New Books in Early Modern History

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 2015; paperback edition, 2018), delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology’s academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the “natural history of man.”Han F. Vermeulen, alumnus of Leiden University and research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how “ethnography” originated as field research by German-speaking historians and naturalists in Siberia (Russia) during the 1730s and 1740s, was generalized as “ethnology” by scholars in Göttingen (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) during the 1770s and 1780s, and was subsequently adopted by researchers in other countries. Before Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on “other” cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Following G. W. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College 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

Paula McQuade, professor of English literature at DePaul University, is the author of a brilliant new account of Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2017). This book opens up an entirely new field for the study of early modern women’s writing, but it also pushes beyond other scholarly conventions to prompt new discussions about the purpose and performance of catechising, the character of household religion and its relationship to education and particularly the teaching of literacy, as well as the capacity of women to create systems of doctrine, with sometimes surprising sources and results. But the book raises other questions as well, not least why it is that the recovery of early modern religion, and particularly the religion of early modern women, so often takes place within literature departments. Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England is a major statement in early modern religious history, and a ground-breaking work in the recovery of early modern women’s voices.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

The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. Gerald Leonard, Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and Saul Cornell, Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University, focus on the decline of the Founding generation's elitist vision of the Constitution and the rise of a more 'democratic' vision premised on the exclusion of women and non-whites. It incorporates recent scholarship on topics ranging from judicial review to popular constitutionalism to place judicial initiatives like Marbury vs Madison in a broader, socio-legal context. The book recognizes the role of constitutional outsiders as agents in shaping the law, making figures such as the Whiskey Rebels, Judith Sargent Murray, and James Forten part of a cast of characters that has traditionally been limited to white, male elites such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall. Finally, it shows how the 'democratic' political party came to supplant the Supreme Court as the nation's pre-eminent constitutional institution.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College 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

Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston and Philadelphia while mocking the scattered settlements of the French. Colonial founders characterized their social experiment as a ‘City on a Hill’, and texts that promoted colonization listed the size and location of a growing number of principal towns and cities. Outside the confines of cities lay different places: the backcountry of settlement and Indian war; an unmapped landscape of forests and rivers. If the town stood out as a site of ordered settlement, the ‘wilderness’ remained a place of mystery and danger.Paul Musselwhite is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2019), he challenges the conventional view of the Chesapeake as a rural society of tobacco and slavery that prevented the development of towns and cities. He argues that contemporaries argued about urban development in ways that intersected with wider discussions of the political and commercial order of the Chesapeake, and its place in theories of commerce and the state in Britain between the early seventeenth century and the American Revolution.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

Gerry Milligan’s Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2018) takes as its subject the woman warrior in early modern Italy as she was and as she was represented across varied types of texts, both literary and historical. What emerges is a discursive construction of the role gender played in the concept of warfare during this time period. How are women depicted in relation to warfare? Are they non-combatant innocents protected by male warriors? If this is not (only) the case, how does the representation of the woman warrior illuminate men and masculinity in the Italian Renaissance? How are gender roles rewritten, challenged, and reaffirmed in the texts under consideration? How do the figures of the virago and the woman warrior resonate with 21st century gender norms? These are some of Milligan’s questions, as well as some of the topics, we consider in this podcast.Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la future consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black’s impressive new book offers an enormously wide-ranging account of the social, political and religious cultures in which England’s greatest dramatist was formed and found success. England in the Age of Shakespeare (Indiana University Press, 2019) draws together Black’s expansive reading in Shakespeare’s contexts with extensive knowledge of the canon of his plays. Black, a professor of history at Exeter University, reads the plays as evidence of Shakespeare’s interest in his changing world. As an English writer, rooted in the very distinctive theological and liturgical arguments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare offers a moral vision of a turbulent and contradictory world.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

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task.In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library.Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed of women who were determined to make their grievances known. Furious at the ever rising price and scarcity of bread, Parisian market women, known as Dames des Halles, joined with other revolutionaries to demand King Louis XVI distribute bread, address the suffering of his subjects, and approve revolutionary reforms. The king ultimately conceded to the market women’s demands. The success of the march symbolized commoners’ new power in politics, including their ability to influence the monarch himself. Although this was certainly watershed moment for the French Revolution, the impact of Dames des Halles went far beyond October 5. As Dr. Katie Jarvis, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, argues in her new book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Oxford University Press, 2019) the Dames drew on their patriotic work as activists and their gendered work as republican mothers to compel the French state to provide practical solutions to the many economic, social, and political issues that children, families, and their customers faced in the marketplace daily. The Dames’ notion of citizenship portrayed their useful work, rather than gender, as a cornerstone of civic legitimacy. Although the Revolution has been told as a primarily masculine trajectory of citizenship, Politics in the Marketplace challenges this assumption and reexamines work, gender, and citizenship at the cusp of modern democracy.Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia is finishing her manuscript, Coercing Children, that examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bianca Premo’s award-winning book The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, makes a powerful yet seemingly simple claim: during the eighteenth century, illiterate ordinary litigants in colonial Spanish America created enlightened ideas and practices by suing their social superiors in higher numbers and with novel claims. By focusing on civil suits undertaken by women, indigenous groups, and the enslaved, Premo demonstrates a gradual shift from a justice-oriented system—focused on extralegal outcomes and casuistic jurisprudence—to a Enlightened law-oriented system—where ordinary litigants based their claims on natural rights, merit, and freedom. Such a transformation expanded through varied and diverse geographies; from metropolitan cities such as Mexico City and Lima, to rural indigenous regions of Oaxaca, and smaller, ethnically diverse, provincial cities such as Trujillo in Peru. As listeners will hear, The Enlightenment on Trial not only challenges traditional histories that have placed the origin of the Enlightenment solely in Western Europe, and in the minds of a few and select group of European men, but it also asks us to situate Latin America in a global conversation— one in which the ideas of ordinary citizens are the matter of intellectual history, and where our commonalities as humans are more important than our differences. This last point, as professor Premo reminds us at the end of the conversation, is an important lesson for our present, a moment in which arguments about radical alterity are used as a basis for exclusion. Instead, for Premo, it is important to highlight the histories that we share, the stories in which we all partake, and that we all need to recover from historical erasure.Lisette Varon-Carvjal is a graduate student in history at Rutger's University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chocolate – nothing is more irresistible for a decadent treat or a rich drink to warm you on a cold winter’s evening. In eighteenth-century Venezuela, cacao became a life source for the colony. Neglected by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. But, they found a solution in trading the highly coveted luxury good, cacao, for the necessities of life with contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean. Establishing an intricate contraband network, an intricate contraband network, Venezuelans normalized their subversions to imperial law. Today, we’re pleased to welcome Jesse Cromwell to discuss his new book, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (published in 2018 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press). This incredibly well researched and beautifully written book explores how smuggling in the Spanish Atlantic became more than an economic transaction or imperial worry. Persistent local need elevated smuggling to a communal ethos and Venezuelans defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures as well as violent protests when the Spanish state enacted the Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century. Exchanges over smuggling between the Spanish empire and its colonial subjects formed a key part of empire making and maintenance in the eighteenth century.Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia is finishing her manuscript, Coercing Children, that examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices