New Books in Iberian Studies

著者: New Books Network
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  • Interviews with scholars of Iberia about their new books
    New Books Network
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Interviews with scholars of Iberia about their new books
New Books Network
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  • Hartley Lachter, "Kabbalah and Catastrophe: Historical Memory in Premodern Jewish Mysticism" (Stanford UP, 2024)
    2024/12/21
    While premodern kabbalistic texts were not chronicles of historical events, they provided elaborate models for understanding the secret divine plan guiding human affairs. Hartley Lachter analyzes innovative kabbalistic doctrines, such as the idea of reincarnation and the notion of multiple successive universes, through which Jewish mystics sought to demonstrate that the misfortunes of Jewish history were in fact necessary steps toward redemption. Lachter argues that these works, mostly composed between the early 14th century and the generation affected by the Spanish expulsion in the early 16th century, enabled Jewish readers to make sense of the troubling misfortunes of their own time. Kabbalah and Catastrophe: Historical Memory in Premodern Jewish Mysticism (Stanford UP, 2024) uncovers the remarkable variety of ways that kabbalists deployed esoteric tradition to argue that God had not abandoned the Jews to the inscrutable forces of history. Instead, they suggested to readers that Jews are history's primary actors, and that despite their small numbers and lack of military power, Jews nonetheless secretly push history forward. For scholars of Jewish mysticism and medieval Jewish history, Lachter articulates how premodern mystical texts can be crucial sources of insight into how Jews understood the meaning of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    45 分
  • Jan Machielsen, "The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
    2024/12/20
    In June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd. In four months, they executed up to 80 women and men for the crime of witchcraft, causing a wave of suspects to flee into Spain and sparking terror there. Witnesses, many of them children, described lurid tales of cannibalism, vampirism, and demonic sex. One of the judges, Pierre de Lancre, published a sensationalist account of this diabolical netherworld. With other accounts seemingly destroyed, this witch-hunt – France's largest – has always been seen through de Lancre's eyes. The narrative, re-told over the centuries, is that of a witch-hunt caused by a bigoted outsider. Newly discovered evidence paints a very different, still darker picture, revealing a secret history underneath de Lancre's well-known tale. Far from an outside imposition, witchcraft was a home-grown problem. Panic had been building up over a number of years and the region was fractured by factionalism and a struggle over scarce resources. The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Jan Machielsen reveals that de Lancre was no outsider; he was a local partisan, married into the Basque nobility. Living at the Franco-Spanish border, the Basques were victims of geography. Geo-politics caused a local conflict which made the witch-hunt inevitable. The same forces eventually sent thousands of religious refugees from Spain to France where they, in turn, became new objects of popular fear and anger. The Basque witch-hunt is justly infamous. This book shows that almost everything historians thought they knew about it is wrong. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    50 分
  • Susan Gaunt Stearns. "Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade" (U Virginia Press, 2024)
    2024/12/09
    Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism. In Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade (University of Virginia Press, 2024), Dr. Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States’ untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Dr. Stearns’s perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments—the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase—and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 3 分

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