New Books in Early Modern History

From 1667 to 1676, a pivotal controversy played out among several mathematical luminaries of the time, partly in the proceedings of the Royal Society but partly in private correspondence. The controversy concerned whether an infamous problem of Ancient Greek geometry, the quadrature of the central conic sections (better known as squaring the circle), could be solved using the classical tools of straightedge and compass. While its impossibility would not be rigorously proven for two more centuries, the theoretical and philosophical implications of these attempts to settle the issue were constitutive of the contemporaneous development of calculus. Dr. Davide Crippa's book The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century (Birkhäuser, 2019) is a deep dive into this little-covered episode in the modern European history of mathematics. He examines the advances of Gregory and Leibniz in full mathematical detail, clarifying in current notation and elegant figures the steps and missteps of their constructions and arguments, and in some cases through the lens of critical and often fierce exchanges with their peers, including recently-published correspondence that traces the former's influence on the latter's efforts. The book reveals The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century to have been a sensation of its time, and deserving of a treatment of its own.Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Quantitative Medicine at UConn Health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are few better guides to the “long eighteenth century” that J. C. D. Clark, emeritus professor of history at the University of Kansas, whose sequence of ground-breaking books have contested prevailing assumptions about religion, politics and early modernity even as they have worked to construct a chastened but compelling account of British and American society from the Restoration to the Great Reform Act. In his new book, Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), Professor Clark works to deconstruct grand narratives of the “rise of modernity” and the political hagiography that so often surrounds his subject. Paine emerges from this account as an individual whose contribution was made in terms of the traditional language of English reformism as well as the recently established arguments of deism, and whose contribution to the American and French revolutions was accidental – and perhaps even incidental. In this exciting new book, Clark emphasizes Paine’s importance – but not in the ways that we might expect.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 a new podcast of the series ‘Arguing History’, Professor Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world, if not on the entire planet, and renowned Ecclesiastical Historian Professor William Gibson discuss the question: ‘is the idea of the Enlightenment one which is no longer useful for historians’? Be prepared for forty-plus minutes of intense but ultra-interesting discussion.Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison award for lifetime achievement.Professor William Gibson, is Professor at Oxford Brookes University. He is a specialist in 17th to 19th century English Ecclesiastical History. Among his other books are The Church of England 1688-1832: Unity and Accord, and Religion and the Enlightenment 1600-1800: Conflict and the Rise of Civic Humanism in Taunton.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

