In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Constructing a Renaissance Pope: Rhetoric, Ceremony, and Authority in the Age of Leo X (1513-1521) (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth McCahill examines the rhetoric and ceremony of the papal court during the pontificate of Pope Leo X (1513-1521).
The son of Lorenzo de' Medici, Leo has been celebrated for bringing a Golden Age of cultural efflorescence to Renaissance Rome, but he has also been excoriated for the prodigality, nepotism, and corruption that provoked Martin Luther first to criticize and then to split from the church. This study does not focus on Leo as a historical individual but analyses the collaborative efforts of curial officials, humanists, and ceremonial experts to construct his image. Although personal loyalty and private self-interest motivated these bureaucrats and scholars, so too did commitment to a traditional vision of papal authority, a vision facing new challenges in an era of rapid spiritual, social, and political change.
Weaving together material from the diaries and manuals of Paris de' Grassi, the papal Master of Ceremonies, and a variety of letters, orations, and other humanist texts, the book situates papal image-making techniques within the broader context of Renaissance culture. It argues that the scripted rites and Ciceronian rhetoric on which the papal court spent so much time and money served as tools of persuasion, creating a rarefied arena in which power, hierarchy, and tradition were continually enacted and negotiated. By embedding curial activities within the geopolitical and cultural landscape of early sixteenth-century Europe, the book illuminates the tension between the mystique of traditional authority and the new technologies, political norms, and religious dissent that conspired to destabilize the papal role.
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.

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We tend to talk about globalisation as if it arrived with container ships, multinationals and the internet. Christopher Meissner’s One from the Many: The Global Economy since 1850 (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that it has a far longer and messier history. In my latest New Books Network interview, I put that history, and some of its biggest open questions, to him.
A book for a nervous moment
Tariffs, industrial policy, “economic security” and the relocation of supply chains have revived the argument that globalisation is going into reverse. Meissner, Professor of Economics at UC Davis and a Research Associate at the NBER, takes the long view. Trade, capital and migration surged between 1850 and 1914, collapsed between the wars, and were rebuilt after 1945. His conclusion is that globalisation is hard to kill, but not guaranteed to survive. That depends on political choices and international cooperation.

If you teach economics, history or political science, or simply want to know whether today’s headlines signal the end of globalisation, this book and this conversation are for you.
What we talk about
Why the first globalisation happened, and what a Briton, an Argentine or an American in 1900 would have made of today’s world
Migration: we have liberalised goods and capital far more than people, so how much does that limit globalisation’s power to reduce inequality?
Whether backlash was always built into globalisation, or whether wars and shocks brought it down, and what that means for today’s politics
The Great Depression and the question of leadership: can the world economy function without a power willing to underwrite it?
The paradox of the US dollar, and why capital flows towards the richest economy rather than the poorest
What evidence would convince Chris that “this time really is different”
Writing a first book, and why economics works best inside history rather than bolted on beside it.

Some of these questions came from my own students, where the book is now core reading. They like it because it explains long-run change while making formal theory accesible.
What other reviewers say
Barry Eichengreen, in Foreign Affairs, praised its clarity and concision across nearly two centuries. In Good Reads, Jason Furman called it a reliable, readable history, well grounded in the research literature. Donald Boudreaux, in The Independent Review, judged it an admirable survey of key events and theories, although he took issue with some analytical choices. That makes it a useful starting point for readers who want to form their own view.

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Mediating God: Muhammad Ghazali and the Politics of Divine Presence in 20th century Egypt (Oxford UP, 2025) is a fascinating and compelling intellectual biography of the Egyptian Muslim theologian, scholar, and activist, Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1996). Al-Ghazali shaped the views of multiple generations of Muslim activists and was a one-time leading intellectual of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Mediating God charts his rise as a leading theologian in the Brotherhood during the 1940s, his subsequent clash and expulsion from the group in 1953, and his extensive post-Brotherhood career during the Nasser years.

To tell this story, it excavates a massive collection of writings by Brotherhood members and their affiliates, many of which have never before been utilized in secondary scholarship. Through an analysis of this collection, Mediating God provides the first in-depth view at the richly cosmopolitan and eclectic intellectual milieu of the Brotherhood and its affiliates from the 1930s through the 1960s. It focuses particular attention on the underexamined, though voluminous, writings al-Ghazali and his colleagues dedicated to charting God as real and meaningful presence in all arenas of human life, from the mundane realms of daily life to political struggles and scientific enterprises. Ultimately, by highlighting the centrality of God as an inscrutable and incalculable-yet intimately known and felt-presence in al-Ghazali and his colleagues' project of spiritual and social uplift, Mediating God provides a way of understanding modern Islamic politics beyond the scholarly framework of Islamism and attendant claims about the functionalization, objectification, and systemization of Islam in modernity.
Dr. Zarate is an assistant professor of Global Humanities at San Jose State University. He completed his PhD at Columbia University and is now a historian of the modern Middle East whose research explores Islam, theology, politics, science, and spirituality in twentieth-century Egypt. His scholarship has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His work combines historical research with approaches drawn from religious studies and anthropology, building on his training at Columbia University as a historian of global Islam. He has conducted extensive archival research in Egypt and the United States and works with Arabic-language primary sources.
Dr. Amanie Yahia Antar is a post doctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada whose research concentrates on the history of Islamophobia in the premodern era, with a focus on sixteenth century Iberia.

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Tom Birkett, University College, Cork, joins Jana Byars to discuss his new book, Runes: A Concise History (Oxford UP, 2025) An accessible and illuminating introduction to the history of the runic script, a writing system in use in the medieval North from the Roman Iron Age until the Reformation and beyond. Runes were the only writing system known to Germanic tribes, including those who migrated to England, and they provide a first-hand account of huge social change in the medieval North, including the Viking expansion in Europe and the adoption of Christianity. Often endowed with magical or prophetic properties--the keys to Middle Earth--runes were in fact a workaday script. As this book demonstrates, however, when the myths are stripped away the stories they tell us are no less fascinating.

Join the fun! The iViking app discussed on the podcast is available for Apple or PC.

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In this episode, Salman Sayyid and Claudia Radiven were joined by Deana Heath to discuss her work Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2026). Heath’s work explores the legacies of colonial violence in India, Britain’s colonial amnesia in reckoning with it’s past and how torture was facilitated and systemized. Deana is a scholar of British Imperialism and colonialism, and is also Chair in Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool.

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