New Books in Medieval History

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor (Princeton UP, 2026) follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival.

Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms.

Sara McDougall is professor of history at John Jay College of the City University of New York and is on the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Her fellowships include the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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Matthew Thomas Miller's new book Feeling like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism (U California Press, 2026), and is available as an open access book (see link below), considers how for many medieval Sufis, Sufism was the “path of love”, and God was the Beloved, and so one had to become a lover of the Beloved on this path. And though there remains a rich corpus of Sufi texts from theological, legal to philosophical that speak to and about this trajectory, Miller re-focuses our attention to the felt and affective dimensions of the genre of poetry, especially of qalandariyyat or rogue poetry. In concentrating on these specific poems and their metaphoric and metaphysical treatments of beauty, sama‘ and ultimately fana’, we begin to the grasp the critical significance of how feelings and the felt dimension (experience) informs the path of love, particularly in how Sufis came to know the secret realities of the Beloved. In this way, the spectrum of emotion, aeffect (affect and effect) held in the body then help us restore the relationship between the mind-body in Sufi thought, according to Miller. This book will be of interest to those who enjoy Sufi and Persian poetry, as well as those who study history of emotion, affect, and literature as well as Sufism generally.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit here to learn more.

Constructing the Medieval Maritime State: Identity, Violence, and Connection in the Mediterranean (Oxford
University Press, 2026) by Professor Travis Bruce explores how the
small medieval kingdom of Denia in Spain became a powerful maritime
state after the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate. Its rulers built
authority, not only through war and seafaring raids but also by
connecting Denia to wider Mediterranean trade, diplomacy, and culture.

The rise and evolution of the taifa
of Denia is a powerful case study for understanding the construction of
medieval maritime states in the Mediterranean. Dr. Bruce situates Denia
within the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate and explores how its rulers
forged legitimacy through identity formation, maritime violence, and
regional connectivity. Denia's identity was negotiated through
rulership, unfreedom, and cultural hybridity, and violence —
particularly predatory warfare and maritime jihad — functioned as both
statecraft and economic extraction. At the same time, Denia's
entanglement in commercial, diplomatic, and intellectual networks
positioned it as a key node linking the Islamic Mediterranean and the
Latin West. The state's trajectory cannot be reduced to narratives of
decline or simple religious conflict but instead reveals a process of
negotiation shaped by mobility, interdependence, and the fluid
boundaries between public and private power. This narrative reframes
Mediterranean history beyond Eurocentric paradigms and underscores the
significance of Islamic maritime states within the wider medieval world.

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.

What do we talk about when we talk about Europe? Is it defined by geography? Or is it politics, or shared culture? In Europe: A New History (Allen Lane, 2026),
award-winning historian Roderick Beaton tells the story of Europe as
never before—as the history of an idea, and a collective identity.

Since
its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, 'Europe' has been defined, and
redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, and with the
narrative drive and scope of a novelist, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s
major historical developments: the rise and fall of Rome; the explosion
of Christianity; the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment; the arrival of Europeans in the Americas; the violent
upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the
uncertainties of the present. Throughout, original sources allow the
voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves.

Grappling with the multilayered identities that have always come with being European, Europe places the Europe of today in a long arc of history stretching back more than 2,500 years.

Roderick Beaton
is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History,
Language and Literature at King's College London and Chair of Trustees
of the British School at Athens, an institute of advanced research. He
is a four-time winner of the Runciman Award, for his books An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel: A Biography, Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution, and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, published by Penguin in 2019. He is also the author of The Greeks: A Global History.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Commander of the Order of Honour
of the Hellenic Republic, and an honorary citizen of Greece. He was
knighted in 2025.

Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature.

The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Katie Barclay tells the surprising history of our most intimate gesture: the kiss. Richly illustrated, it explores a millennium of kisses, asking how and why the kiss has retained its power over the centuries, and what it might mean today. From the furtive kisses of fated lovers Heloise and Abelard to The Godfather’s ‘kiss of death’, Professor Barclay shows how the kiss can be romantic, peaceful, transgressive, intimate, erotic and more. There are kisses that are bad ideas, dangerous kisses and funny ones. New kisses are invented and old ones fall out of favour. 

While the kiss continues to change, Professor Barclay shows that we kiss fewer people, and less often, than we used to. The Kiss reveals a cultural inheritance transmitted in story and song, art and literature, and through the everyday kisses that we receive from our parents, or reserve for our lovers; when we kiss, we kiss with the weight of history.

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.