New Books in Early Modern History

In her book, Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699 (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sher Banu Khan provides a rare and empirically rich view of queenship in early modern maritime Southeast Asia. Four women ruled the Muslim realm of Aceh in succession during the second half of the seventeenth century. Their reign – with the acquiescence of the religious elite in the kingdom - was remarkable in a society where women were not seen as natural rulers, and where in more recent history, public leadership by women was discouraged. Writing against extant historiography that depicts this era as a period of decline, Khan argues instead that the queens of Aceh enabled diplomatic and trading networks to prosper and asserted Acehnese sovereignty in encounters with European powers.In our conversation, we discuss the challenges in multi-lingual archival work, how studying queens can help us to reframe the idea of decline, the gendering of authority and leadership as well as the place of female authority in the Muslim world.Sher Banu Khan is an associate professor of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore.Faizah Zakaria is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her intimidatingly brilliant new book Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sohaira Siddiqui conducts a masterful analysis of how conditions of political change and fragmentation generate intellectual debates and fermentation on the often-conflictual interaction of certainty, continuity, and community in Muslim thought and practice. Focused on the thought and career of the prominent 11th-century Muslim scholar al-Juwayni (d. 1085), Siddiqui examines the hermeneutical choices, operations, and conundrums that go into the negotiation of epistemic certainty in the realms of law and theology with the imperative of historical change and dynamism. The distinguishing hallmark of this book is the way it conducts a thoroughly interdisciplinary examination of early Muslim intellectual thought by putting Islamic law, theology, and politics into a productive and rather profound conversation. The outcome is a study that combines philological prowess, analytical sophistication, and astonishing lucidity. Sure to spark important conversations in Islamic Studies and beyond, this book deserves to be taught in wide ranging undergraduate and graduate seminars as well.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Calvin continues to be the focus of a huge amount of scholarly attention. An annual bibliography records the thousands of items that are published every year on this most seminal of early modern religious thinkers. But how should readers navigate this constantly expanding field? Today we catch up with John W. Tweeddale, academic dean and professor of theology at Reformation Bible College, FL, who is one of the editors (with Derek Thomas) of an important new volume, John Calvin: For a New Reformation (Crossway, 2019). This volume introduces principal themes in its subject’s life, thought and literary achievements – a volume that is set to become a handbook for many readers as they discover one of the greatest protestant theologians.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (Penn State University Press, 2018), Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018), Abigail Shinn, who teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, opens up a broader range of conversion narratives than literary or historical scholars have previously discussed. By expanding the chronological and geographical range of her sources, and so expanding their religious affiliation of her authors and drawing into discussion larger numbers of women, she shows how the representation of conversion changed from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and how disparate narratives relating experiences of Protestant, Catholic and Islamic conversion nevertheless continued to show similar rhetorical characteristics.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the opportunity to lead the way.In Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire (Basic Books, 2019), Alan Gallay shows that, while Ralegh may be best known for founding the failed Roanoke colony, his historical importance vastly exceeds that enterprise. Inspired by the mystical religious philosophy of hermeticism, Ralegh led English attempts to colonize in North America, South America, and Ireland. He believed that the answer to English fears of national decline resided overseas — and that colonialism could be achieved without conquest. Gallay reveals how Ralegh launched the English Empire and an era of colonization that shaped Western history for centuries after his death.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty at California community colleges as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his majestic and encyclopedic new book Slavery and Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2019), Jonathan A. C. Brown presents a sweeping analysis of Muslim intellectual, political, and social entanglements with slavery, and some of the thorniest conceptual and ethical problems involved in defining and writing about slavery. Self-reflective and bold, Slavery and Islam also offers a remarkable combination of intellectual and social history, anchored in layers of complex yet eminently accessible textual analysis. What makes talking about slavery so difficult? What are the dominant discourses on and attitudes about slavery that have dominated Muslim history? What are some of the major points of overlap and fissure between Western and Muslim understandings of slavery? And how must one confront the ethical and interpretive challenges brought by the presence of slavery in Islam? These are among the questions Brown explores and addresses in this monumental work of scholarship that is sure to spark many conversations and debates, within and outside Islamic Studies.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Labels on a map: Surrey. Lower Norfolk. The Isle of Wight. Northumberland. Middlesex. Not a map England, but of the British colonies of Virginia and Maryland published in 1673. This is a map that proclaims empire: from the prominent royal arms, to the ships riding at anchor out in what is labelled the ‘North Sea’. It is both a map of land and of water: rivers open into the interior like great highways; the landscape is thick with English place names. But there are other layers, other presences and histories: indigenous place names, towns and territories not separate but intermingled in a world made less strange by the mere act of naming. And at the top edge of the map, a block of text that describes what lies beyond the Appalachians, where ‘the Rivers take their Originall issuing out into the West Sea’.Christian J. Koot is Professor of History at Towson University. In A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake (NYU Press, 2018) he tells the story of the maker and his map. It was a map in motion along circuits of commerce and knowledge that carried it across an ocean and into the coffeehouses and collections of a metropolitan imperial elite. The book is as striking and detailed as the map at its centre: carefully researched and beautifully illustrated, it illuminates and connects a series of complex worlds.The map discussed in this interview can be accessed here.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, we catch up with Paul Lay, editor of the leading journal History Today, and a senior research fellow in early modern history at the University of Buckingham. Paul is the author of a brilliant new account of the British republic. Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (Head of Zeus, 2020) is the most up to date and accessible narrative of the crucial period in which, after a string of military victories and the invasions of Ireland and Scotland, the revolutionary regime over-reached itself in the failed conquest of Spanish South America, with dramatic consequences for the stability and integrity of government at home. The failed expedition dealt a crushing blow to the confidence of the regime, which believed that God was on its side, and exposed the weaknesses of those improvised systems of government that depended too much upon the security and ability of the single individual at its head. Providence Lost is a compelling and exciting account of a critical period in early modern British history.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Colbert Cairns’ book, Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), traces the biblical figure of Esther, the secret Jewish Queen, as she is reinvented as the patron saint for the early modern Sephardic community. This hybrid globetrotter emerges repeatedly in dramatic texts, poetry, and even visual representation in the global Sephardic diaspora on the Iberian Peninsula, Amsterdam, and New Spain. Colbert Cairns argues that Esther’s female body emerges as a site for power struggles and symbolic territory for drawing constantly moving communal boundaries. While certain early modern representations of Esther mobilize this queen promote traditional values for proper female behavior (obedience, deference to male authority, beauty), Colbert Cairns shows that Esther’s identity exceeds facile notions of national, ethnic, or racial identity and instead opens out a sense of Sephardic difference beyond geographical boundaries.Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices