New Books in Early Modern History

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

Food was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Yale University Press, 2016), it had a cultural significance that permeated nearly aspect of their society. Using a vast range of legal, archaeological, and literary sources, he explains what the English ate during the late Middle Ages, how they ate it, and what their food meant to them. The choices of food available to people typically varied based on wealth and locale, helping to define the class and status of their consumers within English society. Yet Woolgar shows that food often served as a form of connection as well, with the experience of eating within the context of elaborate settings such as celebratory feasts was an important experience of bonding within and between various groups. Together these various choices and settings gave foods and their consumption a particular social and cultural significance that defined the lives of the people who ate them as peasants, townspeople, clergy or elites. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Bourke, Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, began developing his history of Edmund Burke’s political thought in 1991. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton University Press, 2015) uses Burke as a window into the eighteenth-century articulations of British imperial power, exploring the way that Burke approached relations between Britain, Ireland, America, India, and France. Beginning with Burke’s boyhood in Ireland, and closing with the challenge of grappling with Burke’s ongoing legacy, this beautifully written book displays Professor Bourke’s long study, attention to detail, and gift for trenchant observation. Our conversation ranged over subjects as familiar today as they were in the 1700s, including Burke’s understanding of representative politics as a means of resolving conflicts present in the public at large, struggles between state and corporate power, and the warrant for popular revolution.“A career doesn’t have the coherence we impose upon it belatedly, but there exist preoccupations that recur and drive our action.”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 Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Terri Diane Halperin has provided a political history of the 1790s and explained the origins of one of the most contentious free speech events in American history. The Alien and Seditions Acts, which were actually four laws enacted in 1798, dramatically tested the principles of free speech in the young republic. Halperin explains the political origins of the controversy, which began in the earliest days the George Washington’s administration. Although the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John Adams, and the Democratic-Republicans (or Jeffersonians), led by Jefferson and James Madison, had already established their differences on the national stage regarding the Constitution, foreign affairs would create further cleavages between these groups. Halperin investigates and analyzes how the French Revolution was celebrated and feared in America. When France descended into civil war and instigated European wars, the United States feared being drawn into the conflicts. The Federalists developed an affinity for Britain’s rejection of the Terror and resistance to France, while the Democratic-Republicans celebrated the promise of the French Revolution, even though most deplored the violence of the Terror. French and Irish immigrants were welcomed by the Jeffersonians and feared by the Federalists.Halperin demonstrates how dissent against American foreign policy, usually through the many newspapers published in America, was viewed as subversive and threatening to America’s reputation and national security. The Federalists, who dominated the national government during the 1790s, conceived of federal criminal laws to quash dissent. Halperin explains how both sides had their dearly held beliefs: the Federalists thought Jeffersonian newspaper editors would encourage rebellions against federal power or foreign powers efforts to acquire land in the New World; the Jeffersonians claimed that dissent was legitimate and pointed to the First Amendment’s free speech clause as a right that allowed criticism of government. My conversation with Halperin covers all of these events and reveals the importance of the debate over free speech in the early Republic.Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The transmission of a religion closely connected to a particular culture into a very different religious and cultural environment is a difficult act of translation in which a balance must be struck between remaining true to doctrine while understanding and accommodating cultural difference. Members of the Society of Jesus were engaged in a series of such projects in Asia in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This already difficult task was made more complex by the need to maintain unity and discipline among individual Jesuits when travel was dangerous and time consuming and letters might take years to reach their destinations. In his masterful book, The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (Harvard University Press, 2014), Liam Brockey explores these issues through a study of the life of Andre Palmeiro, who traveled throughout Asia settling disputes over complex questions of belief, practice, and ritual. This informative work is not only a biography, as Brockey skillfully uses the career of Palmeiro to complicate the story of the Jesuits in Asia, for instance, showing that national origin was not the main factor determining how much or how little individual Jesuits approved of an “accomodationist” approach. This book is highly recommended, and scholars, graduate students, and those interested in issues of both mission history and the problem of translation will find it well worth reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story of the martyrdom of Husayn, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, is recounted annually around the world. More broadly, the communal retelling of the lives of Shia imams has played an important part in shaping Shia identity and practice. Matthew Pierce, Assistant Professor of Religion at Centre College, examines the early canonization of these life stories in Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiism (Harvard University Press, 2016). Pierce carefully conceptualizes the relationship between history, author, text, and audience through an examination of several collective biographies of the twelve imams from the 10th-12th centuries. From this sub-genre several themes arise in the presentation of the imams, their families, and their actions. Martyrdom is central to the retellings not only of Husayn, but of all the imams. The imams’ death are remembered through images of suffering and mourning but structured in ways that provide solace for the audience. The collective biographies also offer representations of the imams’ bodily performance and communicate idealized forms of masculinity. Accounts of women in the biographies also help in establishing gender norms for the audience. In our conversation we discussed the social role of biography, collective memory, medieval Sunni and Shia identities, gendered bodies, birth narratives, devotional practices, imam Ali’s primordial existence, martyrdom, and the narrative relationships between the imams.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices