intersected and were mutually constitutive. In particular, this collection pays close attention to the issues of class and Empire which shaped this era. It demonstrates how campaigns for women’s rights were consciously and unconsciously played out, impacting attitudes to motherhood, spurring the radical “birth-strike” movement, and burgeoning communist sympathies in working-class communities around Britain and beyond.
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Politics on the Fringe
The People, Policies, and Organization of the French National Front
Edward G. DeClair
Duke University Press, 1999
Once a marginal political coalition, the French National Front has become the most high-profile far-right organization in Europe. In Politics on the Fringe Edward G. DeClair provides the first extensive analysis of the Front’s history, from its creation in 1972 and outcast status in the early 1980s to its achievement of broad-based support and show of political strength in the 1997 elections.

Using rare, in-depth interviews with twenty-nine members of the Front elite, as well as public opinion survey data and electoral results, DeClair examines the internal structure of the Front, its political agenda, and its growing influence in France. DeClair shows how the party has dramatically expanded its traditionally narrow core constituency by capitalizing upon anxieties about national identity, immigration, European unification, and rising unemployment. In illustrating how the rhetoric surrounding such topics is key to the Front’s success, DeClair examines the Front’s legacy by detailing the links between the French far-right and similar movements in such countries as Germany, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and the United States. Finally, Politics on the Fringe offers not only a complete picture of the Front’s increasingly influential role in French partisan politics but also further insight into the resurgence of right-wing extremism throughout western societies in the late twentieth century.

This volume will be of primary importance to political scientists and those engaged with European politics, culture, and history. It will also appeal to those concerned with right-wing populism and political movements.

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Politics without a Past
The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism
Shari J. Cohen
Duke University Press, 1999
In Politics without a Past Shari J. Cohen offers a powerful challenge to
common characterizations of postcommunist politics as either a resurgence of
aggressive nationalism or an evolution toward Western-style democracy. Cohen
draws upon extensive field research to paint a picture of postcommunist
political life in which ideological labels are meaningless and exchangeable
at will, political parties appear and disappear regularly, and citizens
remain unengaged in the political process.
In contrast to the conventional wisdom, which locates the roots of widespread intranational strife in deeply rooted national identities from the past, Cohen argues that a profound ideological vacuum has fueled destructive tension throughout postcommunist Europe and the former Soviet Union. She uses Slovakia as a case study to reveal that communist regimes bequeathed an insidious form of historical amnesia to the majority of the political elite and the societies they govern. Slovakia was particularly vulnerable to communist intervention since its precommunist national consciousness was so weak and its only period of statehood prior to 1993 was as a Nazi puppet-state. To demonstrate her argument, Cohen focuses on Slovakia’s failure to forge a collective memory of the World War II experience. She shows how communist socialization prevented Slovaks from tying their individual family stories—of the Jewish deportations, of the anti-Nazi resistance, or of serving in the wartime government—to a larger historical narrative shared with others, leaving them bereft of historical or moral bearings.
Politics without a Past develops an analytical framework that will be important for future research in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and beyond. Scholars in political science, history, East European and post-Soviet studies will find Cohen’s methodology and conclusions enlightening. For policymakers, diplomats, and journalists who deal with the region, she offers valuable insights into the elusive nature of postcommunist societies.
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Poltava 1709
The Battle and the Myth
Serhii Plokhy
Harvard University Press, 2012

The Battle of Poltava has long been recognized as a crucial event in the geopolitical history of Europe and a decisive point in the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Russian Empire. The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study—history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music—to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle. This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination. Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles—a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians. This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle’s major players.

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Pont-de-Montvert
Social Structure and Politics in a French Village
Patrice L.-R. Higonnet
Harvard University Press, 1971

Pont-de-Montvert is a small and shrunken Protestant village in an isolated part of the Cévennes mountains of Southern France. In 1700, the village was a complicated world where some fifteen hundred landless peasants, yeomen peasants, artisans, bourgeois, and nobles had unequal rights, unequal responsibilities, and different perceptions of politics. Today, Pont-de-Montvert is a much smaller, classless society, where social differences have little to do with politics and are due more to personal worth than to inherited wealth or status.

In the seventeenth century, both rich and poor of Pont-de-Montvert had their own politics; one century later, at the time of the French Revolution, the political differences had vanished though the social ones remained. During the nineteenth century, the social structure was transformed, as were its connections with politics.

In this book, P. L.-R. Higonnet explains these changes and describes the conditions of life for different people at different times in a village that is both a part of France and a world unto itself.

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The Pontecorvo Affair
A Cold War Defection and Nuclear Physics
Simone Turchetti
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo’s knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project.
           
The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline’s promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.
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