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367 results in European history: general interest

Page 1 of 19

The Cambridge Urban History of Europe
  • Volume 1, Ancient Europe
  • General editor Maarten Prak
  • Edited by Penelope J. E. Davies, Christina G. Williamson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

The Cambridge Urban History of Europe
  • Volume 2, Medieval and Early Modern Europe
  • Edited by Patrick Lantschner, Maarten Prak
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • Volume II charts European urbanism between 700–1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world's most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious, and cultural histories of cities and towns.

The Cambridge Urban History of Europe

From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism
  • Ireland and America, 1960-2023
  • Stephen Watt
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    06 June 2025
    Print publication:
    10 September 2024
  • In Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), Polish critic Jan Kott defines one purpose of scholarship in the humanities that summarises the chief aim of this project: 'The writing of history and, above all, literary criticism can, and must, always be understood as an attempt to find in the past aspects of human experience that can shed light on the meaning of our own times'. That is precisely what From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023 attempts to do. Aided by the insights of Irish and Northern Irish playwrights, poets and novelists, this book uses America's historical relationship with Ireland and Northern Ireland as a means of understanding the rise of Trumpism and assessing its potential to incite a new American 'Troubles'. Three related aims are to demonstrate the interdependence of Ireland and the United States since the Famine in Ireland and the American Civil War in the nineteenth century; to delineate the political and economic obstacles in the latter decades of the last century that prevented this relationship from evolving into a more consequential partnership; and to identify the underappreciated leaders who played crucial roles in both the brokering of the Good Friday Agreement and the inception of a revised foreign policy.

Heralds of a Democratic Europe
  • Representation without Politicization in the European Community, 1948-68
  • Koen van Zon
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    04 June 2025
    Print publication:
    15 August 2024
  • The received wisdom in European integration history is that, long before the EU was plagued by Euroscepticism and other forms of contestation, there was a 'permissive consensus' between European elites and the general public, which allowed European integration to move forward. This book looks beyond this presumed consensus, to ask how the members of European institutions themselves perceived and shaped their relations with European citizens during the early years of the European Communities.

    It does so from the perspective of the people who were responsible for representing citizens at the European level: the members of the European Parliament (which represented European citizens) and the Economic and Social Committee (which represented European organised interests). The book follows the first generation of these European representatives in building their institutions during the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that the European representatives sought to democratise the Communities, within the constraints of the legal and institutional framework that was created with the European treaties. In doing so, the book argues, they created new path dependencies and reaffirmed existing ones, but hardly challenged the status quo - characterised later with concepts like the permissive consensus and the democratic deficit. The book shows, then, that the European representatives' ambition to democratise the European Communities from within has shaped European integration in ways that are not fully appreciated and understood by historians and political scientists.

The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History
  • Eastern and Western Visions in the Long Nineteenth Century
  • Edhem Eldem
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    07 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2024
  • A growing flow of visitors in the nineteenth century turned the Alhambra into a touristic destination and a major trope of Orientalism, created by Western authors and artists from François-René de Chateaubriand to Owen Jones and from Washington Irving to Jean-Léon Gérôme. Yet behind this Western infatuation lie scores of 'Oriental' observers of the monument, as revealed by its visitors' book, kept since 1829.

    This book uses this untapped source to analyse the perceptions of the Alhambra by multiple actors, including Westerners, Spaniards, Maghrebines, Ottoman Turks, Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs from the Mashreq. In doing so, it reveals the existence of significant variations in both Western and Oriental perceptions of the monument, from 'Oriental Orientalism' to Arab nationalism. Examining the contemporary press, memoirs, travelogues and photographs - as well as the visitors' book - it uses the Alhambra to build a history of the complex and entangled relations between East and West, North and South, Islam and Christianity, centre and periphery during the heyday of Orientalism and Western hegemony.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy
  • Volume 1, The Two Swords
  • Edited by Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Robert A. Ventresca, Melodie H. Eichbauer, Miles Pattenden
  • Published online:
    28 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • Throughout its history, the papacy has engaged with the world. Volume 1 addresses how the papacy became an institution, and how it distinguished itself from other powers, both secular and religious. Aptly titled 'The Two Swords,' it explores the papacy's navigation, negotiation, and re-negotiation, initially of its place and its role amid changing socio-political ideas and practices. Surviving and thriving in such environment naturally had an impact on the power dynamics between the papacy and the secular realm, as well internal dissents and with non-Catholics. The volume explores how changing ideas, beliefs, and practices in the broader world engaged the papacy and lead it to define its own conceptualizations of power. This dynamic has enabled the papacy to shift and be reshaped according to circumstances often well beyond its control or influence.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy
  • Volume 3, Civil Society
  • Edited by Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Robert A. Ventresca, Melodie H. Eichbauer, Miles Pattenden
  • Published online:
    28 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • Historically, the papacy has had – and continues to have – significant and sustained influence on society and culture. In the contemporary world, this influence is felt far afield from the traditional geographic and cultural center of papal authority in western Europe, notably in the Global South. Volume 3 frames questions around the papacy's cultural influence, focusing on the influence that successive popes and various vectors of papal authority have had on a broad range of social and cultural developments in European and global societies. The range of topics covered here reflects the vast and expanding scope of papal influence on everything from architecture to the construction and contestation of gender norms to questions of papal fashion. That influence has waxed and waned over time as successive popes have had access to greater resources and have had stronger imperatives to use their powers of patronage and regulation to intervene in society at large.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy
  • Volume 2, The Governance of the Church
  • Edited by Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Robert A. Ventresca, Melodie H. Eichbauer, Miles Pattenden
  • Published online:
    28 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • This volume engages with the centrality of the popes within the Catholic Church and the claim of papal authority as it was exercised through the institution's various governing instruments. Addressing the history of the papacy in the longue durée, it highlights developments and the differences between the first and second millennium of the papacy. The chapters bring nuance to older historiographical models of papal supremacy, focusing on how apostolic primacy was contested and re-negotiated, and how the contours of power relationships shifted between center and periphery. The volume draws attention to questions about papal supremacy across time, place, and transnational lines; the function of law in the exercise of papal authority; the governance of the church in the form of the Curia, synods, and regional and ecumenical councils; the governance of the Papal States; the management of finances and church-state relations; and the relationship between papal temporal and spiritual authority.

Berlin
  • Mary Fulbrook
  • Published online:
    13 February 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • Now capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin rose from insignificant origins on swampy soil, becoming a city of immigrants over the ages. Through a series of ten vignettes, Mary Fulbrook discusses the periods and regimes that shaped its character – whether Prussian militarism; courtly culture and enlightenment; rapid industrialisation and expansion; ambitious imperialism; experiments with democracy; or repressive dictatorships of both right and left, dramatically evidenced in the violence of World War and genocide, and then in the Wall dividing Cold War Berlin. This book also presents Berlin's distinctive history as firmly rooted in specific places and sites. Statues and memorials have been erected and demolished, plaques displayed and displaced, and streets named and renamed in recurrent cycles of suppression or resurrection of heroes and remembrance of victims. This vivid and engaging introduction thus reveals Berlin's startling transformations and contested legacies through ten moments from critical points in its multi-layered history.

Éirinn and Iran Go Brách
  • Iran in Irish-Nationalist Historical, Literary, Cultural, and Political Imaginations from the Late-18th Century to 1921
  • Mansour Bonakdarian
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    29 February 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2023
  • This book analyzes particular patterns of nationalist self-configuration and nationalist uses of memory, counter-memory, and historical amnesia in Ireland from roughly around the time of the emergence of a broad-based non-sectarian Irish nationalist platform in the late eighteenth century (the Society of United Irishmen) until Ireland's partition and the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. In approaching Irish nationalism through the particular historical lens of 'Iran,' this book underscores the fact that Irish nationalism during this period (and even earlier) always utilized a historical paradigm that grounded Anglo-Irish encounters and Irish nationalism in the broader world history, a process that I term 'worlding of Ireland.' In effect, Irish nationalism was always politically and culturally cosmopolitan in outlook in some formulations, even in the case of many nationalists who resorted to insular and narrowly defined exclusionary ethnic and/or religious formulations of the Irish 'nation.' Irish nationalists, as nationalists in many other parts of the world, recurrently imagined their own history either in contrast to or as reflected in, the histories of peoples and lands elsewhere, even while claiming the historical uniqueness of the Irish experience. Present in a wide range of Irish nationalist political, cultural, and historical utterances were assertions of past and/or present affinities with other peoples and lands.

