New Books in Early Modern History

In Middle Eastern and Islamic intellectual history, there has long been an assumption of decline in the eighteenth century, right before the nineteenth century, when the nahda or Arabic intellectual renaissance, began: intellectuals were caught in a period of stagnation and retrograde. Ahmad Dallal pushes back against this in Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth Century Islamic Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), bringing together an intricate matrix of ideas stemming from multiple fields of knowledge. He pins this all together with the notion of reform, all the while reminding us that reform is also about tradition. He starts with Wahhabism, carefully dissecting the thought of Muhammad ibn Abdel Wahhab, and then connects it to eighteenth century responses to Wahhabism. From there on, he draws in Hadith studies, Sufism, the concept of Ijtihad in legal reasoning, and legal theory to paint a tapestry of interlaced and dynamic ideas. Overwhelmingly, Dallal demonstrates that reform was tied to giving practicing Muslims increasing control over their own faith. Beyond that, Dallal talks to us about Islamic studies, Orientalism, and modernity, elucidating why we need to bring the 18th century back into the fold of Islamic and Middle Eastern intellectual history.Ahmad Dallal is the dean of Georgetown University in Qatar. He was professor of history (2009-2017) and was the provost at the American University in Beirut (AUB) from 2009 to 2015.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

The early-modern Atlantic World was a chaotic place over which European empires frequently had little control. In her new book American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Molly Warsh uses the pearl trade to explain the complications around imperial economies and imaginations. ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Allan Greer, Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University in Montréal, examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of ‘property formation’ to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent’s resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book’s geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) invites readers to recognize just how often educational encounters crop up throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus. By attending to the ways that violence, deceit, suspicion, sexual desire, concealed identities, and various temptations modulate the relationship between teacher and student, and the ways that shocking and moving stories fix knowledge in the mind and demonstrate relationships—even grammatical relations—in unforgettable ways, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature offers readers interested in the history of pedagogy an exploration of the relationships between Anglo-Saxon students and teachers that tangles with both scholarly and popular expectations of the medieval mind.Addressing Anglo-Saxon uses of the culture of late antiquity, especially the form of the dialogue, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature reveals scenes heavily invested in the tensions between teacher and student, portrayals of engagement between parties that complicate relations of power and creation of knowledge. In the texts under consideration, the lesson for the reader (or hearer) grows from the conflict, rather than concord, between student and teacher. Focused on spiritual education and literacy, often closely linked in Anglo-Saxon texts, Dr. Dumitrescu’s work considers the Anglo-Saxon interest in negative emotions like fear, curiosity, erotic longing, and mistrust; and the potential cognitive uses of these emotions as they emerge in the faceoffs, desert journeys, revenants, riddles, letter battles, sea voyages, and challenges to memory that provide the narrative substance of Anglo-Saxon writing.Rereading the standard texts of the Anglo-Saxon corpus, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature demonstrates the ways in which texts like The Life of St. Mary of Egypt speak to broader medieval interests in learning, and drives toward a grasp of Anglo-Saxon beliefs about the purposes of teaching. Chapters on Solomon and Saturn I, Aelfric Bata’s Colloquies, and Andreas follow an approach to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History which suggests that the common focus on Caedmon’s Hymn draws attention away from the John of Beverly miracle: a story at the crossroads between miraculous Latin learning and English poetry in a mode of vernacular liberation.Treating urges and passions as sparks that give the learning process a necessary heat, even as they threaten to scorch it beyond utility, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature sketches a subtle and sophisticated approach to human emotion and cognition in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England.A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him with a taste for the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in the present, and imagine possible futures. Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritual practitioners in the Caribbean claimed knowledge about the natural world during the 17th century. With penetrating research and analysis, Gomez illustrates how these specialists of African descent devised localized ways of knowing health, nature, and the body, while working within cosmopolitan Caribbean societies in which ritual traditions from around the Atlantic intersected. In a region that was of majority African descent, these practitioners rose to become the intellectual leaders, devising epistemological innovations that spoke to, engaged with and were parallel with European scientific developments, but have hitherto never been included in intellectual history.Pablo Gomez is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. This unique book by dynamic father-son duo Steve and Ben Nadler is titled Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy. It follows the lives and writings of contentious and controversial philosophers from Galileo and Descartes to Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton. Crisscrossing Europe as it follows them in their travels and exiles, the narrative describes their meetings and clashes with each other, their confrontations with religious and royal authority, and recounts key moments in the history of modern philosophy.Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of philosophy and the Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in 17th century philosophy. His books include Spinoza: A Life, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award, and Rembrandt’s Jews which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His son Ben Nadler is an illustrator and a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. See more of his work here.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, offers a sweeping and brilliant intellectual history of the concept of ‘Irfan in medieval, early Modern, and modern contexts. Combining a mesmerizingly layered analysis of previously unexplored manuscripts with close attention to shifting social and political contexts, Anzali shows, with dazzling nuance, the processes and dynamics that informed the institutionalization of ‘Irfan in Iran. This nimbly written book will be of considerable interest to scholars of Muslim intellectual history and Religious Studies. In this conversation, we talked about the key themes, theoretical interventions, and arguments of this book.SherAli Tareen is Assistant 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

In The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2018), Alexander Bevilacqua uncovers a different side of the European Enlightenment, at least with regards to its engagement with Arabic and Islam. Instead of polemics, he tells the story of how books and ideas moved across continents and were studied in Europe, where they were considered a serious object of engagement. He first tracks the movement of books to Europe, then the translation of Arabic’s most famous book—the Qur’an—culminating in the study of Arabic-language materials, which he refers to as the Republic of Arabic Letters. He draws on sources in multiple languages to paint a picture of a vibrant long-distance intellectual community (or the Republic of Arabic Letters) that, for a brief period before European colonial encounters, admired, rather than derided the Arab and Muslim intellectual traditions. He talks to us about the inspiration for the book, why he thinks this intellectual community was so important, and where he sees his work amidst the greater sea of scholarship.Alexander Bevilacqua is an Assistant Professor of History at Williams College. He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (ca. 1450 to 1800). He was educated at Harvard College, University of Cambridge, and Princeton University. From 2014 until 2017 he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. His work has appeared in History of European Ideas, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Past and Present. He has edited, along with F. Clark, Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations (Forthcoming in December 2018 with University of Chicago Press) and he won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize of Harvard University Press for The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment.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

Ethan L. Menchinger‘s The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif (Cambridge University Press, 2017) traces the life and career of Ahmed Vasif (ca. 1735-1806), a prominent diplomat, historian, and intellectual of the early modern Ottoman Empire. This vivid biography places Vasif in the context of an Empire at a historical crossroads. Having witnessed his Empire’s defeat against Russia firsthand, Vasif struggled with how the Ottoman Empire could regain the prestige and power he felt it had lost. By carefully tracing Vasif’s fascinating career, Menchinger reveals a robust debate among Ottoman elites over morality, war, and Ottoman statecraft that drew on a rich imperial past and the exigencies of a new age. This crucial debate helped to frame the intellectual and political life in the Ottoman Empire’s final century. Menchinger’s book would be of interest to intellectual historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, as well as students and scholars interested more broadly in issues of decline, reform, and modernity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices