New Books in Early Modern History
1,098 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsInterviews with scholars of the Early Modern World about the new books
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Episodes
Matthew Pierce, “Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiism” (Harvard UP, 2016)
September 07, 2016 10:00 - 56 minutesThe story of the martyrdom of Husayn, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, is recounted annually around the world. More broadly, the communal retelling of the lives of Shia imams has played an important part in shaping Shia identity and practice. Matthew Pierce, Assistant Professor of Religion at Centre College, examines the early canonization of these life stories in Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiism (Harvard University Press, 2016). Pierce carefully conceptualizes the re...
Neil Kent, “Crimea: A History” (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2016)
September 02, 2016 19:49 - 1 hourIn 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
William Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
August 29, 2016 18:29 - 53 minutesAir pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly tur...
Anders Ingram, “Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015)
August 22, 2016 14:29 - 57 minutesYou read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. All of which is to say we tend to focus on how Europeans got the Middle East wrong, not how the got it right. But, as Anders Ingram points out in his excellent new book Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Palg...
Morgan Pitelka, “Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2016)
August 10, 2016 14:43 - 1 hourMorgan Pitelka’s new book looks closely at the material culture of the Three Unifiers of the late sixteenth century in Japan– Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu–in order to foreground the politics of culture in an age of civil war. The chapters of Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Paul M. Cobb, “The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades” (Oxford UP, 2014)
July 25, 2016 17:13 - 49 minutesThe Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and m...
Daniel Jutte, “The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800” (Yale UP, 2015)
July 12, 2016 21:59 - 33 minutesIn his expansive The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800 (Yale University Press, 2015), Daniel Jutte suggests new ways of understanding the scientific revolution of the early modern period through exploring the ways in which Christians and Jews engaged in the exchange of secret knowledge. As opposed to contemporary understandings of secrets as information needing to be exposed to the public or being withheld for potentially dangerous reasons, Jutte argues t...
Pi-Ching Hsu, “Feng Menglong’s ‘Treasury of Laughs’: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour” (Brill, 2015)
June 08, 2016 14:45 - 1 hourThe Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence. Pi-Ching Hsu’s new translation Feng Menglong’s Treasury of Laughs:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dana Sajdi, “The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant” (Stanford UP, 2012)
May 16, 2016 14:31 - 52 minutesIn her stunning new book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2012), Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, presents a riveting narrative of the intersection of literature, religion, and history in early modern Muslim societies. She does so by focusing on the chronicle of a common Barber in 18th-century Damascus Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr. Through a close reading of the intellectual and politic...
Ayesha Ramachandran, “Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
May 11, 2016 00:00 - 56 minutesAt what point does the world end? More importantly, how did this idea of a whole, unified world emerge to begin with? In Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Ayesha Ramachandran illustrates the anticipated enormity and surprising subtlety of these questions. Prose, vivid imagery and poetry form the text’s arc as Ramachandran distills an interdisciplinary evolution of Eurocentric debates about the relationship between self and god, self and n...
Stern, et al., “The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee” (Penn State UP, 2015)
April 20, 2016 15:02 - 1 hourThe Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, combines a gorgeous facsimile of a late 15th-century illuminated haggadah with a Latin prologue written by a Dominican Friar! Mystery abounds as a Jewish Passover text, written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe, is found to include illustrations of Christian significance. Thanks to a special collabo...
Seth Kimmel, “Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
April 08, 2016 13:18 - 43 minutesIn his path clearing new book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, presents a fascinating account of how conversion from Islam to Christianity was imagined, debated, and contested in early modern Spain. Shifting focus from the experiences of converts to intellectual discussions and disputes on matters such as coercion and a...
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2015)
March 29, 2016 23:56 - 1 hourNathan Perl-Rosenthal‘s Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2015), explores the fascinating history of identification and citizenship in the Atlantic world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. British and French navies harried American privateers and merchantmen, seizing their cargo, imprisoning their bodies, and laying false claim to their allegiance. Rosenthal shows how American sailors were the first to demand officia...
Justin E. H. Smith, “Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2015)
March 02, 2016 16:13 - 1 hourJustin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) argues that “in order to understand the forces that shaped thinking about racial difference in early modern philosophy, we must look to the philosophers’ own interest in a scientific classification and physical anthropology, with an eye to t...
Jeroen Duindam, “Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
February 22, 2016 13:52 - 1 hourFor most of recorded history, single rulers such a kings, queens, chiefs, and emperors exercised authority over human populations. Jeroen Duindam (Professor of Early Modern History, Leiden University) examines an important part of this story in his new book Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He employs an easy-to-follow, four-level comparative framework that explains how dynastic power evolved in kingdoms as diverse as the Qing Empire, Mughal E...
Domna Stanton, “The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing” (Ashgate, 2014)
January 28, 2016 07:35 - 56 minutesDomna Stanton‘s latest book The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (Ashgate, 2014) is a series of six case studies with important literary, historical, and theoretical implications for how we think about gender in the seventeenth century and beyond. In two parts, the first focused on male and the second focused on female writers in this period, the book examines critically key works by Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné...
James A. Benn, “Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History” (U of Hawaii Press, 2015)
January 04, 2016 11:26 - 1 hourJames A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (with brief extensions earlier and later), Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015)
December 18, 2015 17:15 - 1 hourJanet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between medicine and religion in this context. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 )
December 15, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourBelief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Bria...
Hina Azam, “Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
November 25, 2015 06:00 - 52 minutesIn her shining new book Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Hina Azam, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, explores the diversity and complexity of pre-modern Muslim legal discourses on rape and sexual violation. The reader of this book is treated to a thorough and delightful analysis of the range of attitudes, assumptions, and hermeneutical operations that mark the Muslim legal tr...
Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
November 04, 2015 10:54 - 1 hourAnita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead body to sites of dissection across the city, after which we are introduced to four anatomists – charter members of the Paris Academy of Sciences – who will act as focal points for the rest of the story.The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (University of Chicago Press, ...
Kimberly Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France” (Stanford UP, 2013)
September 24, 2015 17:57 - 33 minutesIn Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings o...
Guy Burak, “The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
September 23, 2015 12:33 - 45 minutesThe Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge UP, 2015) is a new contribution to the study of Islam and more specifically to the history of Islamic Law and its development. Guy Burak, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies librarian at New York University, explores the Ottomans’ adoption of one branch of the Hanafi legal tradition as the official school (madhhab) of the dynasty. The period of time in which this process occurred was during the...
Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan” (U of Chicago, 2015)
September 22, 2015 10:43 - 1 hourFederico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces practices and practitioners of natural knowledge from the late-sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Anna M. Shields, “One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China” (Harvard UP, 2015)
September 04, 2015 13:55 - 1 hourAnna M. Shields has written a marvelous book on friendship, literature, and history in medieval China. One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard University Press, 2015) is the first book-length study of friendship in the Chinese tradition. Focusing on the period from the 790s through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeffrey S. Shoulson, “Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
September 03, 2015 10:18 - 30 minutesIn Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings o...
Tabetha Ewing, “Rumor, Diplomacy, and War in Enlightenment Paris” (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014)
August 31, 2015 17:58 - 58 minutesTabetha Ewing‘s Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the word on the street that everyday Parisians might have picked up, and/or spread around town in the 1740s. Focused on rumor during the War of Austrian Succession that lasted from 1740-1748, Ewing’s is a book that examines a range of urban voices and opinions across a pivotal decade of the Enlightenment. Taking very seriously the landscapes of gossip...
Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
August 30, 2015 17:14 - 1 hourKelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that...
James Turner, “Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities” (Princeton University Press, 2014)
August 10, 2015 12:44 - 1 hourJames Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers the significance of philology, the study of language, that for centuries was synonymous with humanistic intellectual life. Turner provides a detailed and fascinating study that traces philology’s beginning in Greek and Roman speculation about language and follows it to the early twentieth century. ...
Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015)
July 08, 2015 15:12 - 1 hourAccording to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredible women, Meredith K. Ray‘s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Dau...
Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
May 19, 2015 18:13 - 1 hourBenjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch ateliers in which exotic geography was produced by bookmakers, paying s...
Stuart Young, “Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014)
April 25, 2015 17:32 - 1 hourIn Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (Maming), Nagarjuna (Longshu), and Aryadeva (Sheng tipo)–from the early fifth to late tenth centuries, and explores the role that these representations played in the development of Chinese Buddhism’s self-awareness of its own position within Buddhist history and its growing confidence that Buddhism c...
Kurtis R. Schaeffer, et al. “The Tibetan History Reader/Sources of Tibetan Tradition” (Columbia UP, 2013)
April 11, 2015 20:32 - 1 hourTwo new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nick Wilding, "Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge" (U Chicago Press, 2014)
March 16, 2015 08:00 - 1 hourNick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo's 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Syste...
Byonghyon Choi, “The Annals of King T’aejo: Founder of Korea’s Choson Dynasty” (Harvard UP, 2014)
February 18, 2015 12:03 - 49 minutesByonghyon Choi‘s new book makes a key document of Korean and world history available in English in a volume that will be tremendously useful for both scholarship and teaching. The Annals of King T’aejo: Founder of Korea’s Choson Dynasty (Harvard University Press, 2014) translates an important excerpt from The Veritable... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kenneth M. Swope, “The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618-44” (Routledge, 2014)
February 11, 2015 13:12 - 1 hourOur interview with Kenneth M. Swope about his book, The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618-44 (Routledge, 2014), published through Routledge, is an effort to address an oversight in how New Books in Military History has generally overlooked both early modern history and works that have an exclusively non-Eurocentric focus. Swope’s book presents a very detailed assessment of the many challenges that underlie the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in China in the seventeenth century. Mor...
Susan Byrne, “Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote” (University of Toronto Press, 2013)
January 29, 2015 14:35 - 58 minutesPlease listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes’ most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of which tie into early modern Spanish debates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...
Joshua S. Mostow, “Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation” (Brill, 2014)
December 10, 2014 12:45 - 1 hourIn pre-modern Japan, Ise monogatari (also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise) was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. Joshua S. Mostow‘s new book focuses on the reception and appropriation of these stories from the twelfth through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
December 09, 2014 13:02 - 1 hourDaniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growt...
Michael Gibbs Hill, trans., Wang Hui, “China from Empire to Nation-State” (Harvard UP, 2014)
November 17, 2014 11:09 - 1 hourMichael Gibbs Hill‘s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui‘s 4-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, 2004). China from Empire to Nation-State (Harvard University Press, 2014) thus makes available to an English-reading audience a fascinating perspective on... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)
November 05, 2014 13:00 - 1 hourLawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking,...
Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)
November 05, 2014 13:00 - 1 hourLawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eugene Y. Park, “A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea” (Stanford UP, 2014)
October 20, 2014 12:47 - 1 hourEugene Y. Park‘s A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces this history by focusing on the Miryang Pak family. The history of transformations in the family’s social status and geography parallels that of modern Korea, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse" (Columbia UP, 2014)
September 29, 2014 08:00 - 1 hourWhere can the the boundaries of science, philosophy, and religion be drawn? Questioning the nature of the universe is an excellent place to rethink how these categories have been deployed across time. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor Religious Studies at Wesleyan University, offers a genealogy of multiple-world cosmologies that demonstrates these terms pliability and the debated relationship between 'Science' and 'Religion.' In Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia Uni...
Nabil Matar, “Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism” (Columbia UP, 2013)
September 18, 2014 17:50 - 55 minutesIn Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism (Columbia University Press, 2014), Nabil Matar masterfully edits an important piece of scholarship from seventeenth-century England by scholar and physician, Henry Stubbe (1632-76). Matar also gives a substantial introduction to his annotated edition of Stubbe’s text by situating the author in his historical context. Unlike other early modern writers on Islam, Stubbe’s ostensible goals were not to cast Isl...
Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
July 30, 2014 14:57 - 43 minutesSlavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands, yet it all but disappeared in Medieval Western and Central Europe. Then, rather suddenly, slavery reappeared in the West, or rather in Western empires. By the early sixteenth century, Portuguese traders had laid the foundations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The...
Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
July 14, 2014 15:33 - 1 hourCraig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Based on a close reading of a staggering array of primary sources, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) in turn subverts several assumptions about the connection between Aristotelian thought and the emergence of the new sciences in early modernity. The book argues that ...
Noah Shusterman, “The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics” (Routledge, 2013)
July 14, 2014 13:33 - 1 hourThis year marks the 225th anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution. You don’t have to be a historian to know and appreciate how significant that revolution is to our understanding of French society and culture since the eighteenth century. Noah Shusterman‘s new book, The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics (Routledge, 2013) is an accessible book that provides readers with an overview of the major events and historical actors who shaped the Revolution from the storming o...
Hugh Talat Halman, “Where The Two Seas Meet” (Fons Vitae, 2013)
June 10, 2014 15:08 - 1 hourIn Where The Two Seas Meet (Fons Vitae, 2013), Hugh Talat Halman unpacks one of the most provocative narratives in the Islamic tradition. In the 18th chapter of the Qur’an, Surat al-Kahf (The Cave), a mysterious figure named Khidr (the “Green Man”), guides Moses through a series of seemingly criminal acts. These events turn out to be, rather, tests to try Moses’ patience, each with divine purpose and knowledge behind it. Because of Khidr’s special knowledge and status–even immortal according ...
Clare Haru Crowston, “Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France”
May 29, 2014 13:01 - 1 hourAnyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. Contemporary ideas and debates about capital, debt, and austerity are only part of what makes Clare Crowston‘s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013) such an interesting read in 2014. In this detailed study of the varied econom...