harles Caspers and Peter Jan Margry's The Miracle of Amsterdam: Biography of a Contested Devotion (University of Notre Dame, 2019) presents a “cultural biography” of a Dutch devotional manifestation. According to tradition, on the night of March 15, 1345, a Eucharistic host thrown into a burning fireplace was found intact hours later. A chapel was erected over the spot, and the citizens of Amsterdam became devoted to their “Holy Stead." From the original Eucharistic processions evolved the custom of individual devotees walking around the chapel while praying in silence, and the growing international pilgrimage site contributed to the rise and prosperity of Amsterdam.With the arrival of the Reformation, the Amsterdam Miracle became a point of contention between Catholics and Protestants, and the changing fortunes of this devotion provide us a front-row seat to the challenges facing religion in the world today. Caspers and Margry trace these transformations and their significance through the centuries, from the Catholic medieval period through the Reformation to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence.Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can science be seductive? According to Tita Chico, the answer is a resounding yes. In her new book, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment(Stanford University Press, 2018), Dr. Chico’s new book upends the traditional, modern dichotomies which enforce strict separations between literature and science. Rather than solely bound to rigorous, self-effacing protocols, scientific practice is instead revealed to be deeply tethered to imaginative, figurative, and aesthetic epistemologies. Much like science, literature produces its own forms of knowledge about the world – for, as Dr. Chico puts it, they are epistemological siblings. This is a book that will interest anyone seeking to question, historicize, and expand the meaning of scientific knowledge by way of recovering its early modern capaciousness. Not only did natural philosophers also write poetry, but natural philosophy could be poetic as well. Readers interested in exploring the possibilities of metaphor, figuration, the imagination, and aesthetics in science will find fertile ground in this book; whilst those seeking to engage in generative conversations about problems like objectivity, truth, and fact will not walk away disappointed either. The Experimental Imagination is, in sum, not only a very rich book, but a book that will surely generate many enriching conversations in e.g. the fields of literary studies, history of science, feminist STS, and eighteenth-century studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the British explored the Atlantic coast of America in the 1580s, their relations with indigenous peoples were structured by food. The newcomers, unable to sustain themselves through agriculture, relied on the local Algonquian people for resources. This led to tension, and then violence. When English raiding parties struck Algonquian villages, they destroyed crops and raided food stores. According to English sources, all of this was provoked by the ‘theft’ of a silver drinking cup, perhaps offered to an Algonquian visitor and understood as a gift of hospitality - a token of a new relationship of equals.For the historian, episodes like this are challenging to explain. We need to treat dismissals indigenous peoples as inferior with much greater scepticism. And we need to recover the intentions of peoples whose actions were interpreted and distorted by the observers who left the ‘historical’ records that we privilege as sources.Rachel Herrmann is Lecturer in Modern American History at Cardiff University. In No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution(Cornell University Press, 2019), she provides a powerfully original examination of how food and hunger structured relations of power in the revolutionary period. The book – which will be published by Cornell this autumn – ranges widely, from the villages of Iroquoia, to the lands of the Cherokee, and along routes taken by Africans to Canada and Sierra Leone. It is a feast, prepared with skill and served with considerable flair.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

There is no denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. The Queen is an iconic yet reserved figure, what with the kerchiefs, the corgis, and the deftly delivered speeches at state occasions. The younger royals seem to be interested in keeping it real, engaging different publics while maintaining ‘the Firm’s’ commitment to service to the nation. Like Greek Gods or reality show contestants, when it comes to the Royals, we all have our favourites.We have come a long way from the eighteenth century, when monarchs were branded as tyrants. At least that is the impression we get if we read the great anti-monarchical voices of the enlightenment. For Thomas Paine, ‘Monarchy and succession have laid the world in blood and ashes’. But lately historians have been taking a second look at the place of monarchy in the history of a global British empire. Hanna Weiss Muller is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University. In Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) she shows that the relationship between ‘subjects’ and ‘sovereign’ was defined by complex and shared bonds. The book takes us around the British empire, from Quebec, to Gibraltar to Calcutta, and reveals the many ways in which the status of subject bound the empire together.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

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (University of Washington Press, 2018) is more than a history of whaling in Japan. Jakobina K. Arch weaves together a wealth of diverse materials to demonstrate and explore the social, cultural, economic, intellectual, and religious impacts of whales on the world of Tokugawa Japan. In doing so, Arch argues powerfully for a historical vision that locates Japan within a larger global environment and also understands the fundamental interconnectedness of land and sea in particular. It is, as she writes, “nonsensical” to draw a clear dividing line between the archipelagic and the pelagic. Arch traces the history of whaling from its recorded origins in the late sixteenth century across the stretch of the Tokugawa period and into the modern period. In doing so, Bringing Whales Ashore not only contributes broadly to Tokugawa and environmental history, but also engages with the modern and contemporary politics of whaling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire. Wilken argues that it was not the political theorists of the Enlightenment who invented religious freedom in response to the wars of the Reformation, but rather the participants of the Reformation itself, including both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, who recovered ideas from the Roman-era Church fathers and used them to develop arguments about religious liberty for both individuals and faith communities. Wilken demonstrates that the concerns about whether faith could ever be enforced by the sword were present from the beginnings of Christianity. Wilken’s book helps inform our understanding of the origins of religious liberty, which is a concept of great import in contemporary debates about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices