New Books in Early Modern History

In this new episode about Digital Humanities at the New Books Network podcast channel we talk about digital projects, the use of Machine Learning technologies, and how they intersect with the Humanities. Albert A. Palacios, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections (University of Texas at Austin), guides us through the different projects he is involved in. Specifically, he shares with us his experience at the “Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Indigenous and Spanish American Historical Collections” initiative, “the Spanish Paleography and Digital Humanities Institute” program, and a partnership project with the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Topics discussed include the use of digital tools like Transkribus and how it is used to read and transcribe early modern colonial documents. We also talk about how people can participate and become part of any of these initiatives. Join us and learn more!Marcus Golding. News Book Network and News Book Network en Español host and collaborator.Marcus Golding. Colaborador y anfitrión de News Book Network and News Book Network en Español. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, which he based on a popular millennium-old tale, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband's affections.Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the pārijāta, a wish-granting tree, from the garden of Indra, king of the gods. Krishna does so to please his favorite wife, Satyabhama, who is upset when he gifts his chief queen a single divine flower. After battling Indra, Krishna plants the tree for Satyabhama--but she must perform a rite temporarily relinquishing it and her husband to enjoy endless happiness. The poem's narrative unity, which was unprecedented in the literary tradition, prefigures the modern Telugu novel.Theft of a Tree is presented here in the Telugu script alongside the first English translation. Ujaan Ghosh is a graduate student at the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin, Madison Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Diplomatic Enlightenment: Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation (Brill, 2021) reconfigures the study of the origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire. Challenging dominant interpretations of the period, this book shows that early eighteenth-century Spanish authors turned to Enlightenment ideas to reinvent Spain’s role in the European balance of power. And while international law grew to provide a legal framework that could safeguard peace, Spanish officials, diplomats, and authors, hardened by the failure of Spanish diplomacy, sought instead to regulate international relations by drawing on investment, profit, and self-interest. The book shows, on the basis of new archival research, that the Diplomatic Enlightenment sought to turn the Spanish Empire into a space for closer political cooperation with other European and non-European states and empires.Edward Jones Corredera is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 2020.Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his fascinating survey Kabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World (NYU Press, 2021), Brian Ogren explores the use of Jewish esoteric thought in colonial America by Quaker theologian George Keith, Puritan ministers Increase and Cotton Mather, the first Hebrew instructor at Harvard Judah Monis, and the seventh president of Yale Ezra Stiles, in shaping new Protestant American religious sensibilities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book--it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in Index, a History of The: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and--of course--indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart--and we have been for eight hundred years. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talk to Lu Ann Homza about her new book, Village Infernos and Witches' Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608-1614 (Penn State Press, 2022). This book revises what we thought we knew about one of the most famous witch hunts in European history. Between 1608 and 1614, thousands of witchcraft accusations were leveled against men, women, and children in the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre. The Inquisition intervened quickly but incompetently, and the denunciations continued to accelerate. As the phenomenon spread, children began to play a crucial role. Not only were they reportedly victims of the witches’ harmful magic, but hundreds of them also insisted that witches were taking them to the Devil’s gatherings against their will.Presenting important archival discoveries, Lu Ann Homza restores the perspectives of illiterate, Basque-speaking individuals to the history of this shocking event and demonstrates what could happen when the Spanish Inquisition tried to take charge of a liminal space. Because the Spanish Inquisition was the body putting those accused of witchcraft on trial, modern scholars have depended upon Inquisition sources for their research. Homza’s groundbreaking book combines new readings of the Inquisitional evidence with fresh archival finds from non-Inquisitional sources, including local secular and religious courts, and from notarial and census records.Expanding our understanding of this witch hunt as well as the history of children, community norms, and legal expertise in early modern Europe, Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates is required reading for students and scholars of the Spanish Inquisition and the history of witchcraft in early modern Europe.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Would a claim that human possession and property rights as merely temporary seem outlandish to a 21st-century thinker? How would this idea be received in Early Modern England? In today's NBN podcast, Dr. Erin Drew addresses this question in our discussion about her new book: The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Virginia Press, 2021). Using an environmental lens to analyze popular theology, moral philosophy, law, Drew also uses the poetry of John Evelyn, Anne Finch, John Philips, John Dyer, and James Grainger to deconstruct usufruct's legacy as a moral relationship between humans and their environments in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth England. During this period, "usufruct" appears as a common point of reference and comparison across philosophical, devotional, legal, and literary discussions of the ethical parameters of possessions, use, and power. Care for trees, for example, and ecologically represent literal connections among other beings and across generations if landlords acted as responsible stewards. By laying out the structure and implications of usufruct as an environmental ethic and its role in English discourse, Dr. Drew brings to light a subversive threat to an eighteenth-century English culture that proves surprisingly conservationist while drawing attention to parallels with contemporary environmental thought and assumption. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Admiral John Byng’s execution for failing to “do his utmost” to relieve the British garrison on Minorca in 1756 is remembered today mainly for Voltaire’s quip about the Royal Navy’s use of Byng’s death “to encourage the others.” In The Execution of Admiral John Byng as a Microhistory of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2021), Joseph J. Krulder uses the event as a window into the era. As Krulder shows, Byng’s failure was the consequence of a number of decisions that reflected the priorities of Britain’s military and political leadership, as well as the disruptions caused by the rapid onset of the war with France. These factors combined to send Byng to relieve an isolated and poorly-led Army garrison with an undermanned fleet facing heavy odds. News of the battle and Byng’s subsequent court-martial prompted a popular reaction that was reflected in numerous ballads, pamphlets, and the new medium of newspapers, as well as in riots and other demonstrations. Much of this was subsequently obscured by the overwhelmingly macrohistorical focus on the event, one which overlooks many of the small details that Krulder shows are vital to understanding the dynamics of the affair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paul Dover argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. Dr. Dover argues that “paper, as never before, became the transactional medium; the repository of personal, communal, and institutional memory; the avenue of communication; the lifeblood of bureaucracies; and the foundation and residue of learning. Early modern Europeans, whether or not they sought to, and whether or not they were pleased with or trusted the new reality, put paper inscribed with text at the centre of their lives.” He argues that these developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life.The book focuses on “two related and simultaneous developments in early modern Europe: the great increase in information created and circulating in European society, largely rendered on paper, and the accompanying efforts to manage and make sense of it, also chiefly via paper.” The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters.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

The emergence of self-government in the Jewish community in Eastern Europe has been a slow process, often encouraged by invitations of existing regimes and sometimes to escape state persecution. Nonetheless, the Jewish community has succeeded in establishing its autonomy as well as maintain a certain degree of control over its traditions.In this new episode, François Guesnet, Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London, traces the travails and triumphs of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, based on his edited volume, “Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present.”The book offers insights into different aspects of Jewish sociopolitical life through expert translation of narrative sources in Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and other languages into English. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices