New Books in Early Modern History

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo's 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian's role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family's mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a "rich, old, slightly batty widow" in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of "intermediaries and go-betweens" in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits.There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Byonghyon Choi‘s new book makes a key document of Korean and world history available in English in a volume that will be tremendously useful for both scholarship and teaching. The Annals of King T’aejo: Founder of Korea’s Choson Dynasty (Harvard University Press, 2014) translates an important excerpt from The Veritable... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our interview with Kenneth M. Swope about his book, The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618-44 (Routledge, 2014), published through Routledge, is an effort to address an oversight in how New Books in Military History has generally overlooked both early modern history and works that have an exclusively non-Eurocentric focus. Swope’s book presents a very detailed assessment of the many challenges that underlie the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in China in the seventeenth century. More importantly, though, he challenges many previously held suppositions about Chinese military capabilities, culture, and society — restoring the Ming to their appropriate place as one of the most well-organized and equipped armies of the early modern era (at least in theory, that is . . . .) Steeped in rare Chinese sources and rich in analysis, this book is an important contribution by one of the field’s most important experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes’ most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of which tie into early modern Spanish debates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In pre-modern Japan, Ise monogatari (also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise) was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. Joshua S. Mostow‘s new book focuses on the reception and appropriation of these stories from the twelfth through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of “objectivity,” and the concept of the public sphere. Don’t miss the beautiful color plates nestled in the midst of the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Gibbs Hill‘s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui‘s 4-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, 2004). China from Empire to Nation-State (Harvard University Press, 2014) thus makes available to an English-reading audience a fascinating perspective on... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking, Lipking traces it through the works of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Hooke, and many others, demonstrating that the ability to envision new worlds is as crucial to their critical insights as rational thought.Each chapter of the book approaches a different discipline, from astronomy to natural history and the life sciences, exploring the intersection between imagination and the emerging ideas surrounding the scientific process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eugene Y. Park‘s A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces this history by focusing on the Miryang Pak family. The history of transformations in the family’s social status and geography parallels that of modern Korea, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices