
New Books in Intellectual History
Interviews with Scholars of Intellectual History about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
Show episodes

Dan Sperrin, "State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime’s perception of itself. Although satire has always been a primary literature of state affairs, and although it has always been used to intervene in ongoing discussions abou

Kirsten Macfarlane, "Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Early modernity has long been seen as a crucial period in the history of biblical scholarship, witnessing rapid advances in studies of Hebrew, Greek, and the ancient Jewish and Christian past. Historians have devoted much attention to how these developments were received by the academic and clerical elite, and yet ther
You’re human, but are you also a Buddha? If so, which one comes first? What does it mean to be human? What is a Buddha exactly? Is our humanity lost or superseded if we become a Buddha? Such questions might interest our more philosophical listeners. Being Human and a Buddha Too (Wisdom Publications, 2023) by today’s g

Jennifer T. Roberts, "Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Covering the whole of the ancient Greek experience from its beginnings late in the third millennium BCE to the Roman conquest in 30 BCE, Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture (Princeton UP, 2024) is an accessible and lively introduction to the Greeks and their ways of living and thinking. In this
How to find hope in these times? I spoke with political scientist Loren Goldman about the principle of political hope: why we should have hope, how to have hope in dark times, and how political hope differs from naïve optimism, faith in progress, or passive reliance on a hidden logic that will save us in the end. Goldm

Yosie Levine, "Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate" (Littman Library, 2024)
My recent interview with Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine about his book, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate (Littman Library, 2024), illuminated the dynamic interplay between Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions-a theme that resonates deeply with our mission at the Unity Through Diversity