New Books in Early Modern History
1,098 episodes - English - Latest episode: 1 day ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsInterviews with scholars of the Early Modern World about the new books
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Episodes
Sarah A. Bendall, "Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
April 28, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesIn sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond, in the form of stays, corsets, hoop petticoats and crinolines, right up until the twentieth century. With a nuanced approach that incorporates a stunning array of visual and written sources and drawing on transdisciplinary methodologies, Shaping Femininity: F...
Andrés Reséndez, "Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery" (Mariner Books, 2022)
April 27, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Pacific Ocean is twice the size of the Atlantic, and while humans have been traversing its current-driven maritime highways for thousands of years, its sheer scale proved an obstacle to early European imperial powers. Enter Lope Martin, a forgotten Afro-Portuguese ship pilot heretofore unheralded by historians. In Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery (Mariner Books, 2021), UC-Davis history professor and Bancroft Prize winner Andrés...
Stefanos Geroulanos on "The Invention of Prehistory"
April 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhat does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos Geroulanos to discuss his new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) to discover how claims about the earliest humans and humankind’s true beginnings inform political and social practices to this day. How do the various stories we tell about human origins, including those abou...
Nicholas Popper, "The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
April 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWe are used to thinking of ourselves as living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. In The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Nicholas Popper shows that earlier eras had to grapple with the same problem—how to deal with too much information at their fingertips. Popper reveals that early modern Britain was a society newly drowning in paper, a light and durable technolog...
Juliet B. Wiersema, "The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia's Pacific Lowlands" (U Texas Press, 2024)
April 26, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesDuring the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps ...
Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
April 25, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesAlexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science. The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes ...
Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
April 24, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the collapse of the Mughal Empire. The story highlights the unique role played by Jain and Hindu bankers in the daily affairs of Islamic, Hindu, and early colonial forms of Indian government. Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge UP, 2024) features brazen emperors, sickly princes, irate governors, an...
Michael Scott and Michael Collins, "Christian Shakespeare?: A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in His Christian Context" (Vernon Press, 2022)
April 23, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThe enigma of William Shakespeare's religious beliefs has long tantalized scholars and enthusiasts alike. Vernon Press's latest publication, Christian Shakespeare?: A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in His Christian Context (Vernon Press, 2022), dives deep into this mystery. The collection of essays, edited by renowned scholars Michael Scott and Michael J. Collins, invites a discourse on the profound impact of Christian faith and the religious controversies of Shakespeare’s era on his poe...
Julie Peakman, "Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis" (Reaktion, 2024)
April 22, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesLibertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Julie Peakman investigates the sex lives of women from 1680 to 1830, the period known as the long eighteenth century. It uncovers the various experiences of women, whether mistresses, adulteresses or those involved in the sex trade. From renowned courtesans to downtrodden streetwalkers, Julie Peakman examines the multifaceted lives of these women within brothels, on stage and even behind bars. Based on new rese...
Steven Nadler, "Spinoza: A Life" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
April 22, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesBaruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also one of the most radical and controversial. The story of Spinoza's life takes the reader into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual, and religious world of the young Dutch Republic. This new edition of Steven Nadler's Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge UP, 2022), winner of the Koret Je...
Amanda Wunder, "Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV" (Yale UP, 2024)
April 20, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesSpanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV (Yale University Press, 2024) by Dr. Amanda Wunder is the first archival study of dress at the court of Philip IV, as told through the life and work of royal tailor Mateo Aguado. Tailor to the queens of Spain from 1630 to 1672, Aguado designed the striking dresses that gave the Spanish court its distinctive look in the Baroque era. The most influential dress designer in the seventeenth-century Spanish world, Aguado wa...
Nicholas Terpstra, "Senses of Space in the Early Modern World" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
April 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHow did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those experiences and further shape them? Senses of Space in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Terpstra takes an approach that is both global expansive and locally rooted by focusing on four cities as key examples: Florence, Amsterdam, Boston, and Manila. They relate to distinct parts of European cultural and colon...
Debby Koren, "Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)
April 18, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesDebby Koren's book Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa (Academic Studies Press, 2023) contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻagunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligator...
Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo, "How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History" (Reaktion, 2024)
April 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had ever seen. How did they achieve this? In How the Spanish Empire Was Built: a 400-year History (Reaktion, 2024) Dr. Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Dr. Manuel Lucena Giraldo argue that Spain’s engineers were critical to this venture. The Spanish invested in infrastructure to the advantage of local power brokers, enhancing the abilities of incumbent e...
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, "Puerto Rico: A National History" (Princeton UP, 2024)
April 16, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesPuerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago's people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds lig...
Jeremy Black, "The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History" (Routledge, 2015)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesIn The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015), Jeremy Black presents a compact yet comprehensive survey of slavery and its impact on the world, primarily centered on the Atlantic trade. Opening with a clear discussion of the problems of defining slavery, the book goes on to investigate the Atlantic slave trade from its origins to abolition, including comparisons to other systems of slavery outside the Atlantic region and the persistence of modern-day slavery. Crucially, the b...
Adam Kabat, "The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan" (Columbia UP, 2023)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAdam Kabat’s The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan (Columbia UP, 2023) is an in-depth introduction to the rich and ribald world of kibyōshi, a short-lived (1778-1807) subgenre of books combining text and illustration on the same page, much like comic books and manga today. This book presents a selection of five kibyōshi in which monsters play central roles. Each of these short books is reproduced in its entirety, accompanied by Kabat’s translations ...
Hume, the Epicureans, and the Origins of Liberalism
April 10, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesEnlightenment philosopher David Hume enjoyed a tremendous influence on intellectual history. What did Hume believe, why was it so controversial at the time, and why to many does it seem so common-sensical now? What can Humian thought explain, and where does it fall short? To discuss, Aaron Zubia, Assistant Professor at the University of Florida's Hamilton Program and 2019-2020 Thomas W. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow here at the Princeton's James Madison Program joins the show to delve into his ne...
Christopher Michael Blakley, "Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World" (Louisiana State UP, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesHistorians of early America, slavery, early African American history, the history of science, and environmental history have interrogated the complex ways in which enslaved people were thought about and treated as human but also dehumanized to be understood as private property or chattel. The comparison of enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses, was a common device deployed by enslavers. The letters, memoirs, and philosophical treatises of the enslaved and formerly e...
Claudio Ferlan, "The Jesuits: A Thematic History" (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2023)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesIn The Jesuits: A Thematic History (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2023), Claudio Ferlan provides an exploration of the tradition of the Society of Jesus. Instead of focusing solely on the Society’s historical milestones and changes, Ferlan traces the continuity of key Jesuit themes over time—covering education, mission, social engagement, and more. The book moves between different periods and places, emphasizing how core Jesuit themes have retained their essence despite profound transformation...
Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, "Merits of the Plague" (Penguin, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSix hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been wil...
Marie de Vignerot, Richelieu's Forgotten Advisor and Heiress
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesDespite being one of the most influential women of 17th century France, Marie de Vignerot has been largely forgotten. The niece, heiress, and advisor to the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, Marie was deeply motivated by her Catholic faith, yet never re-married after she became a widow at 18. She shaped France and the French empire's political, religious, and cultural life as the unconventional and independent Duchesse d’Aiguillon, a position exceedingly uncommon for a woman to possess in her own ...
Paola Tartakoff, "Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the ...
Huaping Lu-Adler, "Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesKant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere (Oxford UP, 2023), philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic ...
Katie Barclay, "Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 17 minutesCaritas, a form of grace that turned our love for our neighbour into a spiritual practice, was expected of all early modern Christians, and corresponded with a set of ethical rules for living that displayed one's love in the everyday. Caritas was not just a willingness to behave morally, to keep the peace, and to uphold social order however, but was expected to be felt as a strong passion, like that of a parent to a child. Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford UP, 2021)...
Oliver Wunsch, "A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France" (Penn State UP, 2024)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesEighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collector...
W. B. Allen, "Montesquieu's 'The Spirit of the Laws': A Critical Edition" (Anthem Press, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesThe Spirit of the Laws not only systematizes the foundational ideas of “separation of powers” and “balances and checks,” it provides the decisive response to the question of whether power in the nation-state can be limited in the aftermath of the Westphalian settlement of 1648. It describes a civilizational change through which power becomes domesticated, with built-in resistance to attempts to absolutize (or make total) political power. As such, it is the Bible of modern politics, now made m...
Thomas Lockley, "A Gentleman from Japan: The Untold Story of an Incredible Journey from Asia to Queen Elizabeth’s Court" (Hanover Square Press, 2024)
March 30, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesOn November 12, 1588, five young Asian men—led by a twenty-one-year-old called Christopher—traveled up the River Thames to meet Queen Elizabeth I. Christopher’s epic sea voyage had spanned from Japan, via the Philippines, New Spain (Mexico), Java and Southern Africa. On the way, he had already become the first recorded Japanese person in North America. Now Christopher was the first ever Japanese visitor to England, and no other would leave such a legacy for centuries to come. The story of Chr...
David Veevers, "The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire" (Ebury Press, 2023)
March 28, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIt’s very easy to study the history of the British Empire from the perspective of, well, the British–and to extend the early 20th century version of the empire as a world-spanning entity backwards through history. David Veevers, in his new book The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire (Ebury Press, 2023) studies the English, and later British, empires from a different perspective: Not the British, but the Irish, Native Americans, Southeast Asians, and Indians they met, tra...
Jamie Goodall, "Daring Exploits of Pirate Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean" (History Press, 2023)
March 28, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesIn 1717, the Council of Trade and Plantations received "agreeable news" from New England. "Bellamy with his ship and Company" had perished on the shoals of Cape Cod. Who was this Bellamy and why did his demise please the government? Born Samuel Bellamy circa 1689, he was a pirate who operated off the coast of New England and throughout the Caribbean. Later known as "Black Sam," or the "Prince of Pirates," Bellamy became one of the wealthiest pirates in the Atlantic world before his untimely d...
William Bain, "Political Theology of International Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIs contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain's Political Theology of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2020) challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval t...
Colleen Taylor, "Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCoins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, pigs. Each of these objects were ubiquitous in the premodern cultural representation of the Irish. Through case studies of these five objects, Colleen Taylor’s new monograph Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2024) recovers the sometimes-oppressive, sometimes-liberatory meanings invested in nonhuman matter. Irish Materialisms collects a rich archive of material from William Carleton’s “Phi...
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesAcross the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultu...
John William Nelson, "Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent" (UNC Press, 2023)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Great Lakes region and its borderlands. In Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023), Texas Tech University historian John William Nelson argues that canoes, and a deep understanding of portages sites where canoes could be carried between waterways, helped secure the region around Chic...
Thomas D. Conlan, "Kings in All But Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesIn the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretching to Korea and China, as well as the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, which functioned as an important regional port with a growing population and a host of temples and shrines. The family was unique in claiming ethnic descent from Korean kings, and-remarkably for this time-such claims were recognized in both Korea and Japan. Their position, coupl...
Victoria Perry, "A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape" (Hurst, 2022)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesThe 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country. Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the architecture and landscapes of Georgian Britain. She reveals h...
Legal Cultures in the Russian Empire
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourLaw. How does the state form and use it? How do people use and shape it? How does law shape culture? How does the practice of law change over time in a modernizing colony? What was stable and what was malleable in the application of law in early modern Russia versus its Central Asian colony in the Empire’s final century? What’s the difference between a bribe and a gift? These are some of the questions at the heart of this fascinating conversation about two books that probe the theoretical and...
Surya Parekh, "Black Enlightenment" (Duke UP, 2023)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Black Enlightenment (Duke UP, 2023), Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh examines the works of such Black writers as the free Jamaican Francis Williams (1697–1762), Afro-British thinker Ignatius Sancho (1729?–1780), and Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), placing them alongside those of their white European contemporaries David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). By rethinking the Enlightenment and its canons, P...
Sean M. Kelley, "American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865" (Yale UP, 2023)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery. In American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transat...
Jeremy Black, "The Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture, 1750-1900" (St. Augustine's Press, 2022)
March 09, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesHistorian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail--namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture. In The Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture, 1750-1900 (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), Black notes that the Gothic novel is also very much ab...
Carmen Fracchia, "'Black But Human': Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700" (Oxford UP, 2019)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourCarmen Fracchia's book Black But Human': Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700 (Oxford UP, 2019) is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and libe...
Diego Javier Luis, "The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History" (Harvard UP, 2024)
March 05, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesBetween 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once i...
Joanna Crosby, "Apples and Orchards Since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
March 05, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesShowing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, Apples and Orchards since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Joanna Crosby takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the importance of the apple as a symbol of both tradition and innovation. From the 18th century in Britain, technological innovation in fruit production and orchard man...
Cristina Brito, "Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesCristina Brito's book Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) deals with peoples' practices, perceptions, emotions and feelings towards aquatic animals, their ecosystems and nature on the early modern Atlantic coasts by addressing exploitation, use, fear, empathy, otherness, and indifference in the relationships established with aquatic environments and resources by Indigenous Peoples and Europeans. It focuses on large aquatic fauna, es...
Roseen Giles, "Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesThe marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and thought-provoking. The composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) created a new practice in which the expressive materials of music and poetry were placed in concert. This innovative new study of Monteverdi's literary personality integrates musical and poetic analysis to create an approach to text-music ...
Jennifer Evans, "Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
March 02, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesHow did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Dr. Jennifer Evans presents a vivid history that investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In do...
Fynn Holm, "The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
February 29, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesJapan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Fynn Holm argues that for centuries some regions in early modern Japan did not engage in whaling. In fact, they were actively opposed to it, even resorting to violence when whales were killed. Resistance against whaling was widespread especially in the Northeast among the Japanese fishermen who worshiped whales as the ...
Christian R. Burset, "An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy" (Yale UP, 2023)
February 29, 2024 05:00 - 44 minutesIn An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Christian R. Burset presents a compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire. For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) as the world’s most powerful empire. At that point, imperial p...
Stanley Wells, "What Was Shakespeare Really Like?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
February 26, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesSir Stanley Wells is one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare. Here he brings a lifetime of learning and reflection to bear on some of the most tantalising questions about the poet and dramatist that there are. How did he think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? This freshly thought and immensely engaging study wrestles with fundamental debates concerning Shakespeare's personality and life. The mysteri...
Till Van Rahden, "Multiplicity: Jewish History and the Ambivalences of Universalism" (Hamburger Editionen, 2022)
February 24, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesSince the Enlightenment, the question has arisen as to how it is possible to think of the “unity of the human race” as a multiplicity. How can the promise of universal equality be combined with the claim to diversity? In Vielheit: Jüdische Geschichte und die Ambivalenzen des Universalismus (Hamburger Editionen, 2022), Till van Rahden takes up this central theme of European modernity through the example of Jewish history. The more the ideal of equality gained in importance, the fiercer the dis...