Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Dee (Wilfred Laurier Univ., Canada) marshals a riveting history of how honor, capability, and determination preserved Louis XIV, his dynasty, and France from catastrophic humiliation. Dee focuses on 1709 and French perspectives on the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). He analyzes French statecraft, military matters, diplomacy, the Flanders campaign, and Malplaquet. He features biography, relationships, and mentalities, and his archival research is impressive. This chronological narrative begins with Louis XIV on January 1, 1709, including flashbacks, and advances through campaign seasons to peace treaties. Formidable European powers threatened France, which was besieged by devastating crises, menacing invasions, and stalled peace negotiations. Protagonists include Boufflers, Villars, Desmaretz, Torcy, Voysin, Montesquiou, Vendome, Chevalier de Luxembourg, and the obscure strategist Le Fevre d'Orval. Dee argues that the French recovery reveals absolute monarchy's strength and Louis's leadership capacity. He spotlights the king summoning subjects to defend French honor, personal sacrifices, the "collective honor" ethos permeating the predominantly French army, and the 1709 battle strategy that enabled honorable peace. Dee deemed Louis's twilight years his Churchillian "finest hour." Nevertheless, the price of royal arrogance was dear. This is an outstanding study of Louis XIV's sunset years.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

In lively, witty prose Palmer (Univ. of Chicago) challenges the idea of the Renaissance as a Golden Age, the birthplace of modernity, individualism, rational thought, and great art, and offers a nuanced view of an era "great and terrible," not wonderful for those living through it but magnificent in what it attempted. In her commanding review of Renaissance historiography, she shows that how one defines the Renaissance depends on what question is posed, by whom, and when, leading to the conclusion that there is no single defining feature of the Renaissance. To illustrate this, she crafts portraits of 15 Renaissance figures, some famous (e.g., Machiavelli), others obscure (e.g., Julia the Sibyl) because they did not match the idealized image of the Renaissance held by people of subsequent ages. The concept of a Golden Age was an invention designed to serve an agenda. Palmer's book is as much about the utility of the myths to later generations and the value of writing history as it is about the character of the Renaissance itself. Deeply erudite, engagingly personal, and a passionate call to build on what the Renaissance achieved, this work is a tour de force.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Professor Bethencourt (King's College London, UK) presents a tremendously thorough study of a particularly unique group of people who were to have overwhelming influence on the cultural, political, and especially economic aspects of the Iberian societies of Spain and Portugal: New Christians. What is significant to note is Bethencourt's larger theme that this unique group of people arose as a result of the "racialization of a large group of people who had been forced to convert to Christianity." The blood purity debate emerged with the rise of the inquisition in Spain and Portugal, and ironically created a people who would have great influence on both countries. This is a study of the rise and decline of the New Christian merchant, which saw the forced imposition of religious conversion placed on them but, at the same time, stimulated their abilities to achieve tremendous success. This study uses both archival materials and existing historiography to cover the major areas of influence of the New Christians in Iberia. It is a work that every college or university with an Iberian studies program should possess.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Alpaugh (Univ. of Central Missouri) chronicles the French Revolution's course from early 1788 to the celebration of the First Year of Liberty in towns and villages throughout the country on July 14, 1790. In this account, common men and women were the driving force for revolutionary change through their collective actions in locality after locality. Successive poor harvests led to a subsistence crisis that fueled popular violence against bread prices, presumed grain-hoarding, and any commercial shipping. The bankrupt monarchy lacked the means, will, and foresight to address the crisis. Distrust of the old regime informed a flood of rumors and misinformation that compelled local elites to acquire weapons from royal arsenals and assume policing roles to preserve public order and personal property. In the French Caribbean, the breakdown of the old order, expectations regarding liberty for all, and sudden access to weapons nearly upended the slave regimes until white elites assumed control and crushed fledging and imaginary slave rebellions with brutal force. Alpaugh's account is both accessible and fascinating. Given the text's geographic scope, it would have benefited from maps of Paris, France's provinces, and the French Caribbean.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.