New Books in Early Modern History

In 1578, a fourteen-foot linen sheet bearing the faint bloodstained imprint of a human corpse was presented to tens of thousands of worshippers in Turin, Italy, as one of the original shrouds used to prepare Jesus Christ’s body for entombment. From that year into the next century, the Shroud of Turin emerged as Christianity’s preeminent religious artifact. In an unprecedented new look, Andrew R. Casper sheds new light on one of the world’s most famous and controversial religious objects.Since the early twentieth century, scores of scientists and forensic investigators have attributed the Shroud’s mysterious images to painterly, natural, or even supernatural forces. Casper, however, shows that this modern opposition of artifice and authenticity does not align with the cloth’s historical conception as an object of religious devotion. Examining the period of the Shroud’s most enthusiastic following, from the late 1500s through the 1600s, he reveals how it came to be considered an artful relic―a divine painting attributed to God’s artistry that contains traces of Christ’s body. Through probing analyses of materials created to perpetuate the Shroud’s cult following―including devotional, historical, and theological treatises as well as printed and painted reproductions―Casper uncovers historicized connections to late Renaissance and Baroque artistic cultures that frame an understanding of the Shroud’s bloodied corporeal impressions as an alloy of material authenticity and divine artifice.Andrew R. Casper's book An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) introduces rich, new material about the Shroud’s emergence as a sacred artifact. It will appeal to art historians specializing in religious and material studies, historians of religion, and to general readers interested in the Shroud of Turin.Andrew Casper is a professor of art history in the Department of Arts at Miami UniversityMorteza 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

Questions about the nature of the American founding undergird our fraught political discourse: was the American Revolution justified? How religious were the Founding Fathers? How should we deal with the fact that they owned slaves? What is Christian Nationalism? Mark David Hall, current Garwood Visiting Fellow with us at the James Madison Program and Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox University, addresses these questions and more in his latest book, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans (Fidelis Books, 2023). In this conversation, Mark and Annika have a lively back and forth about the debates surrounding the American founding and its repercussions today.In addition to his book, you can find more on Mark's views on Christian Nationalism in this essay for Providence Magazine.Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this new history of the Reformation in the Netherlands, Christine Kooi synthesizes fifty years of scholarship provide a broad general history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. Kooi's writing focuses on the political context of the era and explores how religious change took place against the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Special attention is given to the Reformation's role in both fomenting and fueling the Revolt in the Netherlands against the Habsburg regime of Phillip II and demonstrating how it contributed to the formation of the region's two successor states, the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands. Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500-1620 (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a broad understanding of the religions and political debates of the era in the Low Countries by synthesizing years of scholarship and knowledge into one accessible volume. Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a groundbreaking work by bestselling authors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in which they challenge conventional wisdom about the role of technology in driving prosperity. The authors argue that technology is not a neutral force working in the public interest but is shaped by the interests and beliefs of the powerful. Those who control technology are the ones who benefit from it, leaving the rest of society with the illusion of progress.The authors provide a historical account of how technological choices have shaped the course of history, from the appropriation of the economic surplus of the Middle Ages by an ecclesiastical elite to the making of vast fortunes from digital technologies today, while millions of people are pushed towards poverty. The authors emphasize that technological progress can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.The book presents a manifesto for building a better society by using the tremendous digital advances of the last half century to create useful and empowering tools, rather than marginalizing most people through automated work and political passivity. The authors argue that to achieve the true potential of innovation, we need to ensure that technology is creating new jobs and opportunities for everyone. The book offers a vision to reimagine and reshape the path of technology, ensuring that it leads to true shared prosperity.Power and Progress offers a fresh perspective on how technology shapes our lives and highlights the need for a more democratic approach to technological progress. The book provides a compelling argument that the path of technology is not predetermined but can be brought under control to ensure that it benefits everyone, not just a few powerful individuals or corporations. The authors provide an insightful analysis of the power dynamics that underlie technological progress, and their manifesto for a better society is a call to action for policymakers, business leaders, and individuals alike.Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Spoils of Knowledge: Seventeenth-Century Plunder in Swedish Archives and Libraries (Brill, 2023), Emma Hagström Molin offers novel perspectives on document and book plundering. At the forefront of her study is the controversial heritage connected to the Swedish Empire (1611–1721) kept in Swedish archives and libraries.Previous studies suggest that continental spoils were perceived as an inferior and problematic category, and that Catholic books in particular were hard to accommodate in Protestant libraries. However, by considering systems of classification and collection orders of archives and libraries, Hagström Molin unearths a much more complex history of how plundered knowledge was appreciated, used and fused with its new Swedish settings. Moreover, spanning a history of four hundred years, this book shows that the understanding of spoils changed significantly over time. Molin demonstrates the value of studying classification and provenance, and the importance in considering how contextual time and space shapes the meaning of texts.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi was an Italian Jesuit who worked in South India from 1710 to 1747. A brilliant scholar of Tamil, his works include hymns, instructions for catechists, and a robust defense of the Catholic missionary approach. His most famous work is Tēmpāvaṇi (The Unfading Garland), an epic re-telling of the early life of Jesus, set in the context of the whole Biblical story, and surprisingly focused on St. Joseph, spouse of Mary and foster-father of Jesus. St. Joseph in South India argues that Beschi’s distinctively Catholic approach draws on methods already familiar in the Jesuit ethical and dramatic literature in post-Reformation Europe. Francis Xavier Clooney's Saint Joseph in South India: Poetry, Mission and Theology in Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi's Tēmpāvaṇi (Brill, 2022) includes a fresh translation of about 300 verses from Tēmpāvaṇi.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uncertainty about the way a state should be working is not necessarily produced by having multiple voices offering competing ideas about it. As Maura Dykstra’s Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Harvard UP, 2022) shows, one relatively uncontested pole of political power is perfectly capable of generating uncertainty on its own including, paradoxically, through the very act of seeking surety.As Dykstra documents in a fabulously intricate study of administrative and court documents, searches for routinised and carefully monitored ways of running the empire during the Qing dynasty (1636-1911) motivated a range of reforms to the bureaucracy and those that managed it. Over the course of the dynasty’s first centuries these were relatively successful in granting the central authorities in Beijing greater oversight. Yet the imperial centre did not always like what it saw, and the more it got to know about activities in the provinces, the more it came to doubt whether all was well across the realm, a process which eventually culminated in a vast crisis of imperial self-knowledge.Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a Mexico City mansion on October 23, 1789, Don Joaquín Dongo and ten of his employees were brutally murdered by three killers armed with machetes. Investigators worked tirelessly to find the perpetrators, who were publicly executed two weeks later. Labeled the 'crime of the century,' these events and their aftermath have intrigued writers of fiction and nonfiction for over two centuries. Using a vast range of sources, Nicole von Germeten recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery, and highlights how the violence of the Mexican judiciary echoed the acts of the murderers. The Spanish government conducted dozens of executions in Mexico City's central square in this era, revealing how European imperialism in the Americas influenced perceptions of violence and how it was tolerated, encouraged, or suppressed. An evocative history, Death in Old Mexico: The 1789 Dongo Murders and How They Shaped the History of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2023) provides a compelling new perspective on late colonial Mexico City.Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is the Declaration of Independence unique? Does the Declaration prescribe a form of government? What is the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution? Allen C. Guelzo, Director of the James Madison Program's Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, joins the show to answer these questions and more. Guelzo's essay "Harry and me" can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A form at the origins of Western literature, the epic has always been theorized in contrast to other literary genres, those that would either perfect it (such as tragedy, according to Aristotle) or partially take its place, from the chivalric romance to the modern novel. Corrado Confalonieri's Torquato Tasso and the Desire for Unity: Jerusalem Delivered and a New Theory of the Epic (Torquato Tasso e il desiderio di unità: “La Gerusalemme liberata” e una nuova teoria dell’epica) critically traces three different historical phases in the theorization of the epic: the classical poetics of Aristotle and Horace, the debates about poetics and poets in sixteenth-century Italy, and Hegelian philosophy and later twentieth-century theories of literary genres. The point of theoretical and interpretative reference throughout the volume is Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). The book’s final chapter undertakes a careful rereading of Tasso’s magnum opus that overcomes the traditional dichotomy between epic unity and novelistic variety by demonstrating how unity remains a desire rather than a result.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 histories of diplomacy and sociality. Her publications have appeared in The Italianist and the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, with forthcoming research on the intersections across affect, masculinity, early modern poetics, and Baroque opera. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices