Faculty Books

Sailing Away from Byzantium toward East Roman History

Leonora Neville. Sailing Away from Byzantium Toward East Roman History. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Although the first thing one learns about the ‘Byzantine Empire’ is that it was really the eastern Roman empire, scholars have preferred to call it ‘Byzantine’ in a repudiation of the self-conception and emic vocabulary of the inhabitants of that polity. The terminology of ‘Byzantium’ artificially severs the ‘medieval’ eastern Roman empire from its ‘classical’ roots allowing for the fundamentally Eurocentric schematization of history into ‘ancient,’ ‘medieval,’ and ‘Renaissance’ periods. ‘Byzantine’ is not a benign term of art but has served a variety of political and historiographical agendas including maintaining nationalist visions of ethnic continuity, creating precedents for communism, enabling politics of nostalgia for Orthodox dominion, and constructing visions of western European superiority and masculinity that justify colonialism. By exploring these intellectual legacies of ‘Byzantium,’ and the benefits of conceptualizing Roman history as an unsevered whole, this Element exhorts scholars to let go of the ‘Byzantine’ misnomer.

Depicting the Holy War: Crusader Imagery in Medieval French and English Murals

Elizabeth Lapina. Depicting the Holy War: Crusader Imagery in Medieval French and English Murals. Penn State University Press, 2025.

Depicting the Holy War examines the impact that crusades in the Middle East had on societies in western Europe through the analysis of a heretofore largely ignored type of source: mural paintings. In this book, Elizabeth Lapina analyzes five programs of mural paintings from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth century in what is today France and England—in Hardham, Berzé-la-Ville, Poncé-sur-le-Loir, Cressac, and Tour Ferrande. These images provide rare sources of information about attitudes toward crusades in locations that have produced next to no written evidence about the subject, such as rural parishes. Four of the murals are found in ecclesiastical structures, themselves sacred and made more so as the location of the celebration of mass. This sacralization of violence, Lapina argues, led to changing attitudes toward the enemy and depictions of battles as “holy wars” between the forces of good and evil. The mural paintings come from England, Normandy, Aquitaine, Provence, and Burgundy, areas that supplied both numerous crusaders and ideas related to crusades. Taken together, the murals show a trend toward an acceptance and celebration of increasingly varied types of violence across the period. This pathbreaking study employs new methods to open a window onto perceptions and representations of crusades in strata of society about which we know relatively little. It will be indispensable to historians and art historians who study crusades, warfare, and violence in medieval England and France.

Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

James Sweet. Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Oxford University Press, 2025.

The dramatic story of a mutiny aboard an eighteenth-century British ship and how its owners effectively rallied the power of the British Crown to protect their investment and expand their wealth and political power across multiple generations. In 1768, the British slave ship Black Prince, departed the port of Bristol, bound for West Africa. It never arrived. Before reaching Old Calabar, the crew mutinied, murdering the captain and his officers. The mutineers renamed the ship Liberty, elected new officers, and set out for Brazil. By the time the ship arrived there, the crew had disintegrated into a violent mob and fired into the port city. After the Black Prince wrecked off the coast of Hispaniola, the rebels fled to outposts around the Atlantic world. An eight-year manhunt ensued. This book follows the crew’s turn to piracy and the merchant-owners’ response to the uprising. At the very moment that the American Revolution unfolded in North America, the Black Prince’s owners conducted a “shadow” revolution, mobilizing the power of the British Crown to seek justice and restitution on their behalf. These private merchants used state surveillance, policing, extradition, capital punishment, international diplomacy, and even warfare in order to protect their wealth. During an era of professed liberty and freedom, the privatization of state power was already emerging, replacing monarchies with corporate oligarchies, presaging a new kind of political power in the Atlantic world. The eighteenth-century Bristol slave merchants and subsequent generations of their families accrued great fortunes from the trade and invested it in early British banks, railroads, insurance companies, industrial manufacturing, and even the Anglican Church. Mutiny on the Black Prince narrates the dramatic story of the events onboard and the merchant owners’ efforts to capture the rebels from around the Atlantic world, as well as the way that British slavery shaped the industrializing Atlantic economy and the evolution of the modern corporate state.

Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy

Brandon Bloch. Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy. Harvard University Press, 2025.

A revealing account of how German Protestant leaders embraced democratic ideals after WWII, while firmly and consequentially refusing to account for their earlier complicity with Nazism. Germany’s Protestant churches, longtime strongholds of nationalism and militarism, largely backed the Nazi dictatorship that took power in 1933. For many Protestant leaders, pastors, and activists, national and religious revival were one and the same. Even those who opposed the regime tended toward antidemocratic attitudes. By the 1950s, however, Church leaders in West Germany had repositioned themselves as prominent advocates for constitutional democracy and human rights.

The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages

Jessalynn Bird (Co-editor), and Elizabeth Lapina (Co-editor). The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages explores the intersection of crusader studies and studies of nature. The volume addresses encounters with, responses to and representations of a broad variety of phenomena: celestial objects and events; familiar and unfamiliar fauna and flora; seascapes and landscapes; the elements and the seasons; etc. It introduces readers to crusaders’ actual, but also largely or entirely imaginary encounters with natural phenomena, as well as literary references to nature in crusader sources more generally (such as, for example, animal metaphors). Finally, this project investigates the relationships between the natural and the supernatural and between nature and human-made environments. The volume will define “crusades” broadly, to include not only crusades to the East, but also crusades to frontier regions such as the Baltic and Iberian peninsula and extends to representations of crusades and nature in later medieval and early modern sources.

Russian translation of “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A History of the New International Military Tribunal After World War II.” Translated by Robert Abatullin.

Francine Hirsch. Russian Translation of “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A History of the New International Military Tribunal After World War II.” Translated by Robert Abatullin. NLO, 2023.

Organized in the immediate aftermath of World War II to try the former Nazi leaders for war crimes, the Nuremberg trials, known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT), paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this immersive new history of the trials, a central piece of the story has been routinely omitted from standard accounts: the critical role that the Soviet Union played in making Nuremberg happen in the first place. Hirsch’s book reveals how the Soviets shaped the trials–only to be written out of their story as Western allies became bitter Cold War rivals. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers the first full picture of the war trials, illuminating the many ironies brought to bear as the Soviets did their part to bring the Nazis to justice. Everyone knew that Stalin had originally allied with Hitler before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung heavy over the courtroom, as did the suspicion among the Western prosecutors and judges that the Soviets had falsified evidence in an attempt to pin one of their own war crimes, the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, on the Nazis. It did not help that key members of the Soviet delegation, including the Soviet judge and chief prosecutor, had played critical roles in Stalin’s infamous show trials of the 1930s. For the lead American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson and his colleagues, Soviet participation in the Nuremberg Trials undermined their overall credibility and possibly even the moral righteousness of the Allied victory. Yet Soviet jurists had been the first to conceive of a legal framework that treated war as an international crime. Without it, the IMT would have had no basis for judgment. The Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting against Germany–enduring the horrors of the Nazi occupation and experiencing almost unimaginable human losses and devastation. There would be no denying their place on the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Once the trials were set in motion, however, little went as the Soviets had planned. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg shows how Stalin’s efforts to direct the Soviet delegation and to steer the trials from afar backfired, and how Soviet war crimes became exposed in open court. Hirsch’s book offers readers both a front-row seat in the courtroom and a behind-the-scenes look at the meetings in which the prosecutors shared secrets and forged alliances. It reveals the shifting relationships among the four countries of the prosecution (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the USSR), uncovering how and why the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg became a Cold War battleground. In the process Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a new understanding of the trials and a fresh perspective on the post-war movement for human rights.

Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945

Emma Kuby. Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight Against Concentration Camps After 1945. Cornell University Press, 2019.

In 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a “hallucinatory repetition” of Nazi Germany’s most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their unlikely survival incurred a duty to bear witness for other victims. Over the course of the next decade, these pioneering activists crusaded to expose political imprisonment, forced labor, and other crimes against humanity in Franco’s Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. Until now, the CIA’s secret funding of Rousset’s movement has remained in the shadows. Kuby reveals this clandestine arrangement between European camp survivors and American intelligence agents. She also brings to light how Jewish Holocaust victims were systematically excluded from Commission membership – a choice that fueled the group’s rise, but also helped lead to its premature downfall. The history that she unearths provides a striking new vision of how wartime memory shaped European intellectual life and ideological struggle after 1945, showing that the key lessons Western Europeans drew from the war centered on “the camp,” imagined first and foremost as a site of political repression rather than ethnic genocide. Political Survivors argues that Cold War dogma and acrimony, tied to a distorted understanding of WWII’s chief atrocities, overshadowed the humanitarian possibilities of the nascent anti-concentration camp movement as Europe confronted the violent decolonizing struggles of the 1950s.

A Global History of Crime and Punishment Volume 2: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Medieval Age

Karl Shoemaker (Editor). A Global History of Crime and Punishment Volume 2: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Medieval Age. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2023.

What constituted a crime 2,500 years ago, and how was criminal activity dealt with? How has our definition of justice evolved over time alongside developments in law, society, religion and class structures? 36 experts address these pressing questions in a six-volume reference set that spans 2,500 years of human history. Integrating perspectives from history, cultural studies, philosophy and classics, this globally-focused work traces developments in the ever-changing criminal and justice worlds against a variety of social, legal and cultural contexts. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The six volumes cover: 1. Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 CE); 2. Medieval Age (800 – 1450); 3. Renaissance (1450 – 1650) ; 4. Age of Enlightenment (1650 – 1800); 5. Age of Empire (1800 – 1920); 6. Modern Age (1920 – 2000+). Themes include crime, types of criminal, law enforcement, sanctions and representations of crime and punishment. The page extent is approximately 1,728 pp. with c. 300 illustrations. Each volume opens with notes on contributors, a series preface and an introduction, and concludes with notes, bibliography and an index. Table of Contents Volume 1: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in Antiquity Edited by Adriaan Lanni, Harvard Law School, USA Volume 2: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Medieval Age Edited by Karl Shoemaker, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Volume 3: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Renaissance Edited by Laura Stokes, Stanford University, USA Volume 4: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Xavier Rousseaux, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium Volume 5: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Age of Empire Edited by Mark Finnane, Griffith University, Australia Volume 6: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Modern Age Edited by Paul Lawrence, The Open University, UK

Russian translation of "Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union". Translated by Robert Ibatullin

Francine Hirsch. Russian Translation of "Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union". Translated by Robert Ibatullin. NLO, 2022.

Published in English in 2005, The Empire of Nations has already earned the status of a classic study of the history of Soviet nationality politics. Francine Hirsch traces the interaction of power and expertise in the process of state building, showing the contribution of ethnographers, anthropologists, geographers, linguists and other specialists in the formation of Soviet ideas about the nation and race, as well as the development of the very principles of the structure of the USSR as a multinational state. In the 1920s and 1930s, specific forms of state policy towards certain peoples depended on experts who had pre-revolutionary training and relied on Western European ideas. Based on extensive archival research, the author shows how, through planning and conducting censuses, mapping, creating museum exhibitions, the general ideas of the Bolsheviks crystallized into political decisions. The European idea of cultural evolutionism, the Marxist theory of stage development and the Leninist idea of the ability of a revolutionary party to accelerate historical development became the basis of the state policy of integrating different peoples and cultures within the framework of the Soviet project. Francine Hirsch is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA).

Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Vanina Kopp (Co-editor), and Elizabeth Lapina (Co-editor). Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Brepols, 2021.

The volume contributes to reconstruction of medieval and early modern gaming culture through analysis of visual and material evidence. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, games were not an idle pastime, but were in fact important tools for exploring, transmitting, enhancing, subverting, and challenging social practices and their rules. Their study, through both visual and material sources, offers a unique insight into medieval and early modern gaming culture, shedding light not only on why, where, when, with whom and in what conditions and circumstances people played games, but also on the variety of interpretations that they had of games and play. Representations of games, and of artefacts associated with games, also often served to communicate complex ideas on topics that ranged from war to love, and from politics to theology. This volume offers a particular focus onto the type of games that required little or no physical exertion and that, consequently, all people could enjoy, regardless of age, gender, status, occupation, or religion. The representations and artefacts discussed here by contributors, who come from varied disciplines including history, literary studies, art history, and archaeology, cover a wide geographical and chronological range, from Spain to Scandinavia to the Ottoman Turkey and from the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and beyond. Far from offering the ‘last word’ on the subject, it is hoped that this volume will encourage further studies. Vanina Kopp is Privatdozentin at the University of Münster. She was research group leader on medieval games at the German Historical Institute in Paris, where she wrote her second book Sacred, Serious, Subversive (Habilitation, 2020) on literary games in monastic, courtly, and urban contexts, and she has co-edited two volumes on educational games (Jeux éducatifs et savoirs ludiques in Ludica, 2016-2018). She is also the author of one monograph (Der König und die Bücher, Thorbecke 2016) and co-author of an edited volume on archives and power (Archiv Macht Wissen, Campus 2010). Elizabeth Lapina is Associate Professor of Medieval History and Director of the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is the author of one monograph (Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade, Penn State, 2015) and is co-editor of two volumes (The Crusades and Visual Culture, Ashgate, 2015 and The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, Brill, 2017). Her articles include　”Gambling and Gaming in the Holy Land: Chess, Dice and Other Games in the Sources of the Crusades,” published in Crusades in 2013. Table of Contents List of Illustrations Introduction — VANINA KOPP AND ELIZABETH LAPINA Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games: Literary and Archaeological Evidence Combined — KATHERINE FORSYTH AND MARK A. HALL ‘Turne Over the Leef’: Games and Interpretation on Misericords — PAUL HARDWICK Gambling Miners — LENA ASRIH AND JENNIFER GARNER Chess and Cultural Crossings in Boccaccio — AKASH KUMAR Visualizing Chess and Love in Les Eschéz d’Amours — DANIEL E. O’SULLIVAN Game as a Sign of Social Status: Backgammon in the Ottoman Literature and Visual Culture — TÜLÜN DEĞIRMENCI Chess of the Gnostics: The Sufi Version of Snakes and Ladders in Turkey and India — İRVIN CEMIL SCHICK Playthings: Ivory on Ivory — ELINA GERTSMAN The Playing Eye: On the Transfer of Game-related Knowledge through Miniatures in Alfonso X’s Book of Games (1283/84) — MICHAEL A. CONRAD Children’s Toys in Italy, 1350–1550 — ANNEMARIEKE WILLEMSEN The Printed Book and the Visual Culture of Chess in the Late Middle Ages: William Caxton’s 1483 Edition of The Game and Playe of Chess — LOUISE FANG Graffiti as Gaming: Vikings at Play in the Orkney Islands — JULIE MELL Scratching the Surface: Graffiti Games in the Byzantine Empire — WALTER CRIST

On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World

Kathryn Ciancia. On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World. Oxford University Press, 2020.

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish. Over the next two decades, these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of global civilization-in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized-within the borders of their supposedly anti-imperial nation-state. As state institutions remained fragile, long-debated questions of who should be included in the nation re-emerged with new urgency, turning Volhynia’s mainly Yiddish-speaking towns and Ukrainian-speaking villages into vital testing grounds for competing Polish national visions. By the eve of World War II, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union growing in strength, schemes to ensure the loyalty of Jews and Ukrainians by offering them a conditional place in the nation were replaced by increasingly aggressive calls for Jewish emigration and the assimilation of non-Polish Slavs. Drawing on research in local and national archives across four countries and utilizing a vast range of written and visual sources that bring Volhynia to life, On Civilization’s Edge offers a highly intimate story of nation-building from the ground up. We eavesdrop on peasant rumors at the Polish-Soviet border, read ethnographic descriptions of isolated marshlands, and scrutinize staged photographs of everyday life. But the book’s central questions transcend the Polish case, inviting us to consider how fears of national weakness and competitions for local power affect the treatment of national minorities, how more inclusive definitions of the nation are themselves based on exclusions, and how the very distinction between empires and nation-states is not always clear-cut.

Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II

Francine Hirsch. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Byzantine Gender

Leonora Neville. Byzantine Gender. ARC Humanities Press, 2019.

Why were virtuous Byzantine women described as manly? Why were boys’ bodies thought to be closer in constitution to those of women than adult men? Did Byzantines think eunuchs were men? This lively and personal book explains some key aspects of how people of the Medieval Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) conceived of men and women, masculinity and femininity, and proper behaviour for men and women. By laying bare fundamental ideas about how gender was defined and performed, Byzantine Gender enables readers to understand Byzantine society more fully. And by providing background information about Byzantine gender, it makes it easier to approach and appreciate the fascinating otherness of Byzantine culture.

A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe

Giuliana Chamedes. A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe. Harvard University Press, 2019.

Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and Marraro Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association The first comprehensive history of the Vatican’s agenda to defeat the forces of secular liberalism and communism through international law, cultural diplomacy, and a marriage of convenience with authoritarian and right-wing rulers. After the United States entered World War I and the Russian Revolution exploded, the Vatican felt threatened by forces eager to reorganize the European international order and cast the Church out of the public sphere. In response, the papacy partnered with fascist and right-wing states as part of a broader crusade that made use of international law and cultural diplomacy to protect European countries from both liberal and socialist taint. A Twentieth-Century Crusade reveals that papal officials opposed Woodrow Wilson’s international liberal agenda by pressing governments to sign concordats assuring state protection of the Church in exchange for support from the masses of Catholic citizens. These agreements were implemented in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, as well as in countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. In tandem, the papacy forged a Catholic International—a political and diplomatic foil to the Communist International—which spread a militant anticommunist message through grassroots organizations and new media outlets. It also suppressed Catholic antifascist tendencies, even within the Holy See itself. Following World War II, the Church attempted to mute its role in strengthening fascist states, as it worked to advance its agenda in partnership with Christian Democratic parties and a generation of Cold War warriors. The papal mission came under fire after Vatican II, as Church-state ties weakened and antiliberalism and anticommunism lost their appeal. But—as Giuliana Chamedes shows in her groundbreaking exploration—by this point, the Vatican had already made a lasting mark on Eastern and Western European law, culture, and society.

Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing

Leonora Neville. Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

This handy reference guide makes it easier to access and understand histories written in Greek between 600 and 1480 CE. Covering classicizing histories that continued ancient Greek traditions of historiography, sweeping, fast-paced ‘chronicle’ type histories, and dozens of idiosyncratic historical texts, it distills the results of complex, multi-lingual, specialist scholarship into clear explanations of the basic information needed to approach each medieval Greek history. It provides a sound basis for further research on each text by describing what we know about the time of composition, content covered by the history, authorship, extant manuscripts, previous editions and translations, and basic bibliography. Even-handed explanations of scholarly debates give readers the information they need to assess controversies independently. A comprehensive introduction orients students and non-specialists to the traditions and methods of Byzantine historical writing. It will prove an invaluable timesaver for Byzantinists and an essential entry point for classicists, western medievalists, and students.

Morale: A Modern British History

Daniel Ussishkin. Morale: A Modern British History. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Arguably no nation is as closely associated with the term morale as Great Britain. Yet this concept that seems so innate to the British people was carefully cultivated within many spheres of modern national life. In this first critical history of morale, Daniel Ussishkin asks how is it that modern Britons have come to regard morale as a category of conduct, vital for the success of collective effort in war and peace, and a mark of good, modern, and human managerial practice, appropriate for a democratic age. He narrates the intellectual, cultural, and institutional history of morale in modern imperial Britain: its emergence as a new concept during the long nineteenth century, its changing meanings and significations, and the social and political goals those who discussed, observed, or managed morale sought to achieve. Formalized as a new military disciplinary problem during the long nineteenth century, morale came to permeate nearly every civilian sphere of life during the era of the two world wars as a new way of managing human conduct. This book traces how it gradually emerged from a problem that was regarded as residual at best to one that was seen as the epitome of proper managerial practice, its institutional manifestations and promotion by myriad organizations and the social-democratic state, and its emergence as a potent political concept from Britain’s social-democratic moment until the ascendancy of the New Right. Daniel Ussishkin’s Morale tells the history of concept central to the management of war, business, and civic society not just in Britain but in modern culture writ large.

Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens

Claire Taylor. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Examines not only the discourses surrounding poverty, but also the well-being of those categorized as poor and their experiences of poverty Provides a critical reassessment of poverty in the ancient world which is in line with contemporary research within the social sciences Develops a methodology which includes women, slaves, and foreigners as well as male citizens in discussion of poverty and well-being Brings together literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence to examine alternate modes of expression among non-elites in Athens

The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources

Elizabeth Lapina (Co-editor), and Nicholas Morton (Co-editor). The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources. Brill, 2017.

The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources sets out to understand the ideology and spirituality of crusading by exploring the biblical imagery and exegetical interpretations which formed its philosophical basis. Medieval authors frequently drew upon scripture when seeking to justify, praise, or censure the deeds of crusading warriors on many frontiers. After all, as the fundamental written manifestation of God’s will for mankind, the Bible was the ultimate authority for contemporary writers when advancing their ideas and framing their world view. This volume explores a broad spectrum of biblically-derived themes surrounding crusading and, by doing so, seeks to better comprehend a thought world in which lethal violence could be deemed justifiable according to Christian theology. Contributors are: Jessalynn Bird, Adam M. Bishop, John D. Cotts, Sini Kangas, Thomas Lecaque, T. J. H. McCarthy, Nicholas Morton, Torben Kjersgaard Nielsen, Luigi Russo, Uri Shachar, Iris Shagrir, Kristin Skottki, Katherine Allen Smith, Thomas W. Smith, Carol Sweetenham, Miriam Rita Tessera, Jan Vandeburie, Julian J. T. Yolles, and Lydia Marie Walker.

Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian

Leonora Neville. Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture First book devoted to understanding Anna Komnene since 1929, and the first ever to systematically examine how she presents herself in the Alexiad Offers a systematic explanation of the relationship between Anna’s gender and her writing Brings the life and work of a major, but understudied, medieval female author to a wide audience

The Crusades and Visual Culture

Elizabeth Lapina (Co-editor), April Jehan Morris (Co-editor), Laura J Whatley (Co-editor), and Susanna A. Throop (Co-editor). The Crusades and Visual Culture. Ashgate, 2015.

The crusades, whether realized or merely planned, had a profound impact on medieval and early modern societies. Numerous scholars in the fields of history and literature have explored the influence of crusading ideas, values, aspirations and anxieties in both the Latin States and Europe. However, there have been few studies dedicated to investigating how the crusading movement influenced and was reflected in medieval visual cultures. Written by scholars from around the world working in the domains of art history and history, the essays in this volume examine the ways in which ideas of crusading were realized in a broad variety of media (including manuscripts, cartography, sculpture, mural paintings, and metalwork). Arguing implicitly for recognition of the conceptual frameworks of crusades that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, the volume explores the pervasive influence and diverse expression of the crusading movement from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.

Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003

Richard C. Keller. Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award, 2015 In a cemetery on the southern outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of nearly a hundred of what some have called the first casualties of global climate change. They were the so-called abandoned victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck in August 2003, leaving 15,000 dead. They died alone in Paris and its suburbs, and were then buried at public expense, their bodies unclaimed. They died, and to a great extent lived, unnoticed by their neighbors–their bodies undiscovered in some cases until weeks after their deaths. Fatal Isolation tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the multiple narratives of disaster–the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the life stories of the individual victims, which both illuminate and challenge the ways we typically perceive natural disasters; and the scientific understandings of disaster and its management. Fatal Isolation is both a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape and a story of how a city copes with emerging threats and sudden, dramatic change.

Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World

Claire Taylor (Co-editor), and Kostas Vlassopoulos (Co-editor). Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

This volume examines the diversity of networks and communities in the classical and early Hellenistic Greek world, with particular emphasis on those which took shape within and around Athens. In doing so it highlights not only the processes that created, modified, and dissolved these communities, but shines a light on the interactions through which individuals with different statuses, identities, levels of wealth, and connectivity participated in ancient society. By drawing on two distinct conceptual approaches, that of network studies and that of community formation, Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World showcases a variety of approaches which fall under the umbrella of ‘network thinking’ in order to move the study of ancient Greek history beyond structuralist polarities and functionalist explanations. The aim is to reconceptualize the polis not simply as a citizen club, but as one inter-linked community amongst many. This allows subaltern groups to be seen not just as passive objects of exclusion and exploitation but active historical agents, emphasizes the processes of interaction as well as the institutions created through them, and reveals the interpenetration between public institutions and private networks which integrated different communities within the borders of a polis and connected them with the wider world.

Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade

Elizabeth Lapina. Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade. Penn State University Press, 2015.

In Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade, Elizabeth Lapina examines a variety of these chronicles, written both by participants in the crusade and by those who stayed behind. Her goal is to understand the enterprise from the perspective of its contemporaries and near contemporaries. Lapina analyzes the diversity of ways in which the chroniclers tried to justify the First Crusade as a “holy war,” where physical violence could be not just sinless, but salvific. The book focuses on accounts of miracles reported to have happened in the course of the crusade, especially the miracle of the intervention of saints in the Battle of Antioch. Lapina shows why and how chroniclers used these miracles to provide historical precedent and to reconcile the messiness of history with the conviction that history was ordered by divine will. In doing so, she provides an important glimpse into the intellectual efforts of the chronicles and their authors, illuminating their perspectives toward the concepts of history, salvation, and the East. Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade demonstrates how these narratives sought to position the crusade as an event in the time line of sacred history. Lapina offers original insights into the effects of the crusade on the Western imaginary as well as how medieval authors thought about and represented history.

Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios

Leonora Neville. Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Nikephoros Bryennios’ history of the Byzantine Empire in the 1070s is a story of civil war and aristocratic rebellion in the midst of the Turkish conquest of Anatolia. Commonly remembered as the passive and unambitious husband of Princess Anna Komnene (author of the Alexiad), Bryennios is revealed as a skilled author whose history draws on cultural memories of classical Roman honor and proper masculinity to evaluate the politicians of the 1070s and implicitly to exhort his twelfth-century contemporaries to honorable behavior. Bryennios’ story valorizes the memory of his grandfather and other honorable, but failed, generals of the eleventh century while subtly portraying the victorious Alexios Komnenos as un-Roman. This reading of the Material for History sheds new light on twelfth-century Byzantine culture and politics, especially the contested accession of John Komnenos, the relationship between Bryennios’ history and the Alexiad and the function of cultural memories of Roman honor in Byzantium.

Ancient Graffiti in Context

Claire Taylor (Co-editor), and J.A. Baird (Co-editor). Ancient Graffiti in Context. London & New York: Routledge, 2012.

Graffiti are ubiquitous within the ancient world, but remain underexploited as a form of archaeological or historical evidence. They include a great variety of texts and images written or drawn inside and outside buildings, in public and private places, on monuments in the city, on objects used in daily life, and on mountains in the countryside. In each case they can be seen as actively engaging with their environment in a variety of ways. Ancient Graffiti in Context interrogates this cultural phenomenon and by doing so, brings it into the mainstream of ancient history and archaeology. Focusing on different approaches to and interpretations of graffiti from a variety of sites and chronological contexts, Baird and Taylor pose a series of questions not previously asked of this evidence, such as: What are graffiti, and how can we interpret them? In what ways, and with whom, do graffiti communicate? To what extent do graffiti represent or subvert the cultural values of the society in which they occur? By comparing themes across time and space, and viewing graffiti in context, this book provides a series of interpretative strategies for scholars and students of the ancient world. As such it will be essential reading for Classical archaeologists and historians alike.

Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject

Karl Shoemaker. Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject. University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.

How do we select those who will be subject to capital punishment? How do we identify the worst of the worst and decide who among them can and should be executed? Today these questions are more pressing than they have ever been. As the number of people sentenced to death and executed declines in the United States, those who are executed stand out as distinctive kinds of criminals, distinctive kinds of people. Does a death sentence affirm or deny their humanity? Is such a sentence an act of revenge or a carefully calculated act of justice? These are more than questions for policy and law. They are one way of getting a handle on how our culture understands what makes life worth preserving and of delving into its complex calculus of punishment and retribution. Who Deserves to Die? brings together a distinguished group of death penalty scholars to assess the forms of legal subjectivity and legal community that are supported and constructed by the doctrines and practices of punishment by death in the United States. They help us understand what we do and who we become when we decide who is fit for execution.

Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500

Karl Shoemaker. Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500. Fordham University Press, 2011.

Sanctuary and Crime rethinks the history of sanctuary protections in the Western legal tradition. Until the sixteenth century, every major medieval legal tradition afforded protections to fugitive criminals who took sanctuary in churches. Sanctuary-seeking criminals might have been required to perform penance or go into exile, but they were guaranteed, at least in principle, immunity from corporal and capital punishment. In the sixteenth century, sanctuary protections were abolished throughout Europe, uprooting an ancient tradition and raising a new set of juridical arguments about law, crime and the power to punish. Sanctuary law has not received very much scholarly attention. According to the prevailing explanation among earlier generations of legal historians, sanctuary was an impediment to effective criminal law and social control, but was made necessary by rampant violence and weak political order in the medieval world. Contrary to the conclusions of the relatively scant literature on the topic, Sanctuary and Crime argues that the practice of sanctuary was not simply an instrumental device intended as a response to weak and splintered medieval political authority. Nor can sanctuary laws be explained as simple ameliorative responses to harsh medieval punishments and the specter of uncontrolled blood-feuds. This book seeks to integrate the history of sanctuary law with the history of criminal law in medieval Europe. It does so by first situating sanctuary law within the early Christian traditions of intercession and penance as well as late-imperial Roman law. The book then traces the transmission of Romano-Christian sanctuary legislation into the feuding traditions of early medieval Europe, showing how sanctuary law was an important emblem of Christian kingship and was integrated into a broad range of social, legal, ecclesiastical and political practices. By the late twelfth-century, sanctuary had been domesticated within the procedures of royal law in England. Unmoored from its taproots in penitential and intercessory practices, sanctuary became a central feature of the emergent law of felony in the early English common law. While sanctuary was widely recognized throughout late medieval Europe, medieval English records provide rich accounts of sanctuary in everyday medieval life and the book reflects the prominence of the English sources. The book concludes by examining the legal arguments in both English and Roman-canonical legal traditions that led to the restriction and abolition of sanctuary privileges in the sixteenth-century and which ushered in a new age of criminal law grounded in deterrence and a state-centered view of punishment and social control.

Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités Une comparaison Angleterre, États-Unis et France

Richard C. Keller (Editor), Robert Dingwall (Editor), and Carine Vassy (Editor). Enregistrer Les Morts, Identifier Les surmortalités Une Comparaison Angleterre, États-Unis Et France. Presses de l’EHESP, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique, 2010.

La canicule de 2003, qui a tué 15 000 personnes en France sans que cette surmortalité ait été identifiée rapidement, a suscité des interrogations sur la capacité des pouvoirs publics à dénombrer les morts avec exactitude, à détecter les crises sanitaires et à prévenir l’apparition de drames semblables. Comment enregistre-t-on les morts ? Quelles sont les informations que l’on cherche ainsi à obtenir et dans quels buts ?Pour répondre à ces questions, qui se posent dans tous les pays industrialisés, quatre sociologues et un historien se sont intéressés aux modalités d’enregistrement de la mortalité en Angleterre, aux États-Unis et en France. Leur étude montre que ces modalités reflètent des choix de société, plus ou moins anciens, qui diffèrent d’un pays à l’autre. Pourquoi les Français sont-ils obsédés par la confidentialité des causes de la mort ? Pourquoi les Anglais pratiquent-ils vingt fois plus d’autopsies qu’en France ? Comment les Américains inscrivent-ils l’enregistrement des morts dans la lutte contre le terrorisme ? En principe, les trois pays produisent des données de mortalité similaires, susceptibles de faire l’objet de comparaisons internationales. En pratique, les modes de construction de l’information sont très variables, et les préoccupations de santé publique sont loin d’être prioritaires.

Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa

Richard C. Keller. Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship. Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.

Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union

Francine Hirsch. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press, 2005.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR’s internal borders, led expeditions to study “the human being as a productive force,” and created ethnographic exhibits about the “Peoples of the USSR.” In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100

Leonora Neville. Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Acting essentially to maintain power and collect taxes, the emperors of the Byzantine Empire (ca. 950-1100) did not attempt to govern provincial society. As a result, provincial households took advantage of this situation by competing for local control over each other whenever they could. This book describes the power-holders in the central provinces in a detailed comparison of the provincial strength of the imperial government and the mechanics of local authority.

United Government and Russian Foreign Policy, 1900-1914

David McDonald. United Government and Russian Foreign Policy, 1900-1914. Harvard University Press, 1992.

In 1904 a small, distant war brought Russia to the brink of internal collapse – and yet within ten years the country embroiled itself in an incomparably larger conflict close to home. How the war with Japan and its aftermath actually steered Russia toward such an unlikely, fateful decision is the subject of David McDonald’s book, an analysis of Russian foreign policy on the eve of World War I. The revolutions that followed the Russo-Japanese War confirmed Russian statesmen in their belief that complications abroad threatened the domestic order. McDonald shows how this perceived connection prompted the institutional measures intended to minimize the risks of foreign entanglements, principally the reform of the Council of Ministers as a “United Government” that would share the emperor’s role in forming foreign policy. These measures, as McDonald demonstrates, had a decisive effect on Russia’s restrained response to trouble in the Balkans, and consequently, on the course of world history. McDonald’s analysis integrates the history of Russian foreign policy at this critical juncture with accounts of the “crisis of autocracy” that marked the early 20th century. Depicting Nicholas II’s struggle with his ministers over the direction of foreign policy, the book offers insight into the evaluation of the bureaucratic state and its relation to domestic society in late imperial Russia.