New Books in Early Modern History

Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produced shadows and reflections. Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) beautifully places Kepler’s optics into conversation with the art and literature of the period. It looks carefully at the crucial ways that changing notions of visibility set Kepler’s optics up as the cornerstone to his radical Copernican astronomy as Kepler made three moves that helped him bridge the visual gap between the heavens and its observers: (1) He defined light as a mathematical body, (2) He showed how instruments of observation could be manipulated mathematically to achieve exact representation of distant and almost invisible heavenly occurrences, and (3) He helped develop a new language for scientific observation by reformulating the relationship of mathematics to phenomena. In the course of his elegant analysis of how and why this all played out, Chen-Morris also guides readers through the relationships between Kepler’s ideas, Shakespeare’s writings, Renaissance painting, and more. Its a fascinating book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively offer a fascinating window into the correspondence of two brilliant early modern writers and intellectuals. Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) traces the relationship between Sarrocchi, a Naples-born writer, famous for her salons and for writing an epic poem that emphasized the significance of women as knowers of the natural world, with Galileo. The letters feature three major themes: Sarrocchi consulting Galileo for writerly advice as she revised her epic poem, Sarrocchi’s efforts to defend Galileo’s discoveries to the scientific community in Italy, and Sarrocchi and Galileo’s shared interest in judicial astrology and natal charts or nativities. The slim volume will be a resource not just for readers and researchers but also for classroom discussion, where the letters could serve as great primary sources to feature in a number of course contexts. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) presents the history of the nation’s forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey and also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America’s most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. The author rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a “slave king” as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, he identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa.The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves also suggests the necessity for an increased focus on the substantial contact that many Africans had with European primarily Portuguese cultures before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas. The book has already garnered honors as the winner of the Richard O. Collins Award in African Studies, the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award, and the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize.Jeroen Dewulf is associate professor of Dutch studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and director of the school’s Institute of European Studies. In addition to The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves, he is also the author of Spirit of Resistance: Dutch Clandestine Literature during the Nazi Occupation and co-editor of Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. His current research focuses on the connections between African-American culture in New Orleans and West African traditions, and will also soon be published in book form.James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century to control the cinchona tree and its bark, and traces the history of quina as a product of local, imperial, and commercial networks in [the] eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Science and empire were deeply intertwined in the Spanish Atlantic, and Crawford offers a window into the epistemic culture produced by Spanish colonial governance and resulting encounters across and within the Andean and Atlantic contexts. Part One of the book looks carefully at what it meant to know nature in the early modern Atlantic World. It traces the transformations of quina from a local Andean remedy into a botanical commodity and an imperial natural resource from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, showing how these transformations resulted from the bark’s integration into Andean, Atlantic, and imperial networks of circulation of people, texts, objects, and images. Part Two of the book explores several key conflicts in the late eighteenth century that emerged as the Spanish Crown tried to assert greater control over the tree and its bark. It’s a story that will be of interest to the histories of science, medicine, natural history, and early modernity! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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