New Books in Early Modern History

Jodi Campbell is Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She has written extensively on Spanish drama, royal history and women’s history. Her first book was published by Ashgate in 2006 and is titled Monarchy, Political Culture and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation. She also co-edited Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2012). Dr. Campbell’s new book, At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) focuses on food as a mechanism for the performance of social identity in early modern Spain.According to Dr. Campbell, early modern Spaniards adhered to strict regulations about food consumption based on their place in the social hierarchy as well as defined categories of gender, age, occupation and religion. The particular foods one ate as well as how they ate them were part of a display of identity and collective belonging.This enticingly-written book fills a need in food scholarship to understand Spanish customs in the broader context of early modern European food culture. Spain followed some of the general European trends for adopting New World foods, such as sugar, but its Jewish and Muslim roots inflected Spain with its own particular food heritage.“A phenomenal book… beautifully written and organized, and meticulously researched with a broad range of primary and secondary sources. There is nothing like it in English.”--Ken Albala, professor of history and the director of the Food Studies Program at the University of the Pacific and the author of Food in Early Modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (University of Virginia Press, 2017; paperback, 2018), William Kelso, Emeritus Head Archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, takes us literally to the soil where the 1607 Jamestown colony began, unearthing footprints of a series of structures, beginning with the James Fort, to reveal fascinating evidence of the lives and deaths of the first settlers, of their endeavors and struggles, and new insight into their relationships with the Virginia Indians. He offers up a lively but fact-based account, framed around a narrative of the archaeological team's exciting discoveries.Unpersuaded by the common assumption that James Fort had long ago been washed away by the James River, William Kelso and his collaborators estimated the likely site for the fort and began to unearth its extensive remains, including palisade walls, bulwarks, interior buildings, a well, a warehouse, and several pits. By Jamestown’s quadricentennial over 2 million objects were cataloged, more than half dating to the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Kelso’s work has continued with recent excavations of numerous additional buildings, including the settlement’s first church, which served as the burial place of four Jamestown leaders, the governor’s rowhouse during the term of Samuel Argall, and substantial dump sites, which are troves for archaeologists. He also recounts how researchers confirmed the practice of survival cannibalism in the colony following the recovery from an abandoned cellar bakery of the cleaver-scarred remains of a young English girl. CT scanning and computer graphics have even allowed researchers to put a face on this victim of the brutal winter of 1609–10, a period that has come to be known as the "starving time."Refuting the now decades-old stereotype that attributed the high mortality rate of the Jamestown settlers to their laziness and ineptitude, Jamestown, the Truth Revealed produces a vivid picture of the settlement that is far more complex, incorporating the most recent archaeology and using twenty-first-century technology to give Jamestown its rightful place in history, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of the transatlantic world.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris], Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps. These images are integrated into the text and function not only as illustrations, but also as images with their own story to tell. Majerus’ narrative arc follows the twists and turns of madness in a city long associated with mental pathogens and their cures and reveals how the history of psychiatry can be told differently through the lens of visual culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In November 2013, two mass burials were discovered unexpectedly on a construction site in the city of Durham in northeast England. Over the next two years, a complex jigsaw of evidence was pieced together by Christopher Gerrard, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Durham, and a team of archaeologists to establish the identity of the human remains. Today we know them to be some of the Scottish prisoners who died in the autumn of 1650 in Durham cathedral and castle following the battle of Dunbar on the south-east coast of Scotland. Fought between the English and the Scots, this was one of the key engagements of the War of the Three Kingdoms. Using the latest techniques of skeleton science, this book gives back to the men a voice through an understanding of their childhood and later lives. Archaeological and historical evidence also allows us to reconstruct with vivid accuracy how and why these men vanished off the historical radar. Of the prisoners who survived their ordeal after Dunbar, new evidence has emerged about their involvement in local industries and in one of the great infrastructural projects of the day, the draining of the Fens. Others were sent far away, transported to the colonies as indentured servants to begin a new life at the edge of the known world. Following the trail of their biographies takes us across the Atlantic where the Dunbar men supported each other throughout their lives on the frontiers of New England. Here they worked in ironworks and sawmills, farmed and fished and adapted to the vast forested landscapes which they named ‘Scotland’ and ‘Unity’, after the vessel they had sailed in. None returned to the country of their birth. Winner of the Best Archaeological Book at the 2018 British Archaeology Awards, Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar, 1650 (Oxbow Books, 2018) is a collaboration between academic researchers and professional archaeologists working on the Scottish Soldiers Research Project.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, thanks to his editorship of the influential multi-volume Encyclopédie. As Andrew S. Curran explains in his biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019) however, this was just one product of his wide-ranging literary efforts. The son of a cutler, Diderot underwent training for a life in the church, only to abandon it for an uncertain literary career. Initially finding success as a translator, his early works gained Diderot both acclaim and led to his imprisonment for several months. It was soon after his release that Diderot began work on the Encyclopédie, a years-long project that proved an important vehicle for spreading many of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Curran demonstrates that editing the Encyclopédie served as a way for Diderot to advance his views while avoiding the brunt of the controversy they engendered, with many of his later, often radical works not published until many years after his death in 1784.Andrew S. Curran (Ph.D., New York University, 1996) is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and a member of Wesleyan University’s Romance Languages and Literatures department. In addition to Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, his major publications include an edited volume (Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought in Eighteenth-Century Life) and two books: Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 2001) and, more recently, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011 / paper 2013). The Anatomy of Blackness recently appeared in French translation (Anatomie de la noirceur) at Classiques Garnier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victoria Brownlee is the author of an exciting new contribution to discussions of early modern religion and literature. Her new book, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers an illuminating account of how, why, when, where and by whom Bibles were read in early modern England, as well as a series of case studies of particular characters or passages in the Old and New Testaments. Why did Bible reading matter so much in the England of Elizabeth I and James VI/I? Did it matter that the Bible was an illustrated text? Why did expositors work so hard to limit the language of the Song of Songs, when creative writers worked so hard to expand its reference? Join us on this podcast as Dr. Brownlee suggests answers to these and other questions about readings of the Bible in early modern England.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 Islamic intellectual history, it is generally assumed that the Ottomans did not contribute much to Islamic thought. With his new book, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2018), Hüseyin Yılmaz uses the Ottoman notion of the caliphate to push back against that assumption: he demonstrates how a new understanding of the caliphate was developed by Ottoman thinkers, by engaging with those that came before them as well as their own lived present. But Yılmaz goes beyond simply addressing the caliphate and political thought. Caliphate Redefined represents one of the first major studies of pre-modern Ottoman thought, mapping out the field for the benefit for all of those who engage with it. Furthermore, Yilmaz pushes implicitly and forcefully for recognition of Turkish as a critical language in Islamic intellectual history, acknowledging its contribution to the Islamic thought canon. Finally, Caliphate Redefined is a stunning study of Sufism in the Turkish-speaking context, allowing us a glimpse of Sufism’s intellectual history and how it intersects and encompasses different aspects of Muslim life.Huseyin Yilmaz is associate professor at George Mason University. He holds a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. His research interests focus on the early modern Middle East including political thought, geographic imageries, social movements, and cultural history. He is also the Director of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. Prior to his appointment at George Mason, he taught for the Introduction to the Humanities Program and Department of History at Stanford University and the Department of History at University of South Florida. His new book, the subject of our interview, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2018), is the first comprehensive study of pre-modern Ottoman political thought and focuses on the intersection of mysticism and the definition of authority.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment. As savants attempted to appropriate leadership of the mechanical arts while deriding artisans as mere laborers, some of these refashioned themselves as artistes, capable of blending craft knowledge with intellectual esprit. Through the little studied and understood Société des Arts, these advertised their service and utility to the state and French economic and imperia expansion. As they fought for official appointments and academic recognition, they help solidify key the Enlightenment concept of technological progress. Through the eyes and experiences of artistes, the Enlightenment appears much less the product of intellectual breakthroughs, and instead, a reflection of the political economic strategies of artisans as they defined their role within the French empire.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite ranking among the most influential people in English history, Thomas Cromwell has long eluded biographers and historians. In Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (Viking, 2018), though, Diarmaid MacCulloch provides readers with the definitive study of this key figure in the English Reformation. Drawing upon the full range of the available archival material and his own deep understanding of the era, MacCulloch shows how Cromwell’s views and achievements often belie the historical reputation that has formed around him. The son of a yeoman, Cromwell emerged by dint of his abilities and language skills to become a trusted servant of the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, in the 1520s. When Wolsey lost favor because of his failure to obtain for Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Cromwell survived and established himself as a trusted adviser to the king. By 1534 he cemented his position as Henry’s chief minister, becoming the political architect of England’s break with the Catholic Church and the English Reformation that followed. As MacCulloch demonstrates, Cromwell’s skills as a Parliamentary manager and his experience with Church affairs were key to his role in the events of the 1530s, though in the end his formidable skills proved insufficient when Cromwell fell out of Henry’s favor by the end of the decade and was executed without trial in 1540. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of the British. Danna Agmon’s A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Cornell University, 2017) zooms in on the 1716 arrest and conviction of a Tamil commercial agent and employee of the French East India Company, a legal case that resonated throughout the empire for decades, even centuries, afterward. The “Nayiniyappa Affair” at the heart of this microhistory is Agmon’s way into a complex web of interests and fractures: the aims and actions of French traders, missionaries, and administrators, as well as the roles and agency of indigenous subjects and intermediaries. Moving from colonial Pondicherry to metropolitan France and back again, A Colonial Affair focuses on a local story and context with much broader implications for how we think about the workings of imperial power, authority, and sovereignty.In chapters that revisit the narrative of Nayiniyappa’s case from different angles, Agmon treats the affair as a prism illuminating aspects of the history of French colonialism. Examining the scandal from various perspectives, A Colonial Affair considers the myriad ways in which the origins and outcomes of the Nayiniyappa scandal were and might be understood. Throughout the book, Agmon weaves together the richness of the abundant archival material on the affair with careful analysis of the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of the case and context, including the meanings and effects of language, religious belief, local and kinship networks. A Colonial Affair will be of wide appeal to readers interested in the histories of France, India, Early modern capitalism, law, and empire in its multiple forms.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the cultural politics of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices