New Books in Early Modern History

The remarkable life of history's first foreign-born samurai and his astonishing journey from Northern Africa to the heights of Japanese society. When Yasuke arrived in Japan in the late 1500s, he had already traveled much of the known world. Kidnapped as a child, and trained into a boy soldier in India, he had ended up an indentured servant and bodyguard to the head of the Jesuits in Asia, with whom he visited India, China and the budding Catholic missions in Japan. From the volatile port city of Nagasaki to travel on pirate-infested waters, he lived it all and learned more every day. His arrival in Kyoto, however, literally caused a riot. Most Japanese people had never seen an African man before, and many of them viewed him as the embodiment of the black-skinned (in local traditions) Buddha or a local war god or demon. Among those who were drawn to his presence were Lord Nobunaga, head of the most powerful clan in Japan, who made Yasuke a samurai in his court. Soon, he was learning the traditions of Japan's martial arts, fighting in battles and ascending to the upper echelons of Japanese society. In the four hundred years since, Yasuke has been known in Japan largely as a legendary, perhaps mythical, figure. Now, combining all the primary sources for the first time, African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan (Hanover Square Press, 2021) presents the never-before-told biography of this unique figure of the sixteenth century, one whose travels between countries, cultures and classes offers a new perspective on race in world history and a vivid portrait of life, faith and war in medieval Japan.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margarette Lincoln's London and the Seventeenth Century (Yale Yale University Press, 2021) explores the ups and downs of life in Stuart London through the eyes of those who lived through it. The Gunpowder Plot, the Civil Wars, Charles I's execution, the Plague, the Great Fire, the Restoration, and then the Glorious Revolution: the seventeenth century was one of the most momentous times in the history of Britain, and Londoners took center stage.In this fascinating account, Margarette Lincoln charts the impact of national events on an ever-growing citizenry with its love of pageantry, spectacle, and enterprise. Lincoln looks at how religious, political, and financial tensions were fomented by commercial ambition, expansion, and hardship. In addition to events at court and parliament, she evokes the remarkable figures of the period, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Pepys, and Newton, and draws on diaries, letters, and wills to trace the untold stories of ordinary Londoners. Through their eyes, we see how the nation emerged from a turbulent century poised to become a great maritime power with London at its heart--the greatest city of its time.The seventeenth century was a period of tumult - Civil War, the Great Fire (and many other fires), the Great Plague (and other bouts of plague every 20 years or so), and many many executions. Yet, amidst the mess, this period also saw London lay the groundwork for its rise as a maritime power and eventually as the World's Greatest City.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (Oxford UP, 2021) provides an account of various theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). It examines the evolution of different juridical models of inheritance--in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common--against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively.Christopher T. Fleming reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth-nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. Fleming attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharmaśāstra as positive law, this study argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. It charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance--through precedent and statute--over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we speak to Hannah Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about her new monograph, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020).Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities.Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The arrival in 1532 of a small group of Spanish conquistadores at the Andean town of Cajamarca launched one of the most dramatic – and often misunderstood – events in world history. In Inca Apocalypse: The Spanish Conquest and the Transformation of the Andean World (Oxford UP, 2020), R. Alan Covey draws upon a wealth of new archaeological and archival discoveries to detail the remarkable events that ended one empire and transformed another. From this he builds a new narrative that highlights the apocalyptic mindsets of the two empires and how these shaped the interactions between the Spanish and the Inca. As Covey explains, the Spaniards arrived at a point when the Incan empire was coping with the disruptions caused by a civil war and a devastating pandemic. To the Inca and their neighbors, the Spaniards were yet another disruptive force, one that different groups in the region sought to exploit for their own purposes. The result was twenty years of political infighting and warfare, culminating in the defeat of insurrectionary Spaniards by a force of Incans fighting on behalf of the king of Spain. Though such maneuvering helped preserve a degree of status for the Inca elite, it opened the way for the gradual absorption of the Inca into the Spanish empire in a process that played out over the following century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The debate about the origins of Enlightenment haven’t paid as much attention as they should have done to the radical religious cultures of the Dutch Republic in the mid-17th century, which are the subject of Francesco Quatrini’s new book. Adam Boreel (1602-1665): A Collegiant's Attempt to Reform Christianity (Brill, 2020) is a biographical and thematic study of one of the most enigmatic – and perhaps one of the most important – of the period’s religious and scientific thinkers. In the first major biography of this figure, and in almost two hundred thousand words, Quatrini reconstructs from complex and often ambiguous sources Boreel’s childhood in the Dutch Reformed church, the intellectual agendas and travels by which he was exposed to more radical forms of Christianity, the friendship networks in which he worked on projects that seem to have designed the conversation of the Jews, and most significantly of all the unofficial institutions that fostered the wide-ranging and open-ended conversations on religious subjects that marked the communal life of the Collegiants. Quatrini’s outstanding new book opens up new windows in our understanding of early modern religion and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A four-hundred-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. Tracing the development of alchemy in England from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history. Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew A. Vogan, who has published several books on the religious history and literature of seventeenth-century Scotland, and several editions of works by Covenanter preachers and theologians, talks today about his latest project. David Dickson’s sermons on the Old Testament book of Lamentations were recorded in manuscript by one of his listeners in 1628. Since then, the notes have remained in private hands, most recently in the possession of the library of the University of Glasgow, where Dickson taught. In Sermons on Jeremiah's Lamentations (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020), Vogan (with Chris Coldwell) has edited these notes, presenting modern readers with an accessible and carefully annotated edition of an important sermon series from one of the most influential early modern Scottish theologians.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carina Johnson is coeditor -- with David Luebke, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz -- of Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017 (Berghahn, 2019) and she is also the author of the introduction to this collected volume. Today she talks about these fifteen essays written by both German and American experts of Reformation History and how they see the towering figure of Martin Luther looming over 500 years of German history and identity.In terms of theology and confession, then later (in the nineteenth century) of nationalism, and (finally) the post-national, almost Pan-European politics of today, Martin Luther has been asked to wear many hats over time. In this discussion, Professor Johnson considers the agendas those hats have contained, while also considering the details of social history of real people who lived their lives oblivious to the political questions in the stratosphere. In the second half of this discussion, Dr. Johnson considers the changing role of ‘Great Men’ in the service of public memory, including Martin Luther King (on whose holiday we recorded) and Christopher Columbus whose quincentenary preceded Luther’s by 25 years and is still fresh in our minds.Carina Johnson is Professor of History at Pitzer College. She is the author of Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (2011). Her current research includes “cross-cultural encounters, proto-ethnography, memory, and the experience of violence in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire.” Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe, the Spanish Empire, and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eminent medievalist Michael D. Bailey, Professor of History at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, talks about his upcoming book, Origin of the Witches’ Sabbath. The book contains nimble and enjoyable translations of five medieval treatises as well as the two witchcraft trials, as well as a critical introduction.While the perception of magic as harmful is age-old, the notion of witches gathering together in large numbers, overtly worshiping demons, and receiving instruction in how to work harmful magic as part of a conspiratorial plot against Christian society was an innovation of the early fifteenth century. The sources collected in this book reveal this concept in its formative stages.The idea that witches were members of organized heretical sects or part of a vast diabolical conspiracy crystalized most clearly in a handful of texts written in the 1430s and clustered geographically around the arc of the western Alps. Michael D. Bailey presents accessible English translations of the five oldest surviving texts describing the witches’ sabbath and of two witch trials from the period. These sources, some of which were previously unavailable in English or available only in incomplete or out-of-date translations, show how perceptions of witchcraft shifted from a general belief in harmful magic practiced by individuals to a conspiratorial and organized threat that led to the witch hunts that shook northern Europe and went on to influence conceptions of diabolical witchcraft for centuries to come.Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath makes freshly available a profoundly important group of texts that are key to understanding the cultural context of this dark chapter in Europe’s history. It will be especially valuable to those studying the history of witchcraft, medieval and early modern legal history, religion and theology, magic, and esotericism. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices