New Books in Early Modern History

Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the story of Ottoman Egypt and astronomy, looking at how astronomy tied together the state and religious practice. We talk about how religious authority was negotiated through astronomy, the zij (the genre of astronomic handbooks used by astronomers), translation, and how print affected the distribution of astronomic knowledge. Stolz also contends with the specter of the nahda, or the Arabic language intellectual renaissance, and he tells us how he deals with it in his work. As always, we check in with the field of Middle Eastern history and ask what one should do with increasingly limited access to archives.Daniel Stolz is an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was previously a visiting assistant professor of history at Northwestern University, where he was also affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. He received his PhD from Princeton University in Near Eastern Studies. He is a historian of the modern Middle East, specializing in Egypt and the late Ottoman Empire. He is the author of many articles on science and religion in Egypt and the monograph discussed in this interview.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

Exactly five centuries after Martin Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Christians continue to debate the best approach to the reading of their sacred book. The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor University Press, 2017) the latest book by Iain Provan, who is the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College, Vancouver, advises readers on how to balance the competing claims of tradition and modernity. Provan’s work proposes a “seriously literal” reading of Scripture. But what does that mean, and how can it be defended?Provan is leading a study tour called “Walking Where Luther Walked” from 29 April to 8 May, 2019. For more information, click here.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

Robert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subjects in eighteenth-century England didn’t know they were living in something called ‘the Enlightenment.’ Rather, they were still grappling with the fallout of the Reformation, and more specifically the results of two bloody seventeenth-century revolutions. Ingram’s excellent book analyzes the ways that the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions and the event caused them.Robert G. Ingram is a professor of History at Ohio University, where he teaches early Modern British and European religious, political, and intellectual history. He is also the founding director of the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics and Institutions.Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and as a dimension of imperialism through the development of the Portuguese empire. The global connections forged by seafaring empires demanded new ways of conceiving a unified world. As the Portuguese were first to discover, the ancient canon provided little guidance, and far-flung colonies all seemed unique and defied coherent categorization. Through efforts to interpret, control, and economize a their outposts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the Portuguese developed novel and creative methods of producing knowledge within a globalizing world. Late in the 17th century, some of these efforts would coalesce around the idea of the tropics as physicians attempted to consolidate their authority over the health of the empire.  A space of prodigious nature and profuse disease, the tropics soon became an orienting notion of modern race theory and empires.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

Most Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates in his new book In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking, 2018), it was Admiral Comte de Grasse’s naval victories which made possible George Washington’s decisive victory at the battle of Yorktown. Such a victory did not seem possible at the start of 1781, as the British imperial forces seemed locked in an intractable stalemate with the rebelling colonists. In that year, however, the assistance of the French helped to tip the balance, not just on sea but in the land war as well. Once Admiral de Grasse’s ships drove off the British fleet in the battle of the Chesapeake, Washington was able to lay siege to General Charles Cornwallis’s forces at Yorktown with a combined Franco-American army, defeating the main British force in the Southern states and realizing America’s independence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of anyone working on the history of anatomy, early modern medicine, and/or the history of the book. This volume pays special attention to the Fabrica as material object, tracing how owners used and reacted to it by carefully tracing 475 years of its reading history through annotations, hand-coloring, binding, circulation, and other evidence left from the global movement of copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions. Dániel Margócsy and I talked about the process by which he and his co-authors (Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe) accomplished this massive task, and what the resulting volume can help us understand about the reception history of the Fabrica and its larger consequences for how we work with books as objects.Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dramatic fall and destruction of Ayutthaya at the hands of the Burmese in 1767 has been the subject of films, television shows, songs and books for popular audiences and classrooms, many of them aimed at stoking nationalist sentiment among the citizens of contemporary Thailand and Myanmar by invoking a sense of historical animosity and vengefulness. But what was Ayutthaya before its downfall? How did it become so successful, and if it was such a success, why did it collapse so quickly when confronted by enemies. In A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) long-time collaborators Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit answer these questions and many more. Along the way they offer a new thesis on the economy and society of Ayutthaya that departs from an established view of it as peasant-based. Baker joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss this thesis, to talk about the city’s commercial and political relations not only with its close neighbours but also with China, Japan, Persia and Europe; the part that Buddhism played in its politics and social life, and to reflect on the uses and challenges presented to scholars of the period by sources both official and literary. Listeners of this episode might also be interested in:* Shane Strate, The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation* Kathelene Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern AsiaNick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than focus on the city itself or the republic’s higher-profile naval forces, Ongaro examines the workings of the Venetian land forces—its cavalry, militia, and fortress structures. Financing and supplying these forces required increasingly sophisticated administrative measures that, as in so many European states at the time, drove the expansion of state institutions. Most previous studies have assumed that such expansion came at the expense of local power structures and that state administrations existed in competition with local elites. By examining the records of municipal and rural archives in the Venetian hinterland, Ongaro instead shows that while the central state had the power to make demands, those demands were most often satisfied in cooperation with local forces, rather than in competition. Local elites benefitted from the contracts to provision fortresses or supply saltpeter, for example, and so did not resist state directives as a matter of course.This detailed economic history will expand your horizons and your understanding of early modern military history.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the government: “Who nominated you to tell the people that God does not exist anymore?  What do you hope to gain by persuading Man…that his soul is nothing but a puff of wind, blown away at the gates of the tomb?” He then proceeded to lay out his vision for a national moral code rooted in a belief in the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.  To introduce this civic religion to the people, Robespierre, with the help of Jacques-Louis David, created the Festival of the Supreme Being which would be celebrated across the whole of France. In his book, Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality (Manchester University Press, 2016), Dr. Jonathan Smyth examines Robespierre’s desire to establish a national morality as the foundation for his utopian Republic of Virtue.  Drawing from his extensive research in departmental and local archives, Dr. Smyth offers a fascinating look at the festival from the planning stage to its execution in both Paris and the provinces.Dr. Jonathan Smyth is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.  After retirement from his previous profession in 1998, he was awarded a First-Class Honours B.A. in Humanities from the Open University in 2003, and a Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Pamela Pilbeam at Royal Holloway in 2010.  He has presented papers on various political, religious, and cultural aspects of the French Revolution, especially revolutionary festivals, at the George Rudé Conference,  Society for the Study of French History conferences, various symposia and colloquia in France, and the Society for French Historical Studies Conference in the United States.Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though today the public and private sectors are treated as distinct if not separate, the situation was quite different in early modern England. Back then the two were often intertwined, with one of the best examples of this being the English East India Company. In her book A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Harvard University Press, 2018), Rupali Mishra examines the relationship between the Company and the English state in the early 17th century, showing the many ways in which the two were linked. As Mishra explains, their involvement began with the very creation of the Company, through the granting of a patent that delegated a degree of sovereignty to it. This empowerment was important to the Company’s success, though it also fueled conflicts both internally and with the broader London mercantile community. Added to the semi-official status that the Company sometimes possessed in its dealings abroad was the investment in the Company by many of the leading political figures of that time, including the king, James I. James was not above exploiting the Company as a tool of his policy, though the Company’s sometimes difficult relationship with the crown worsened after his passing in 1625, as his successor Charles I posed yet another series of challenges the Company had to navigate in order to maintain its very existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices