New Books in Early Modern History

Rebecca Goldstein, an American philosopher, talks about her book Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. The podcast explores Spinoza's excommunication, his challenge to religion, and his influence on Western philosophy. It also discusses the concept of excommunication and Jewish identity, as well as Spinoza's attempt to transcend religious affiliation.

The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down--and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America.Peter Moore's Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream (1740–1776) (FSG, 2023) tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in US history: the "American dream." Centered on the friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the British publisher William Strahan, and featuring figures including the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. Everyone, it seemed, had "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

Conor Lucey's book House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life (Four Courts Press, 2022) explores the everyday character and functions of domestic spaces in Georgian Ireland. While the design and decoration of the country pile and the aristocratic town house enjoys a long and distinguished literature, to date there has been no sustained examination of how rooms were habitually occupied and experienced, or how different social demographics--not least the burgeoning 'middling sorts'--might have informed approaches to spatial design and functionality. Drawing on recent pioneering research, the topics and themes addressed here range widely from comfort, privacy, and multiple occupancy to sociability, maternity, and piety. Focusing on how different species of domestic spaces were used and inhabited, from mansions and merchant houses to lodgings and farm house cabins, this book expands our understanding of house and home in Ireland in the long eighteenth century.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A rich and indulgent history, English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables (William Collins, 2022) by Dr. Diane Purkiss will change the way you view your food and understand your past.Dr. Purkiss uses the story of food as a revelatory device to chart changing views on class, gender, and tradition through the ages. Sprinkled throughout with glorious details of historical quirks – trial by ordeal of bread, a fondness for ‘small beer’ and a war-time ice-cream substitute called ‘hokey pokey’ made from parsnips – this book is both an education and an entertainment.English Food explores the development of the coffee trade and the birth of London’s coffee houses, where views were exchanged on politics, art, and literature. Dr. Purkiss introduces the first breeders of British beef and reveals how cattle triggered the terrible Glencoe Massacre. We are taken for tea, to the icehouse, the pantry, and the beehive. We learn that toast is as English as the chalk cliffs. We bite into chicken, plainly poached or exotically spiced. We join bacon curers and fishermen at work. We follow the scent of apples into ancient orchards.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023).Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of colonialism to the pan-European movement that grew out of the first world war and peace project (or was it?) that emerged from the second.Not only is pro-Europeanism “analogous to nationalism - something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale," Kundani argues, but the EU itself has “become a vehicle for imperial amnesia" thereby promoting and privileging “whiteness”.Hans Kundnani is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations Workshop, an associate scholar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and a visiting scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research. From 2018-22, he was a full-time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe Programme. Before that, he was a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, the Transatlantic Academy, and the European Council on Foreign Relations. In 2014, he published The Paradox of German Power.*The author's own book recommendations are Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006 - first published in 1956)Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse.Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!The strange thing is that Clive’s argument was actually acceptable according to how many at the time understood corruption, as Nicholas Hoover Wilson writes in Modernity's Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India (Columbia University Press: 2023). Nick uses Company rule in India as a way to examine how society’s view of corruption changed–from something governed by one’s situation, to a behavior that violates some universal code of ethics.In this interview, the two of us talk about Clive, Company rule, and why this period is a good period through which to understand the idea of “corruption.”Nicholas Hoover Wilson is associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. Nick’s research focuses on the historical sociology of empires and colonialism, through the case of the English East India Trading Company's presence in South Asia.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Modernity’s Corruption. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is the first to chart the global diversity of colophons between 1400 and 1800. The volume presents a new approach to scribal cultures that expands traditional definitions. Moving from the paradigm of codicological information towards a thorough interpretation of the wider social worlds of colophons in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, this volume uncovers the fascinating cultural history of early modern scribes. Chapters examine how those engaging in the composition and distribution of colophons shaped scribal identities, group cultures and bookish communities in a world in which manuscripts mattered. Authors build on approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, codicology, history, and philology to offer a new conceptual framework that studies colophons as scribal practices embedded in their changing social and cultural worlds. As a new contribution to the history of the book, this volume’s global approach pushes the boundaries of what constitutes a colophon.Christopher Bahl is an Assistant Professor in South Asian History, Durham University, UK. He is interested in the social, cultural, and political histories of the early modern western Indian Ocean world and studies them through its surviving manuscript cultures.Stefan Hanß is a Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, UK, and winner of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award and a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Hanß has published widely on material culture and global history.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Plato: Permitting and Forbidding Open-Inquiry in 12-15th Century Europe and North Africa (Brill, 2021), Yehuda Halper examines Jewish depictions of Socrates and Socratic questioning of the divine among European and North African Jews of the 12th-15th centuries. Without direct access to Plato, their understanding of Socrates is indirect, based on legendary material, on fragmentary quotations from Plato, or on Aristotle. Out of these sources, Jewish authors of this period formed two distinct views of Socrates: one as a wise, ascetic, monotheist, and the other as a vocal skeptic. The latter view has its roots in Plato's Apology where Socrates describes his divine mandate to question all knowledge, including knowledge of the divine. After exploring how this and similar questions arise in the works of Judah Halevi and the Hebrew Averroes, Halper traces how such open-questioning of the divine arises in the works of Maimonides, Jacob Anatoli, Gersonides, and Abraham Bibago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2016) explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance.Al Coppola is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New YorkMorteza 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

In 1686 in Geneva, a single mother named Jeanne Catherine Thomasset is charged with poisoning two young children: her own illegitimate daughter and the son of a rural wet nurse. So begins a harrowing criminal trial during which authorities interrogate Jeanne Catherine several times, sometimes with torture, to determine the truth.Sara Beam's The Trial of Jeanne Catherine: Infanticide in Early Modern Geneva (University of Toronto Press, 2021) is a suspenseful historical mystery that offers students the opportunity to learn about motherhood, child rearing, gender, religion, local politics, and the practice of criminal justice in early modern Europe. This edition provides the complete trial transcript as well as the deliberations of the Genevan authorities and relevant correspondence.Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices