New Books in Early Modern History

Tracy Rutler's Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool UP, 2021) explores the imaginaries of novels and plays from the "liminal" period that followed the end of Louis the XIV's reign in France. Examining a range of French works from the 1730s and 1740s, including writing by Antoine François Prévost, Claude Crébillion, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny, Rutler traces a set of utopian themes and impulses that questioned and resisted heteronormativity and bourgeois family relations during this period. Interrogating gender, sexuality, and kinship in both the content and the form of their work, these authors challenged patriarchal power and relations as the foundations of state and society in France. At once intimate and political, the characters, scenes, and narratives these authors produced also posed questions about (the) Enlightenment more broadly.In readings informed by thinkers like Foucault and Rancière, as well as the work of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theorists, Queering the Enlightenment is divided into three sections: Family Remains, Prodigal Sons, and Narrative Spinsters. Beginning with an analysis of eighteenth-century powerhouses Montesquieu and Voltaire on patriarchal decline and repair, Rutler goes on to consider literary representations of reproduction, masculinity, the public sphere, marriage, maternity, and same-sex community. The book will be of great interest to literary scholars and historians alike, particularly anyone interested the legacies of the Enlightenment and how historical struggles/debates over kinship, gender, and sexuality continue to resonate in the present.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her formidable and fiercely well-argued new book Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022), Divya Cherian shows with meticulous detail and in lyrical prose, the processes and practices that contributed to the emergence and hardening of an exclusivist Hindu identity set in opposition to a notion of Untouchability that also subsumed Muslims. Set in eighteenth century Marwar in the Rathor Kingdom, this book sketches an intimate portrait of the micro-politics and the everyday life of the aspirations, fissures, and resistances that went into the stipulation of caste distinctions in early modern South Asia. At the heart of this book is a narrative equally fascinating and frictious of how a state driven campaign to cultivate “virtuous” Hindu merchants or Mahajans contributed to the demarcation of epistemological, legal, and spatial boundaries between upper caste Hindus and untouchables, including Muslims.Merchants of Virtue combines the best forms of social, legal, political, and conceptual history, and its invasive examination of the interface between religion, state, and society will be of much interest to scholars of religion, South Asia, and Islam. Available also as an Indian edition, this book will also make for an excellent text to teach in both undergraduate and graduate seminars.SherAli Tareen is Associate 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 book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent thinking has resuscitated civility as an important paradigm for engaging with a violence that must be deemed endemic to our lives. But, while it is widely acknowledged that civility works against violence, and that literature generates or accompanies civility and engenders tolerance, civility has also been understood as violence in disguise, and literature, which has only rarely sought to claim the power of violence, has often been accused of inciting it. Engaging Violence: Civility and the Reach of Literature (Stanford UP, 2022) sets out to describe the ways in which these words—violence, literature and civility—and the concepts they evoke are mutually entangled, and the uses to which these entanglements have been put.Simpson's argument follows a broadly historical trajectory through the long modern period from the Renaissance to the present, drawing on the work of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and philosophers. The result is a distinctly new argument about the complex and often mystified entanglements between literature, civility and violence in the anglophone Atlantic sphere. What now are our expectations of civility and literature, separately and together? How do these long-familiar but residually imprecise concepts stand up to the demands of the modern world? Simpson's argument is that, despite and perhaps because of their imperfect conceptualization, both persist as important protocols for the critique of violence.David Simpson is Distinguished Professor and G.B. Needham Chair, emeritus, at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is States of Terror: History, Theory, Literature (2019).Morteza 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deanne Williams, author of Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Performance and Pedagogy, discusses the existence and participation of girl actors in medieval and early modern England. She explores the impact of girl actors in Shakespeare's portrayal of girlhood and highlights influential figures like Hroswitha of Gandersheim and Anne Boleyn. The podcast also delves into the creative productivity of girl translators and the connections between geography and girl culture.

Lenora Hanson's The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation (Stanford UP, 2022) provides an account of the long arc of dispossession from the British Romantic period to today. Lenora Hanson glimpses histories of subsistence (such as reproductive labor, vagrancy and criminality, and unwaged labor) as figural ways of living that are superfluous—simultaneously more than enough to live and less than what is necessary for capitalism.Hanson treats rhetorical language as an archive of capital's accumulation through dispossession, in works by S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Benjamin Moseley, Joseph Priestley, and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as in contemporary film and critical theory. Reading riots through apostrophe, enclosure through anachronism, superstition and witchcraft through tautology, and the paradoxical coincidence of subsistence living with industrialization, Hanson shows the figural to be a material record of the survival of non-capitalist forms of life within capitalism. But this survival is not always-already resistant to capitalism, nor are the origins of capital accumulation confined to the Romantic past. Hanson reveals rhetorical figure as entwined in deeply ambivalent ways with the circuitous, ongoing process of dispossession.Reading both historically and rhetorically, Hanson argues that rhetorical language records histories of dispossession and the racialized, gendered distribution of the labor of subsistence. Romanticism, they show, is more contemporary than ever.Lenora Hanson is Assistant Professor of English at New York University.Morteza 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2023), he shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge, political thought, the East India Company, the British Empire, and South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received a PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from the University of Chicago.Morteza 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest is Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s new book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Emergency takes nine words—“birds,” “wealth,” “caves,” “television,” “demons,” “migrations,” “love,” “the sun,” and “Mormons”—and weaves a rich transhistorical narrative about the Popul Vuh sacred narrative. In these pages, Garcia explores how this text emerged in conditions of historical violence and persisted through over three hundred years, becoming a touchstone for Mesoamerican religious studies, decolonial activism, and literary adaptation.Edgar Garcia is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His previous books are Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019). He has also served as the guest editor of Fence, a literary magazine. Written during the COVID pandemic, Emergency was published in 2022.John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the early modern period, political theorists in France and England drew on the works of Plutarch to offer advice to kings and princes. Elizabeth I herself translated Plutarch in her later years, while Jacques Amyot's famous translations of Plutarch's The Parallel Lives led to the wide distribution of his work and served as a key resource for Shakespeare in the writing of his Roman plays, through Sir Thomas North's English translations. Rebecca Kingston's Plutarch's Prism: Classical Reception and Public Humanism in France and England, 1500–1800 (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how Plutarch was translated into French and English during the Renaissance and how his works were invoked in political argument from the early modern period into the 18th century, contributing to a tradition she calls 'public humanism'. This book then traces the shifting uses of Plutarch in the Enlightenment, leading to the decline of this tradition of 'public humanism'. Throughout, the importance of Plutarch's work is highlighted as a key cultural reference and for its insight into important aspects of public service.Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (U Chicago Press, 2022) engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history of science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.Morteza 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices