In this most recent episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sophia Rosenfeld about her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her book explores how the idea of making a choice from a menu of options arranged by someone else became synonymous with what it meant to be free between the early modern period and the 20th century, via shifts to consumer culture, religious life, romance, and reproduction.
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In this most recent episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sophia Rosenfeld about her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her book explores how the idea of making a choice from a menu of options arranged by someone else became synonymous with what it meant to be free between the early modern period and the 20th century, via shifts to consumer culture, religious life, romance, and reproduction.
Summer of Fire and Blood: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Lyndal Roper
In Theory: The JHI Blog Podcast
54 minutes 47 seconds
7 months ago
Summer of Fire and Blood: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Lyndal Roper
In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, Oxford about her new book, "Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War" (Basic Books, 2025), also available in German as "Für die Freiheit: Der Bauernkrieg 1525" (trans. Holger Fock and Sabine Müller, S. Fischer Verlage, 2024). In this new history of this massive event, Roper closely examines the political, religious, and intellectual worlds of the thousands of peasants who rose up and took over vast lands in what is now Germany, in one of the most decisive moments in the history of the Reformation, and (as we discuss) for the intellectual history of everything from revolution to ecology to brotherhood. By reading the peasants' movements, physical landscape, complaints, dreams, desires, and visions for the future, Roper offers us an account of how, for a few months in the middle of the sixteenth century, the poorest people in Germany almost overturned the social order of their world.
In Theory: The JHI Blog Podcast
In this most recent episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sophia Rosenfeld about her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her book explores how the idea of making a choice from a menu of options arranged by someone else became synonymous with what it meant to be free between the early modern period and the 20th century, via shifts to consumer culture, religious life, romance, and reproduction.
