World-renowned historian and eyewitness to history, Felix Gilbert offers in his memoirs a unique perspective on the events of the 20th century. He recalls his childhood during the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and vividly describes the devastation of his native Germany by the Nazis.

When we think about the European past, we tend to imagine villages, towns, and cities populated by conventional families—married couples and their children. Although most people did marry and pass many of their adult years in the company of a spouse, this vision of a preindustrial Europe shaped by heterosexual marriage deceptively hides the well-established fact that, in some times and places, as many as twenty-five percent of women and men remained single throughout their lives. Despite the significant number of never-married lay women in medieval and early modern Europe, the study of their role and position in that society has been largely neglected. Singlewomen in the European Past opens up this group for further investigation. It is not only the first book to highlight the important minority of women who never married but also the first to address the critical matter of differences among women from the perspective of marital status. Essays by leading scholars—among them Maryanne Kowaleski, Margaret Hunt, Ruth Mazo Karras, Susan Mosher Stuard, Roberta Krueger, and Merry Wiesner—deal with topics including the sexual and emotional relationships of singlewomen, the economic issues and employment opportunities facing them, the differences between the lives of widows and singlewomen, the conflation of singlewomen and prostitutes, and the problem of female slavery. The chapters both illustrate the roles open to the singlewoman in the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries and raise new perspectives about the experiences of singlewomen in earlier times.

This book turns the received wisdom of European history inside out. From discussions of the Gothic, Hun and Vandal invasions and the fall of the Roman Empire, through other great events and issues of European history, Josep Fontana re-examines the traditional acceptance of such ideas as classical heritage, medieval Christendom, reformation and counter-reformation, absolutism, and the idea of progress. At the same time he draws attention to the existence and validity of dissidence, rebellion and variety which are, for him, identifying marks of Europe.

In cultural and intellectual terms, one of the EU’s most important objectives in pursuing unification has been to develop a common historical narrative of Europe. Across ten compelling case studies, this volume examines the premises underlying such a project to ask: Could such an uncontested history of Europe ever exist? Combining studies of national politics, supranational institutions, and the fraught EU-Mideast periphery with a particular focus on the twentieth century, the contributors to History and Belonging offer a fascinating survey of the attempt to forge a post-national identity politics.

A broad history of the western European legal tradition. Bellomo discusses the great jurists who gave common law its intellectual vigor as well as the humanist jurists of the period.

Karin Tilmans is an historian, and academic coordinator of the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute, Florence. Frank van Vree is an historian and professor of journalism at the University of Amsterdam. Jay M. Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale. --

This volume contains three sections of essays which examine the role of commemoration and public celebrations in the creation of a national identity in Habsburg lands. It also seeks to engage historians of culture and of nationalism in other geographic fields as well as colleagues who work on Habsburg Central Europe, but write about nationalism from different vantage points. There is hope that this work will help generate a dialogue, especially with colleagues who live in the regions that were analyzed. Many of the authors consider the commemorations discussed in this volume from very different points of view, as they themselves are strongly rooted in a historical context that remains much closer to the nationalism we critique.