
New Books in Western European Studies
Interviews with Scholars of Western Europe about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Show episodes

Keir Giles, "Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent" (Hurst & Co., 2024)
Who will defend Europe? The answer should be obvious: Europe should be able to defend itself. Yet, for decades, most of the continent enjoyed a defence holiday, outsourcing protection to the United States while banking an increasingly illusory ‘peace dividend’. Now, after three decades of reducing armed forces and draw
Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with land, waters, forests and wildlife. A Land Won From Waste: Scotland AD 400–1400 (John Donald/Birlinn, 2025) by Professor

Camilla Annerfeldt, "Clothing and Identity in Early Modern Rome" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Camilla Annerfeldt joins to discuss Clothing and Identity in Early Modern Rome (Bloomsbury, 2025). This is the first book-length exploration of the clothes worn in early modern Rome and provides novel insights into the city of Rome during one of its most fascinating periods. It also challenges the notion – well-establi

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
In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X.

Quentin Skinner, "Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understandin