An Economic History of the Iberian Peninsula, 700–2000
  • General editor Pedro Lains
  • Edited by Leonor Freire Costa, Regina Grafe, Alfonso Herranz-Loncán, David Igual-Luis, Vicente Pinilla, Hermínia Vasconcelos Vilar
  • Published online:
    22 February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • This is a comprehensive long-run history of economic and political change in the Iberian Peninsula. Beginning with the development of the old medieval kingdoms, it goes on to explore two countries, Portugal and Spain, which during the early modern period possessed vast empires and played an essential role in the global economic and political developments. It traces how and why both countries began to fall behind during the first stages of industrialization and modern economic growth only to achieve remarkable economic development during the second half of the twentieth century. Written by a team of leading historians, the book sheds new light on all aspects of economic history from population, agriculture, manufacturing and international trade to government, finance and welfare. The book includes extensive new data and will be an essential work of reference for scholars of Portugal and Spain and also of comparative European economic development.

Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy
  • Guy Tal
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    22 February 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • The figure of the witch is familiar from the work of early modern German, Dutch, and Flemish artists, but much less so in the work of their Italian counterparts. Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy seeks to explore the ways in which representations of witchcraft emerged from and coincided with the main cultural currents and artistic climate of an epoch chiefly celebrated for its humanistic and rational approaches. Through an in-depth examination of a panoply of arresting paintings, engravings, and drawings-variously portraying a hag-ridden colossal phallus, a horror-stricken necromancer dodging the devil's scrabbling claws, and a nocturnal procession presided over by an infanticidal crone - Guy Tal offers new ways of reading witchcraft images through and beyond conventional iconography. Artists such as Parmigianino, Alessandro Allori, Leonello Spada, and Angelo Caroselli effected visual commentaries on demonological notions that engaged their audience in a tantalizing experience of interpretation.

Sienese Hospitals within and beyond the City Walls
  • Charity and the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala, 1400-1600
  • Sarah Loose Guerrero
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    17 February 2024
    Print publication:
    31 August 2023
  • This book combines the history of charitable institutions with the study of power in urban and rural spaces from the late medieval to the early modern era. Focusing on the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, the book goes beyond examining hospitals in an urban context to also consider the significant impact of charitable institutions in rural spaces. Case studies of Santa Maria della Scala's farms allow an investigation of the relationship between urban institutions and their rural properties, while looking at subject hospitals outside the Sienese state offers a glimpse into the competition for power with non-Sienese entities. As Siena's politics shifted in the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Scala and its rural spaces became sites where power was negotiated. The book thus demonstrates how geographies of power affected the practice of charity for both urban hospitals and the rural communities they influenced.

The Art and Government Service of Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei (c.1421-c.1495)
  • Visual Propaganda and Undercover Agency for the Republic of Siena
  • Anabel Thomas
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    24 November 2023
    Print publication:
    15 May 2023
  • In 1454 the Sienese painter Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei faced litigation from the Mercanzia in Siena for defaulting on a contract from one of the leading Franciscan confraternities in the city. Two fellow Sienese artists, Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro, had recently completed a new altarpiece for the same entity. Anabel Thomas considers how the two commissions were linked and questions why Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei's brief to fresco the confraternity chapel remained unfinished.

    In a wide ranging analysis of mainly unpublished records, focussing on the artist's association with key members of Sienese society, fellow artisans and government officials, Thomas concludes that Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei might have honoured his contract had he not become immersed in the military strategy, diplomacy and visual propaganda of the Republic of Siena.

Roman Period Statuettes in the Netherlands and beyond
  • Representation and Ritual Use in Context
  • Christel Veen
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    18 November 2023
    Print publication:
    17 April 2023
  • The subject of this study is a relatively rare category of artefacts, bronze and terracotta statuettes that represent deities, human figures and animals. They were introduced in the northwestern provinces by Roman troops from the end of the first century BCE onwards. The statuettes have been recovered from military and non-military settlements, the surrounding landscape and, to a far lesser extent, from sanctuaries and graves. Until now, their meaning and function have seldom been analysed in relation to their find-spots. Contrary to traditional studies, they have been examined as one separate category of artefacts, which offers new insights into the distribution pattern and iconographic representation of deities. When studying a group of artefacts, a large research area or a large dataset is required, as well as dateable artefacts and find-contexts. These conditions do not apply to the Netherlands and to the majority of statuettes that are central to this study. Moreover, although the changing appearance of statuettes suggest a transformation of cults, the identities of the owners of these statuettes remain invisible to us. Therefore, the issue of Romanization is not put central here. Instead, the focus is on a specific aspect of religion, known as lived religion, within the wider subject of its transformation in the Roman period: how people used statuettes in everyday life, in the context of their houses and settlements.

Comparative Perspectives in Scottish and Norwegian Legal History, Trade and Seafaring, 1200-1800
  • Edited by Andrew R. C. Simpson, Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    17 November 2023
    Print publication:
    31 March 2023
  • There were significant points of contact and similarities in the ways in which the laws of Scotland and Norway developed. The Treaty of Perth of 1266 was of significance in the state formation of both countries, and in the determination of their territorial boundaries. The laws and customs applicable in the Orkneys and the Shetlands remain distinctive due to Norse influence, centuries after those islands became subject to Scottish sovereignty. The extensive trading links between two countries united by the North Sea raises the question of how trade between the territories was regulated.

    This book brings together experts in Norwegian and Scottish legal, economic and political history to explore these points of contact. It breaks new ground, considering Scots law in terms of its historical interactions and similarities with another national legal system, rather than in terms of its place at the intersection between the common law and the civilian traditions.

Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making during the 19th and 20th Centuries
  • Nicole Leopoldie
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    15 November 2023
    Print publication:
    14 February 2023
  • This work examines and compares courtship and marriage patterns that occurred between France and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Departing from state-centered studies of marriage law, it draws on the methodologies of transnational history, cultural history, and the history of emotion to show that these unions were part of a broader pattern of the larger cultural love affair between the two societies.

Genevra Sforza and the Bentivoglio
  • Family, Politics, Gender and Reputation in (and beyond) Renaissance Bologna
  • Elizabeth Bernhardt
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    14 November 2023
    Print publication:
    27 February 2023
  • Genevra Sforza (c. 1441-1507) lived her long life near the apex of Italian Renaissance society as wife of two successive de facto rulers of Bologna: Sante then Giovanni II Bentivoglio. Placed twice there without a dowry by Duke Francesco Sforza as part of a larger Milanese plan, Genevra served her family by fulfilling the gendered role demanded of her by society, most notably by contributing eighteen children, accepting many illegitimates born to Giovanni II, and helping arrange their future alliances for the success of the family at large. Based on contemporary archival research conducted across Italy, this biography presents Genevra as the object of academic study for the first time. The book explores how Genevra's life-story, filled with a multitude of successes appropriate for an elite fifteenth-century female, was transformed into a concordant body of misogynistic legends about how she destroyed the Bentivoglio and the city of Bologna.

Rev. James Fraser, 1634-1709
  • A New Perspective on the Scottish Highlands before Culloden
  • David Worthington
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 October 2023
    Print publication:
    31 January 2023
  • This book studies the revealing autobiographical sources left by Rev. James Fraser of Kirkhill (1634-1709), a Gaelic-speaking scholar, traveller and minister. It examines Fraser's self-presentation and situates him within his locality, Scotland, the British Isles and Europe, also incorporating recent historiography to provide a more comprehensive presentation of the social, economic and cultural trajectories of the early modern Highlands.

    David Worthington focuses on the Scottish Highlands' strong engagement with Europe and early entanglement with empire. He challenges the assumption that the north Highlands, in particular, was sealed off from the rest of the world before Culloden and he identifies the agency, vitality and resilience of the people of the Highlands prior to the peripheralisation, depopulation and under-development that then occurred.

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