European Studies: French Studies (19)

• European Studies: French Studies
• Philosophy
• Science: History of Science
• Women and Gender Studies

Science in the Salon: Atoms and Animals in Madeleine de Scudéry’s 'Conversations' (1680–92): An Essay and Translation

• Helena Taylor

Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) was a celebrated seventeenth-century novelist and essayist, yet her engagement with natural philosophy and the sciences has been largely overlooked. This volume presents the first English translation of 'The Story of Two Chameleons' (1688) and situates it within Scudéry’s broader scientific and philosophical writing. Beyond this seminal text, the book explores her reflections on atomism, natural history, and epistemology, revealing her critical engagement with cutting-edge theories of her time, including a challenge to the Cartesian ‘animal-machine’ hypothesis.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature
• Philosophy

Sensing Violence: Reading with the Marquis de Sade

• Will McMorran

What does reading fictional violence do to us as readers? To find out, this provocative and original book turns to the works of an author synonymous with sexual violence: the Marquis de Sade. Drawing on psychology, cognitive literary studies, and empirical research, it argues that reading is a fundamentally embodied act – and one that implicates us far more than we might like to think in fictional depictions of violence.

• European Studies: French Studies
• Theatre

Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité

• Pauline Beaucé
• Jeffrey M. Leichman

Les théâtres du passé : des théâtres virtuels ? C’est une des questions passionnantes explorée dans ce livre par des chercheurs et chercheuses en littérature, musicologie, histoire, études théâtrales, histoire de l’art, architecture et sciences du numérique. Ces Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité proposent de relever un défi épistémologique autour de la notion de virtuel pour la recherche en histoire du théâtre en engageant différents formats de réflexion : entretiens, articles multimédia, brèves de méthodologie, exposition virtuelle.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature
• Women and Gender Studies

Destins de femmes: French Women Writers, 1750-1850

• John Claiborne Isbell

Destins de femmes is the first comprehensive overview of French women writers during the turbulent period of 1750-1850. John Isbell provides an essential collection that illuminates the impact women writers had on French literature and politics during a time marked by three revolutions, the influx of Romantic art, and rapid technological change.

• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

Reading the Juggler of Notre Dame: Medieval Miracles and Modern Remakings

• Jan M. Ziolkowski

In this two-part anthology, Jan M. Ziolkowski builds on themes uncovered in his earlier The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Here he focuses particularly on the performing arts.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature
• Philosophy

'The Philosophes' by Charles Palissot

• Jessica Goodman
• Olivier Ferret

This masterful and highly accessible translation of Les Philosophes opens up this polemical text to a non-specialist audience. It will be a valuable resource to non-Francophone scholars and students working on the philosophical exchanges of the Enlightenment.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Philosophy

The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie'

• Caroline Warman

The Atheist’s Bible challenges prevailing scholarly views on Diderot’s Éléments, asserting its contemporary philosophical importance, and prompting its readers to inspect more closely this little-known and little-studied work. This book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (1823), a work which, Warman argues, represents the first publication of Diderot’s Éléments, long before its official publication date of 1875.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 6: War and Peace, Sex and Violence

• Jan M. Ziolkowski

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 5: Tumbling into the Twentieth Century

• Jan M. Ziolkowski

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 4: Picture That: Making a Show of the Jongleur

• Jan M. Ziolkowski

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3: The American Middle Ages

• Jan M. Ziolkowski

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism

• Jan M. Ziolkowski

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1: The Middle Ages

• Jan M. Ziolkowski

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Philosophy

Denis Diderot 'Rameau's Nephew' - 'Le Neveu de Rameau': A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition

• Denis Diderot
• Marian Hobson
• Kate E. Tunstall
• Caroline Warman

Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew has achieved a literary-philosophical status that no other work by Diderot shares. This interactive, multi-media edition offers not only a brand new translation of Diderot's famous dialogue but provides portraits and biographies of the numerous individuals mentioned in the text, allowing a window onto the complex social and political context that forms the backdrop to the dialogue. Links to musical pieces selected by Pascal Duc and performed by students of the Conservatoire nationale de musique, Paris, illuminate the wider musical context of the work, enlarging it far beyond its now widely understood relation to opéra comique.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Philosophy

Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment

• Caroline Warman
• Caroline Warman

This anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. First published by the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values, Tolerance has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• History

On History: Introduction to World History (1831); Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters, 9 January 1834; Preface to History of France (1869)

• Jules Michelet
• Lionel Gossman
• Edward K. Kaplan
• Flora Kimmich

One of the great Romantic historians, Jules Michelet served as a model and inspiration for the founders of the influential Annales school in France. This volume, consisting of three programmatic essays by Michelet with an introduction by Lionel Gossman, offers Anglophone historians a sense of this important historian’s worldview and the values underlying all his historiographical work. Taken together, the three texts can be read as a kind of manifesto of Romantic historiography, laying out a grand vision of history, what it means, why it matters, and why it is important for historians to have a lively sense of it.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

Bourdieu and Literature

• John R.W. Speller

One of the foremost French intellectuals of the post-war era, Bourdieu has become a standard point of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics and sociology, but his long-standing interest in literature has often been overlooked. The first full-length study of Bourdieu’s work on literature in English, this book is a wide-ranging, rigorous and accessible introduction to the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu’s work and literary studies. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of his contributions to literary theory and his thinking about authors and literary works.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Literature

Les Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell: Études réunies par Murielle Lucie Clément

• Murielle Lucie Clément

Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), caused a literary sensation in 2006. Described as ‘deliberately repellent’ by the New York Times, Jonathan Littell’s novel tells the story of World War II through the eyes of former SS officer Maximilien Aue. In the first academic study of this controversial best-seller, twenty-one leading scholars discuss the aesthetics, themes and characters of the novel, as well as formal aspects of Littell’s writing. Offering a highly varied range of approaches, they tackle ideas around parricide, genocide, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, as well as Littell’s portrayal of historical and fictional characters.

• Anthropology
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• History

The American Archipelago: A New Edition of Oscar Handlin’s Classic Anthology, 'This Was America'

• Oscar Handlin
• Kenneth Weisbrode

FORTHCOMING

The collection at hand, Handlin’s classic anthology 'This Was America', first published in 1949, gathers Europeans’ travel accounts and perspectives on America from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Rather than presenting a single narrative, Handlin emphasizes variety: contrasting impressions of liberty and inequality, restlessness and rootedness, optimism and critique by people arriving from diverse European backgrounds. His free translations and selective introductions guide readers subtly but leave interpretation open. Over time, these essays shift meaning depending on context—once read as a celebration of American life, they now invite more critical reflection. This new edition reimagines America not as a singular whole but as an “archipelago”: a collection of diverse experiences, perceptions, and contradictions. The metaphor underscores the interplay between unity and multiplicity in American identity.