New Books in Early Modern History

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal‘s Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2015), explores the fascinating history of identification and citizenship in the Atlantic world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. British and French navies harried American privateers and merchantmen, seizing their cargo, imprisoning their bodies, and laying false claim to their allegiance. Rosenthal shows how American sailors were the first to demand official status and national recognition from the federal government. Using diverse sources such as notarized affidavits, tattoos, and eventually national identity papers, Perl-Rosenthal shows how sailors secured for themselves a measure of personal safety and security in a perilous Atlantic.The shifting patterns of imperial expansion and nationality of the Age of Revolution did not adapt quickly enough to accommodate new American identities. The Atlantic world operated on an informal and imprecise metric of “common sense nationality” that demarcated one’s national allegiance through shared visual, linguistic, or cultural cues. The British Navy often claimed American sailors as deserters or traitors to the crown, unable or unwilling to distinguish between those loyal to the United States and those fleeing conscription. Provided with faulty, incomplete, or fraudulent identification, Americans were at risk of false imprisonment at the hands of the British. American ships would often fly British or French colors as flags of necessity, hiding from hostile ships and marauding privateers. Responding to the press gang, imprisonment, and execution Perl-Rosenthal shows how the American federal government took action, providing the first national identification documents available to sailors of all races who wished or required them. In so doing, the new federal government engaged in the first formal recognition of black sailors as citizens decades before the American Civil War.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

Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) argues that “in order to understand the forces that shaped thinking about racial difference in early modern philosophy, we must look to the philosophers’ own interest in a scientific classification and physical anthropology, with an eye to the way these projects were influenced by early modern globalization and by the associated projects of global commerce, collection, and systematization of the order of nature.” The resulting book is a thoughtful contribution to both the history of philosophy and science in early modernity, and to the modern history of concepts of race and identity, and is highly recommended to readers and teachers in both fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For most of recorded history, single rulers such a kings, queens, chiefs, and emperors exercised authority over human populations. Jeroen Duindam (Professor of Early Modern History, Leiden University) examines an important part of this story in his new book Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He employs an easy-to-follow, four-level comparative framework that explains how dynastic power evolved in kingdoms as diverse as the Qing Empire, Mughal Empire, France, and Dahomey in Africa. The use of this framework allows Duindam to move beyond the pitfalls of many comparative works. With careful attention to detail, he recounts how “divergent practices” of dynastic rule “can be seen as part of the same pattern,” as well as how “striking similarities hide profound differences (14).” This approach allows him to illustrate the tendency of scholars to overstate the differences between “Eastern” and “Western” dynasties; it also puts him in a strong position to make astute observations about the role women played in the functioning of dynastic power. Just as important, Duindam’s analysis of dynastic power raises important questions about how modern governments maintain their authority and how the “masses” view the exercise of power over them. Whatever one thinks of Duindam’s specific arguments, he has authored a well-crafted, thought-provoking work that should be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about global history and the exercise of power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Domna Stanton‘s latest book The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (Ashgate, 2014) is a series of six case studies with important literary, historical, and theoretical implications for how we think about gender in the seventeenth century and beyond. In two parts, the first focused on male and the second focused on female writers in this period, the book examines critically key works by Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné. In close readings that situate authors and texts within a broader historical context, Stanton examines gender as a dynamic, relational construct across multiple genres, including drama in its comic and tragic forms, letters, treatise, novella, and memoir. Departing from the premise that the querelle des femmes must also be understood as a querelle des hommes, The Dynamics of Gender is concerned throughout with women and men, femininity and masculinity, writers and the written-about.Drawing on and engaging with the critical theoretical work and insights of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, The Dynamics of Gender makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how gender and power work and shift in and across texts and time. This is a book about bodies and/of writing that pursues important questions about what it meant to write as men and women historically, and about what “reading-as-a-feminist” might mean into the present and future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (with brief extensions earlier and later), Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Janet Gyatso, a historian, discusses the interplay between Buddhist ways of knowing and scientific research in early modern Tibet. She explores the history of medicine, the significance of intricate paintings, the connection between Buddhism, medicine, and the state, and the challenges of reconciling traditional knowledge with dissection. Additionally, she highlights the complex relationship between gender and medicine, including the concept of a third sex. The episode concludes with a discussion on the author's book and future plans.

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her shining new book Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Hina Azam, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, explores the diversity and complexity of pre-modern Muslim legal discourses on rape and sexual violation. The reader of this book is treated to a thorough and delightful analysis of the range of attitudes, assumptions, and hermeneutical operations that mark the Muslim legal tradition on the question of sexual violation. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of this book is the way it showcases the staggering range and diversity of approaches to defining and adjudicating rape that populate the Muslim legal tradition. Focusing primarily on the Maliki and Hanafi schools of law, Azam convincingly demonstrates that Muslim legal discourses on rape were animated and informed by competing ways of imagining broader categories such as sovereignty, agency, property, and rights. In our conversation, we talked about problems of translation involved in using the category of rape in relation to pre-modern discursive archives, proprietary and theocentric approaches to sexual ethics in medieval Islam, the differences between the Maliki and Hanafi school on defining and punishing male-female rape, and the implications and significance of this study to the contemporary legal landscape in Muslim societies. This meticulously researched and lucidly written book will be of much interest to students of Islam, Islamic Law, Gender and Sexuality, and Muslim intellectual history. It will also make a great contribution to upper level undergraduate and graduate seminars on these topics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead body to sites of dissection across the city, after which we are introduced to four anatomists – charter members of the Paris Academy of Sciences – who will act as focal points for the rest of the story.The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2015) opens up Parisian bodies – human and animal, dead and alive – to argue that dissection played a major role in the development of experimental methods in seventeenth century science. In Guerrini’s hands, the history of science and medicine in early modern Paris was simultaneously a history of fairy tales and opera, dogs and chameleons, artists and knife-makers, labyrinth-making and oratory. It is a fascinating book that is a must-read for historians of anatomy and of early modern science and medicine, and will be accessible and gripping for readers well beyond those fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings on religious conversion and how conversion became a means through which other “technologies of transformation” were figured. His reading of diverse texts, from the translated King James Bible to the poetry of Milton, helps us understand the ways in which the figure of the Jew could serve a variety of purposes in the early modern English imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices