New Books in Early Modern History

The Roman singer, courtesan, and writer Margherita Costa won prominence and fame across the courts of Italy and France during the mid-seventeenth century. She secured a steady stream of elite patrons – including popes, queens, grand dukes, and influential cardinals – while male poets and librettists wrote celebratory poetry on her behalf. In addition to her appearances as a soprano on the opera stage, Costa published a remarkable fourteen full-length texts across an expanse of genres: burlesque comedy, drama, equestrian ballet, pastoral opera, amorous letters, lyric poetry, and history.Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court (U Toronto Press, 2023) brings together close textual readings of Costa’s numerous publications with archival materials detailing her performance itinerary and social-cultural networks. The book progresses chronologically through her life, geographically along the routes she travelled, and thematically via the genres in which she experimented. Jessica Goethals illuminates how Costa was unafraid to leap over the boundaries of decorum that delimited what women should and did write about. More than merely a literary biography, this book is also a portrait of seventeenth-century courts, their concerns, and their entertainments.Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the cultures of diplomacy and reception. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer re-examines empire as process—and Ireland's role in it—through the lens of early modernity. It covers the two hundred years, between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, that equate roughly to the timespan of the First English Empire (c.1550-c.1770s).Ireland was England's oldest colony. How then did the English empire actually function in early modern Ireland and how did this change over time? What did access to European empires mean for people living in Ireland? This book answers these questions by interrogating four interconnected themes. First, that Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, Second, that the Irish operated as agents of empire(s). Third, Ireland served as laboratory in and for the English empire. Finally, it examines the impact that empire(s) had on people living in early modern Ireland.What becomes clear is that colonisation was not a single occurrence but an iterative and durable process that impacted different parts of Ireland at different times and in different ways. That imperialism was about the exercise of power, violence, coercion and expropriation. Strategies about how best to turn conquest into profit, to mobilise and control Ireland's natural resources, especially land and labour, varied but the reality of everyday life did not change and provoked a wide variety of responses ranging from acceptance and assimilation to resistance.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices.Focusing on the ways that written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies.The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis XIV (Boydell Press, 2023) closely analyses the rise and fall of Louis XIV's marine insurance institutions in Paris, which were central to the French monarchy's efforts to stimulate commerce, colonial enterprise and economic growth. These institutions were the projects of two leading ministers, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and his son, the Marquis de Seignelay. While both men recognised that marine insurance was crucial for protecting commercial investment in French maritime endeavours, Colbert looked to private enterprise to lure capital away from passive investments in state debt towards the marine insurance industry. Seignelay, by contrast, leveraged the tools of privilege on which the French economy was built by creating the first chartered company in the history of marine insurance. In exploring the global insurance portfolios of the men and women who joined these institutions - and the conflicts that arose when maritime incidents came into dispute - the book identifies the absolute monarchy itself as the source of the institutions' struggles. While the markets of Amsterdam and London thrived in the long run, Parisian insurers were made to bear the burden of maritime and colonial losses during Louis XIV's costly wars to make up for the state's inadequate protection of French shipping, the French Atlantic empire and the Parisian market. This encapsulates, the book argues, the overarching system of risk management that lay at the heart of absolutism itself.This book emerged from Wade´s prize-winning dissertation: "Privilege at a Premium: Insurance, Maritime Law and Political Economy in Early Modern France, 1664-c. 1710" (University of Exeter, 2021).Lewis Wade is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University. His doctoral thesis was the recipient of the British Commission for Maritime History’s Boydell & Brewer Prize for the best doctoral thesis in maritime history and the Association of Business Historians’ Coleman Prize for the best doctoral thesis in business history..This book is available open access here.Also mentioned in the podcast is:Harris, R., Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (Princeton UP, 2020).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and human geography of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Iranian provinces, present-day Pakistan, and Transoxiana. Historian Karen C. Pinto examines around 100 examples of these maps retrieved from archives across the world from three points of view: iconography, context, and patronage. By unraveling their many symbols, she guides us through new ways of viewing the Muslim cartographic imagination.Dr. Karen Pinto is an Associate Scholar in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Karen is working on a forthcoming book that explores the Islamic conception of the Mediterranean and mapping.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science.Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richardson, who undertook various tours of England from the ages of twelve to fifty-two; and the sisters Katherine and Martha Wilmot, who travelled to Russia in their late twenties. The supreme tourist of the book, the political salon hostess Lady Elizabeth Holland, travelled to many countries with her husband, including Paris, where she met Napoleon, and Spain during the Peninsular War.Using a methodology informed by literary and design theory, art history, material culture studies and tourism studies, Emma Gleadhill's Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750-1830 (Manchester UP, 2022) examines a wide range of objects, from painted fans "of the ruins of Rome for a sequin apiece" and the Pope's "bless'd beads", to lava from Vesuvius and pieces of Stonehenge. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narrativeEmma Gleadhill is a Melbourne-based historian and artistMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (University of Virginia Press, 2023), Miles P. Grier argues that blackness in Othello and the texts that it influenced should be understood as deeply material, transferable, and unstable. The defining of alphanumerical and dramatic characters, while represented as settled, was anything but. As Miles writes in the book, “Before the racial categories of high scientific racism were elaborated in the late eighteenth century, a functional white interpretive community was being forged through the shared exercise of interpretive authority over inky black figures. The stage offered a place in which control over symbols and their interpretation could be celebrated as if it were already a fait accompli, rather than a tense, ongoing battle.”Miles Parks Grier is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Miles’s articles have appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance. Along with Cassander L. Smith and Nicholas Jones, Miles co-edited Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, 2018). Inkface is his first monograph.John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, exploring the transformative role of the hajj pilgrimage in Muslim political culture. The podcast discusses the challenges of researching diverse sources and highlights the relationship between Muslim groups, the declining Mughal Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. It also explores the influence of religious scholars during the empire's decline, the significance of Sufi lodges in the Ottoman Empire, and the role of East Pakistan in Muslim nationalism. The podcast concludes by discussing Choudhury's book and another book on Persian language and literature.

From rumps and stays to muffs and handkerchiefs, underwear and accessories were critical components of the 18th-century woman's wardrobe. They not only created her shape, but expressed her character, sociability, fashionability, and even political allegiances. These so-called ephemeral flights of fashion were not peripheral and supplementary, but highly charged artefacts, acting as cultural currency in contemporary society.The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Elisabeth Gernerd highlights the significance of these elements of a woman's wardrobe in 1770s and 1780s Britain and the Atlantic World, and shows how they played their part in transforming fashionable dress when this was expanding to new heights and volumes. Dissecting the female silhouette into regions of the body and types of dress and shifting away from a broad-sweeping stylistic evolution, this book explores these potent players within the woman's armoury. Marrying material, archival and visual approaches to dress history, and drawing on a rich range of sources – including painted portraiture, satirical prints, diaries, memoirs – The Modern Venus unpacks dress as a medium and mediator in women's lives. It demonstrates the importance of these overlooked garments in defining not just a woman's silhouette, but also her social and cultural situation, and thereby shapes our understanding of late 18th-century life.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Often cited but rarely studied in their own right, family directories allow a reconsideration of how ancestry and genealogy became an object of widespread commercialization across the eighteenth century. These directories replaced the expensive, locally-produced, early modern artefacts (tombs, windowpanes, illuminated pedigrees), and began to reach a wide audience of readers in the British Isles and the colonies. In Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Stéphane Jettot offers an insight into the cumulative process leading to the creation of these hybrid products — a combination of court almanacks, county histories, and town directories. Employed by contemporaries as reference tools to navigate through a dynamic and changing society, they could be used as a means to probe contemporary attitudes towards social status and political events. Published by the most prominent London booksellers who shared their copyrights among themselves, they relied on the considerable involvement of thousands of families in the counties.In their correspondence with publishers, many new and old elites desired to insert their own narrative into a general history of Britain by dispatching documents, quotations, and anecdotes. Based on a unique source-base, this book provides a systematic review of these directories, their production, and sale, but also their potential role in shaping the character of social change. Dr. Jettot demonstrates the wider ramifications of genealogy and its structural ability to reinvent itself, associate amateurs and antiquarians alike, and thrive on the wavering lines between facts and fiction, offering an exciting and unique insight into the social history of eighteenth-century Britain.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices