From 1400 through 1700, the number of reports of demonic possessions among European women was extraordinarily high. During the same period, a new type of mysticism—popular with women—emerged that greatly affected the risk of possession and, as a result, the practice of exorcism. Many feared that in moments of rapture, women, who had surrendered their souls to divine love, were not experiencing the work of angels, but rather the ravages of demons in disguise. So how then, asks Moshe Sluhovsky, were practitioners of exorcism to distinguish demonic from divine possessions?
 
Drawing on unexplored accounts of mystical schools and spiritual techniques, testimonies of the possessed, and exorcism manuals, Believe Not Every Spiritexamines how early modern Europeans dealt with this dilemma. The personal experiences of practitioners, Sluhovsky shows, trumped theological knowledge. Worried that this could lead to a rejection of Catholic rituals, the church reshaped the meaning and practices of exorcism, transforming this healing rite into a means of spiritual interrogation. In its efforts to distinguish between good and evil, the church developed important new explanatory frameworks for the relations between body and soul, interiority and exteriority, and the natural and supernatural.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity. This was a sudden transformation, says Dror Wahrman, and nothing short of a revolution in the understanding of selfhood and of identity categories including race, gender, and class. In this pathbreaking book, he offers a fundamentally new interpretation of this critical turning point in Western history.
Wahrman demonstrates this transformation with a fascinating variety of cultural evidence from eighteenth-century England, from theater to beekeeping, fashion to philosophy, art to travel and translations of the classics. He discusses notions of self in the earlier 1700s--what he terms the ancien regime of identity--that seem bizarre, even incomprehensible, to present-day readers. He then examines how this peculiar world came to an abrupt end, and the far-reaching consequences of that change. This unrecognized cultural revolution, the author argues, set the scene for the array of new departures that signaled the onset of Western modernity.

אמהות וילדים: חיי משפחה באשכנז בימי הביניים הוא ניסיון ראשון לתאר את תולדותיה של המשפחה היהודית באשכנז בימי הביניים. הספר עוסק בפרק הזמן שמִן הלידה ועד הגיע הילדים לגיל חינוך, בערך בגיל שבע, תוך התמקדות ביחסים שבין ההורים לילדיהם ובמיוחד בין האמהות לילדיהן. המחברת דנה במגוון רחב של מקורות, יהודיים ונוצריים, ובכלל זה כתבי יד שטרם פורסמו, ובאמצעותם היא מציגה תמונה מקיפה של המשפחה היהודית בימי הביניים. אמהות וילדים: חיי משפחה באשכנז בימי הביניים בוחן שורה של נושאים, ובהם: הריון ולידה, מיילדוּת, ברית מילה, טקסי לידה, הנקה, מוות בעריסה, נטישת תינוקות, עקרות ופוריות, ומקומם של הילדים במערכת הערכים של התקופה – כל זאת תוך השוואה מתמדת לחברה הנוצרית. ההשוואה בין החברה היהודית לחברה הנוצרית היא אחת מתרומותיו החשובות של החיבור, שכן היא חושפת את היסודות המשותפים לשתי החברות ומדגימה את החשיבות של ניתוח אורח החיים היהודי על רקע החברה שבה חיו היהודים. בנוסף למתודה ההשוואתית מתבססת המחברת על מתודות מתחום לימודי המִגדר, ובאמצעותן היא משרטטת את מקומם של הגברים והנשים בחברה הימי ביניימית ואת המתחים והשינויים שחלו ביחסים ביניהם. הגרסה האנגלית של הספר, שראתה אור בהוצאת אוניברסיטת פרינסטון, זכתה בפרס קורת לספר הטוב בהיסטוריה יהודית שהתפרסם בשנת 2004. 

The book examines the interactions among religious practices, urbanization processes, and the rise of French Absolutism. It focuses on the cult of Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, and the ways in which social and political developments in Paris between 1400 and the French Revolution shaped the cult and were, in turn, shaped by it.
The first section analyzes the development of the cult, its liturgy and cult practitioners, in medieval Paris, and the construction of the saint as a patroness of the city.
The second part follows the transformations in public rituals of invocations of the saint, and the appropriations of the cult by municipal and royal authorities.
The third section focuses on the devotional practices and social composition of the lay confraternity in honor of the saint.

"News Over the Wires" tells the story of the development of the news wire service as a business operation strategically positioned between the telegraph industry and the press. This unique history of telegraphic news gathering and news flow evaluates the effect of the innovative technology on the evolution of the concept of news and journalistic practices. It also addresses problems of technological innovation and diffusion. Menahem Blondheim's main concern, however, is the development of oligopoly in business and the control revolution in American society. He traces the discovery of timely news as a commodity, presenting a lively and detailed account of the emergence of the New York Associated Press (AP) as the first private sector national monopoly in the United States, and Western Union as the first industrial one. The book assembles, in a narrative parade of personalities and episodes, a wide-ranging body of primary sources, many of them previously untapped. It reconstructs the career of AP's maverick manager, Daniel H. Craig, and highlights his achievements as one of the most creative and effective, if least appreciated, of America's great system builders. The Associated Press and Western Union provide a novel perspective on processes of modernization and national integration in America. "News Over the Wires" demonstrates the significance of the monopolistic structure of the news business and its important impact on economic development, on the political process, and on social integration in general.

The books analyses the Roman electoral system under the late Republic and its impact on the Republican political system as a whole. The political system of the Republic is often described as narrowly oligarchic; all forms of popular participation had little real impact on how the Republic was run. Though this view has been challenged in recent years, the Republican electoral system is still widely regarded as controlled and manipulated by the narrow circle of Roman nobility (among other things, through patronage). This book offers a very different picture: a wide popular electorate, free to choose between upper-class candidates who fiercely competed for the votes of the populace and had to make great efforts in order to win popularity with the common people. Competitive popular elections influenced the whole balance of power between the common people and the elite. The books refers, by way of comparison, to modern electoral systems and their impact on the relations between the people and the social and political elite.