Justice for jehanne

A spellbinding narrative history that defies modern assumptions about women’s lives in the Middle Ages and informs contemporary debates about sexual violence and the limits of justiceIn the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s or...

The west

A comprehensive intellectual history of the idea of the WestHow did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin to refer to themselves in this way? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined...

Empires in world history

How empires have used diversity to shape the world order for more than two millenniaEmpires—vast states of territories and peoples united by force and ambition—have dominated the political landscape for more than two millennia. Empires in World History departs from conventional European and natio...

Michelangelo, god's architect

The untold story of Michelangelo’s final decades—and his transformation into the master architect of St. Peter’s BasilicaAs he entered his seventies, Michelangelo despaired that his productive years were over. Anguished by the death of friends and discouraged by the loss of commissions to younger...

Waiting for godot

Now coming to Broadway, starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter and directed by Tony and Olivier Award-winner Jamie Lloyd, Samuel Beckett's indelible masterpiece, an unwavering testament to what it means to be humanFrom an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, fo...

A woman is responsible for everything

A groundbreaking look at the integral role of women in early modern Jewish communal lifeIn small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in the daily life of their communities, managing homes and professions, le...

They called it peace

A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empiresImperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a p...

The world at first light

A magisterial history of the Renaissance and the birth of the modern worldThe cultural epoch we know as the Renaissance emerged at a certain time and in a certain place. Why then and not earlier? Why there and not elsewhere? In The World at First Light, historian Bernd Roeck explores the cultural...

Liquid empire

A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of waterIn the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savan...

From caligari to hitler

An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticismFirst published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an undisputed landmark study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. Prominent film critic Siegfried Kracauer examines Germ...

The machiavellian moment

Originally published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment remains a landmark of historical and political thought. Celebrated historian J.G.A. Pocock looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and ot...

The last invasion of england

An electrifying narrative history that reframes Britain’s constitutional revolution as a full-scale Dutch invasionIn popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife of J...

Cold war city

The untold story of West Berlin, the island city deep inside the Soviet bloc that withstood the decades-long confrontation between the USSR and the WestLocated more than one hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain, West Berlin served as a stage on which the confrontation between nuclear-armed super...

Venice and the mongols

A global history of commercial and cultural exchange between two great powers of the medieval ageIn the mid-thirteenth century, Europe was shaken by the Mongol invasions. Realizing the immense potential for accessing remote markets in the East, Venetian merchants, diplomats, and seafarers establi...

The making of the medieval middle east

A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the storyIn the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in mot...

How to focus

How you can learn to focus like a monk without living like oneDistraction isn’t a new problem. We’re also not the first to complain about how hard it is to concentrate. Early Christian monks beat us to it. They had given up everything to focus on God, yet they still struggled to keep the demons o...

Rules

A panoramic history of rules in the Western worldRules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe un...

The last embassy

From the acclaimed author of The Gunpowder Age, a book that casts new light on the history of China and the West at the turn of the nineteenth centuryGeorge Macartney's disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing narrative of modern Sino-European relations. Summarily d...

The gramscian moment

Though claimed by disparate schools of thought, Peter Thomas shows Gramsci is best understood as deepening the classical Marxist tradition.

A culture of growth

From Nobel Prize–winning economist Joel Mokyr, a revealing look at why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial RevolutionDuring the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much ...

Architectural styles

A hand-drawn guide to architectural styles throughout historyArchitectural Styles is an incomparable guide to architectural styles across the centuries and around the world. Modeled after an architect's plein air sketchbook, the volume features hundreds of detailed drawings by esteemed architectu...

Scale and the incas

A groundbreaking work on how the topic of scale provides an entirely new understanding of Inca material cultureAlthough questions of form and style are fundamental to art history, the issue of scale has been surprisingly neglected. Yet, scale and scaled relationships are essential to the visual c...

A medieval book of beasts

Text, translation, and critical study of one of the most important medieval bestiaries.The bestiary - a book of animals, both real and mythical - is one of the most interesting and appealing medieval artefacts. The "Second-family" bestiary is the most important and frequently produced version (s...

Endgame and act without words

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is cons...

The first emancipation

A new history of slavery and the French RevolutionThe First Emancipation is a dramatic account of how slavery and race profoundly influenced the course of the French Revolution and had a central impact on the lives of key leaders, including Mirabeau, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleo...

The people’s justice

A major new interpretation of the French Revolution that brings to life the criminal tribunals at the heart of the Republic’s political culture In The People’s Justice, Carla Hesse offers a sweeping reappraisal of political violence in the French Revolution. From Charles Dickens to Hannah Arendt,...

In the scholar’s workshop

The hidden hands behind history’s great scholarly worksFor centuries, many of the world’s most influential thinkers routinely relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying. In the Scholar’s Workshop introduces readers to these...

The scandinavian home

A wide-ranging study of the intertwined notions of home and homeland that were central to the art and material culture of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the second half of the nineteenth century.The arts played a crucial role in reinforcing a shared sense of belonging amongst Nordic coun...

Dissimilar similitudes

From an acclaimed historian, a mesmerizing account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objectsBetween the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, European Christians used a plethora of objects in worship, not only prayer books, statues, and paintings but als...

Masada

The dramatic story of the last stand of a group of Jewish rebels who held out against the Roman Empire, as revealed by the archaeology of its famous siteTwo thousand years ago, 967 Jewish men, women, and children—the last holdouts of the revolt against Rome following the fall of Jerusalem and the...

Catholic spectacle and rome's jews

A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscapeStarting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed,...

The fate of rome

How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient worldHere is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the ...

A velvet empire

How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth centuryAfter Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. A Velvet Empire is a global hist...

Bukovina

The making and remaking of Bukovina, a disputed Eastern European borderland, from the eighteenth century to the present dayBukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing...

Weimar germany

The definitive history of Weimar politics, culture, and societyA New York Times Book Review Editor’s ChoiceA Financial Times Best Book of the YearThoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated, Weimar Germany brings to life an era of unmatched creativity in the twentieth ce...

Ideas for the philosophy of the history of mankind

One of the most important works of the Enlightenment—in the first new, unabridged English translation in more than two centuriesPublished in four volumes between 1784 and 1791, Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind is one of the most important works of the Enlightenment—a bo...

The aphorisms of franz kafka

A splendid new translation of an extraordinary work of modern literature—featuring facing-page commentary by Kafka’s acclaimed biographerIn 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of more than 100 aphorisms, known as the Zürau aphorisms, after the Bohemian village in which he composed them. Among ...

The perils of interpreting

A fascinating history of China’s relations with the West—told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translatorsThe 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney’s fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East...

A thirst for empire

How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerismTea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. For centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—i...

A history of art history

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicamentsIn this authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher S. Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly disc...

Art history 101 . . . without the exams

A millennia of art history condensed into 20 accessible chapters

Blue

A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color blue throughout the agesBlue has had a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now cite it as their favorite color. In this fascinatin...

Contact: art and the pull of print

A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of printIn process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an...

The world of mucha

A collection of Mucha’s romantic art, including 370 decorative paintings and his masterpiece, the 'Slav Epic.'

On weaving

The classic book on the art and history of weaving—now expanded and in full colorWritten by one of the twentieth century’s leading textile artists, this splendidly illustrated book is a luminous meditation on the art of weaving, its history, its tools and techniques, and its implications for mode...

George barbier

Proving woman

Around the year 1215, female mystics and their sacramental devotion were among orthodoxy's most sophisticated weapons in the fight against heresy. Holy women's claims to be in direct communication with God placed them in positions of unprecedented influence. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages fema...

The age of social democracy

A history of how Norway and Sweden became the envy of the modern worldThis is the history of how two countries on the northern edge of Europe built societies in the twentieth century that became objects of inspiration and envy around the world. Francis Sejersted, one of Scandinavia's leading hist...