New Books in Early Modern History

Matthew L. Jones’s wonderful new book traces a history of failed efforts to make calculating machines, from Blaise Pascal’s work in the 1640s through the efforts of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, incorporating an account of both the work and relationships of scholars and artisans, and their reflections on the nature of invention. Innovative in its approach and its form, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers a thoughtful and beautifully-written history of technology that offers an important perspective on a division between two poles of writing the history of technology: “the collective, deterministic account of inventive activity and the individualistic, heroic, creative account (7).” In Jones’s hands, we are offered a third way of understanding cultural production in early modernity, one that did not bifurcate between imitation and originality, social and individual making, or design and production. Central to the story is the history of efforts to mechanize the process of carrying ones in addition, and this fascinating problem persists as a thread through many of the projects discussed in the book. On the pages of Reckoning with Matter, readers will not only enjoy a compelling account of machine calculation through the nineteenth century, but will also find the story of a frog that tears out the eyes of a fish, a man who designed machines for making breakfast, and discussions of the significance of credit and intellectual property, modern programming, sketching, imitation, and debates over the nature of thinking. Highly recommended!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea monsters, and sundry multi-headed predators. But you also find a lot of bizarre, well, people. These include giant people, tiny people, one-footed people, people with two heads, and people with no heads at all (their eyes, mouths and noses are in their chests). What is one to make of all these different kinds of humanity? And, more important from a historical point of view, what did Renaissance mapmakers think they were doing when they adorned their cartographical products with them? In her wonderful new book Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Surekha Davies offer answers aplenty, and good ones. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays. Responding to a rich scholarship on Shakespeare, the authors shift the centers and margins of literary discourse to illuminate aspects that were previously dismissed as insignificant.In Culinary Shakespeare, food is theorized as a territory where multiple dimensions intersect and overlap: aesthetic, social, national, political, etc. As the authors of the introduction section state, “This culinary Shakespearean moment, by crystalizing question about knowledge, power, ethics, colonialism, labor, and desire, introduces us to the grave importance of food in the early modern period and to the dangers of ignoring eating as an ontological and epistemological phenomenon” (1). A part of everyday life, food reflects the individuals engagements with the world and others, revealing intricacies of communication and world-view construction.In Shakespeare’s plays, food is copiously visible and, at the same time, exquisitely subtle. As the essays demonstrate, Shakespeare offers a variety of food engagements ranging from traditional English cuisine and exotic delicatessens to drinking, feasting and banqueting. The three parts of the collection guide readers through the levels Shakespeare’s gastronomic representations permeate: Local and Global; Body and State; Theatre and Community. The three chapters coherently illustrate the idea framed by the introduction note: “For Shakespeare, the culinary is primary” (3). Although the statement may sound categorical, it nevertheless draws attention to textual layers that contain essential information not only about Shakespeare’s plays, but also about society and the community in Early Modern England. Describing food subtleties, the contributors discuss how Shakespeare address the issues of economy and nationhood. Highlighting the perspectives that were underrepresented in the traditional scholarship, Culinary Shakespeare also invites new engagements with literature and literary criticism. Revealing shifting nature of centers, the collection provides tools for reading texts as entities that participate in and absorb a diversity of discourses.David B. Goldstein is associate professor of English at York University in Toronto. Amy L. Tigner is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Traditionally histories of the Enlightenment era exclude Ireland in the belief that the movement left little impression on developments. In The Irish Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2016), Michael Brown challenges this assumption, demonstrating how the ideas and themes of the Enlightenment had a considerable impact upon the history of the country. He begins by examining how the Enlightenment entered the public discourse confessionally, though the debates taking place within the Presbyterian, Anglican, and Catholic faiths in the aftermath of the decisive War of the Two Kings in the 1690s. From there it spread to the public sphere, where issues of civility took center stage both as a means of addressing problems in Irish life and as a tool for bridging the divide between confessions. By the late 18th century, however, the public discourse became increasingly radicalized, with the divergence of views leading to the 1798 Rising, which Brown terms an “Enlightened Civil War” that represents the failure of civil society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Was the War for American Independence really about American independence? It depends on who you ask.In his new book, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (Knopf, 2016), Larrie Ferreiro draws on decades of new research in archives and on battlefields across the US and Europe to detail the smuggling, espionage, gun running, and politicking that wrested the United States from British control. A revision of the national myth that the American colonies rose up and threw off imperial oversight solely by the unity found in the strength of their convictions, this globalist return to the 1760s and 70s weaves together military, economic, diplomatic, and social history with fascinating stories of the European soldiers, sailors, merchants, and ministers who conspired and collaborated to give the north American colonies a fighting chance. In Brothers at Arms, and in this interview, Dr. Ferreiro advances the argument that for the governments of France and Spain, defeating the British in the American colonies was as much about achieving their own interests in the sphere of European power as it was about heeding the call to advance the ideals of liberty and justice across the Atlantic, and that the relationships that developed between France, Spain, and the new United States did more to shape American institutions and ways of life that we often acknowledge.Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carls work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her brilliant new book Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Lena Salaymeh, Associate Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University, presents a fascinating account of the historical unfolding of Islamic Law that combines dazzling textual analysis with cutting-edge theoretical interventions. Beginnings of Islamic Law makes a formidable and eminently convincing case for a carefully historicized approach to the study of Islamic law while arguing for the intimate entanglement of law and history. Another hallmark of this book is its focus putting Islamic Legal traditions in conversation with Jewish Law in singularly productive ways. Through a historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated comparison of Islamic and Jewish Law on specific questions of ethics and practice such as women initiated divorce, treatment of prisoners of war, and circumcision, this book highlights important and often surprising points of overlap and divergence. In our conversation we talked about the major themes, arguments, and possible misinterpretations of the book. Beginnings of Islamic Law will be of great interest to all students of Islam, Islamic Law, Jewish Law, Legal Studies, and the study of Religion more broadly. It should also make an excellent text for courses on these subjects.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 at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like so many Americans, I’m a big fan of the undead. I look forward to a night of nail-biting when a new episode of The Walking Dead airs and I get excited when Hollywood gears up for the next big-budget film featuring zombie hordes. I also love those rarer literary takes on the undead, such as Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and I even published my own riff on the genre entitled The Cliffs, which imagines what those familiar zombies might do in the Appalachian foothills where I live. If you share my enthusiasm for people not quite alive and not quite dead and, well, not quite people, you’re in for a post-Halloween treat. Medieval historian and former grave-digger Scott Bruce has assembled an anthology of tales about the undead that shows were not alone. Readers have been fascinated by spirits, ghosts, apparitions, demons, and zombies since the start of Western literature. Bruce’s anthology, The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (Penguin, 2016) begins with Homer’s Odyssey and ends with Hamlet, but between those classic stories, he gives us selections from a vast and surprising range of sources: histories, hagiography, personal letters, theological treaties, sagas, and collections of miracles and marvels. In these selections, which are by turns fascinating, surprising, heartbreaking and sometimes freaky, the undead have never been so fresh, so lively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush’s own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book’s journey: a mirror, a debtors’ petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Alexander Dun is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. His book Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) provides a detailed examination of how the Haitian Revolution shaped Americans view of their own revolution, their relations with both England and France, and left an imprint on the domestic ideological battles between Federalists and Republicans. Philadelphia, a center for antislavery activity and a stage for revolutionary ideas, was actively engaged in trade with the French colony of Saint Domingue. Newspapers, letters, and eyewitness accounts from merchant ships provide a window into how the Haitian Revolution influenced domestic politics. People and ideas from Saint Domingue flooded the city dividing citizens over the meaning of rebellion, revolution, freedom and slavery. Dun has deciphered complex events and shown how Haiti became a symbol of all that was right and wrong in the revolutionary Atlantic.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kelly Watson’s Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (New York University Press, 2015) explores the history of the New World through the lens of the cannibal myth. Watson establishes that accusations of cannibalism in the Americas during the early modern period became a valuable discursive tool to justify the European imperial project. She shows how early accounts of crazed cannibal women grounded the often discordant voices of Spanish explorers, colonial officials, and clergy into one persuasive call for action in the Caribbean and Mexico.Watson shows how Spanish accounts followed similar calls for action against cannibals in ancient and medieval texts echoing the writings of Pliny and Herodotus. Although these claims were often exaggerated or fabricated, the cannibal myth became a kind of prehistory essential for the atrocities and enslavement of native peoples of the Americas. French and English colonists also employed the cannibal myth for their own interests. Watson shows how French Jesuit missionaries used the spectre of native cannibalism as a means to amplify their own sense of Christian martyrdom in Quebec. The English too used captivity narratives to reinforce their claim to North American lands as a something that was once wild and savage now made civilized through great diligence and personal risk. In all contexts, the cannibal myth identified and enhanced the masculine identities of the colonizers, enhancing a claim to subjectivity, justice, and reason to the perceived chaos of effeminized native peoples.James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices