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Europe in the Eleventh Century: Beyond Revolution and Reform with Charles West (Oxford UP, 2025)
Eleventh-century Europe was diverse and fast-changing. Historians have often debated this change through two sets of competing arguments, one about the shifting role of the Church and the Papacy, and the other about the rise of castellan lords and a proliferation in violence. Yet these arguments about 'Church Reform' and 'Feudal Revolution' only really apply to one part of Europe, the Latin West.
Europe in the Eleventh Century: Beyond Revolution and Reform (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Professor Charles West takes its cue from contemporary perceptions of Europe, and includes Byzantium (or East Rome) and Muslim al-Andalus in scope. In doing so, it presents a new perspective on Europe in the period. Its chapters assess different scales of action and interaction within this wide space. They take from the reader from the peasants living in small village settlements, via the great city of Constantinople, the taifa emirates, kingdoms from Ireland to Hungary, and the two universal empires, up to contemporary ideas, cosmologies, and representations of the wider world.
Viewed in this broad setting, the Latin West's remarkable expansion during this period, dramatically illustrated by the First Crusade at the century's end, can best be understood as the poorly controlled overspilling of internal dynamics, as the established public order was disrupted. Elsewhere in Europe, existing structures proved more resilient and better able to accommodate internal economic and social development, though remaining vulnerable to aggression from outside.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
9 Oct 2026
Tyrants and Traders: Tintagel, Arthur and the Lost Kings with Ken Dark (Bloomsbury, 2026)
How Roman Britain ended is one of the most controversial questions in British history. Unique among former Roman citizens in Western Europe, the Britons established long-lived kingdoms, resisting 'barbarian' political takeover for centuries. Yet so little is known of them from written records that even the names of most of their kings are effectively lost to history.
Packed with the latest discoveries and ground-breaking research, in Tyrants and Traders: Tintagel, Arthur and the Lost Kings (Bloomsbury, 2026) Professor Ken Dark brings the fascinating, but mysterious, world of these rulers and their kingdoms to life. Archaeological evidence, along with re-analysis of the few existing texts, reveals an unexpectedly sophisticated society, connected to a wider international network of trade and cultural contacts than might until recently have seemed imaginable. Professor Dark demonstrates through the latest archaeological discoveries that Tintagel – an eroded coastal stronghold in Cornwall, closely associated with the later legend of King Arthur – was a royal fortress and trading centre of one of the most important British kingdoms of this period.
This is a historical period filled with memorable characters and stories: from the outraged churchman Gildas, attempting to reform the corrupt rulers he thought threatened civilized life itself, to St. Patrick, who played a major part in converting Ireland to Christianity, to no less than King Arthur – whose historical existence Professor Dark shows to be much more likely than usually supposed.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
8 Oct 2026
Resurrection on Trial (with Peter D. Martino, esq.): A Law Professor Weighs the Evidence with Peter D. Martino
Peter Dominic Martino is a trial lawyer, law professor, former CEO, and former nuclear submarine officer. He serves as Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and is a co-founder of Honos Law PLLC. He studied in Annapolis and later Georgetown Law, served in the Navy, and in the Department of Homeland Security, and practices law in New York City. His new book from Sophia Press is Resurrection on Trial: A Judicial Inquiry into the Christian Claim of the Resurrection of Jesus (Sophia Institute Press, 2026), and he walks me through the evidence for our foundational belief—as he says, “the boldest claim that’s ever been made in the history of the world,”—on Almost Good Catholics.
Here is Peter’s book from Sophia Press, and also from Amazon.
Here is Peter’s faculty website at St. Thomas University College Law School.
Inside a recent episode
Thomas Smith, "Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)
Published 16 Oct 2025 · Transcript excerpt
[…] So if we take that away actually it removes some of that texture from the context of Byzantine calling for aid, I think that definitely there is a spark there from Byzantine, but I think maybe we need to revise downwards the thought that the emperor is sending lots and lots of letters to the west and that he's really quite as involved as people might have thought. I still think that we have to look for the origins of the first crusade in the conception of the idea really in the west rather than in the near east as some scholars recently have suggested. Okay, so then focusing on the origins of the crusade in the west, what can we understand about the processes of organizing and recruiting to actually make this happen? […]
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