New Books in Early Modern History

A unique, illustrated book that aspires to bring medieval history closer to the general audience will change the way you see medieval history, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History (Icon Books, 2021) busts the myth of the ‘Dark Ages’, shedding light on the medieval period’s present-day relevance in a unique illustrated style.This history takes us through the rise and fall of empires, papacies, caliphates and kingdoms; through the violence and death of the Crusades, Viking raids, the Hundred Years War and the Plague; to the curious practices of monks, martyrs and iconoclasts. We’ll see how the foundations of the modern West were established, influencing our art, cultures, religious practices and ways of thinking. And we’ll explore the lives of those seen as ‘Other’ – women, Jews, homosexuals, lepers, sex workers and heretics. Join historian Eleanor Janega and illustrator Neil Max Emmanuel on a romp across continents and kingdoms as we discover the Middle Ages to be a time of huge change, inquiry and development – not unlike our own.Eleanor Janega is a medieval historian at the London School of Economics specializing in sexuality, propaganda, apocalypticism, and the urban experience in the medieval period generally and in late medieval Bohemia in particular. Her focus is on communicating medieval history for a general audience, and to that end she blogs at going-medieval.com and has written for The Washington Post, BBC History and History Today among others. At the same time, she can also be found hosting medieval history programs on History Hit TV.Neil Max Emmanuel is a motion graphics animator, illustrator, storyboard artist, cartoonist, visual facilitator, media trainer, and consultant. For ten years he has worked for Channel 4’s Time Team alongside the country’s leading historical experts and filmmakers. He has worked for many historical documentaries for BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic and History Channel to name a few.Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance: The Varieties of Architectural Experience (Cambridge UP, 2021) is the first study of Renaissance architecture as an immersive, multisensory experience that combines historical analysis with the evidence of first-hand accounts. Questioning the universalizing claims of contemporary architectural phenomenologists, David Karmon emphasizes the infinite variety of meanings produced through human interactions with the built environment. His book draws upon the close study of literary and visual sources to prove that early modern audiences paid sustained attention to the multisensory experience of the buildings and cities in which they lived. Through reconstructing the Renaissance understanding of the senses, we can better gauge how constant interaction with the built environment shaped daily practices and contributed to new forms of understanding. Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance offers a stimulating new approach to the study of Renaissance architecture and urbanism as a kind of 'experiential trigger' that shaped ways of both thinking and being in the world.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. about his book North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020). He is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His publications include two academic books, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (UNC Press, 2021) and North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020), the independently published Hertford County, North Carolina’s Free People of Color and Their Descendants (2016), as well as articles in the Journal of Social History and the North Carolina Historical Review. Milteer was the recipient of the Historical Society of North Carolina’s R. D. W. Connor Award in 2014 and 2016 for the best journal article in the North Carolina Historical Review.In North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” “mixed-­bloods,” or simply “free people of color.” From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted—praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful business people and winning the respect of their white neighbors.Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included.North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever­-evolving forms of racial discrimination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between the start of the Seven Years' War in 1756 and the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, Jamaica was the richest and most important colony in British America. White Jamaican slaveowners presided over a highly productive economic system, a precursor to the modern factory in its management of labor, its harvesting of resources, and its scale of capital investment and output. Planters, supported by a dynamic merchant class in Kingston, created a plantation system in which short-term profit maximization was the main aim. Their slave system worked because the planters who ran it were extremely powerful.In Jamaica in the Age of Revolution (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020), prize-winning historian Trevor Burnard analyzes the men and women who gained so much from the labor of enslaved people in Jamaica to expose the ways in which power was wielded in a period when the powerful were unconstrained by custom, law, or, for the most part, public approbation or disapproval. Burnard finds that the unremitting war by the powerful against the poor and powerless, evident in the day-to-day struggles slaves had with masters, is a crucial context for grasping what enslaved people had to endure.Examining such events as Tacky's Rebellion of 1760 (the largest slave revolt in the Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution), the Somerset decision of 1772, and the murder case of the Zong in 1783 in an Atlantic context, Burnard reveals Jamiaca to be a brutally effective and exploitative society that was highly adaptable to new economic and political circumstances, even when placed under great stress, as during the American Revolution. Jamaica in the Age of Revolution demonstrates the importance of Jamaican planters and merchants to British imperial thinking at a time when slavery was unchallenged.Trevor Burnard is the Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation and Director of the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull. Professor Burnard is a scholar of early American, imperial, world and Atlantic history, with a special interest in plantation societies in the New World and their connections to eighteenth-century modernity. He is coauthor, with John Garrigus, of The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. A social historian of gender, slavery, and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic World, Jerrad is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “The Work of Freedom: African American Women and the Ordeal of Emancipation in New England, 1740-1840” which examines the everyday lives, labors, and emancipation experiences of African-descended women in late-colonial and early republic New England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from across Tibetan Buddhist schools while crystallizing what it meant to be part of their own Nyingma school. At the monastery, ritual performance, meditation, renunciation, and training in the skills of a bureaucrat or member of the literati went hand in hand. Studying at Mindröling entailed training the senses and cultivating the objects of the senses through poetry, ritual music, monastic dance, visual arts, and incense production, as well as medicine and astrology.Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindröling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics. Considering laypeople as well as monastics and women as well as men, A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindröling Monastery (Columbia UP, 2021) sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes. Townsend traces how tastes, values, and sensibilities were cultivated and spread, showing what it meant for a person, lay or monastic, to be deemed well educated. Combining historical and literary analysis with fieldwork in Tibetan Buddhist communities, this book reveals how monastic institutions work as centers of cultural production beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally deemed Buddhist.Jue Liang is scholar of Buddhism in general, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular. My research examines women in Tibetan Buddhist communities past and present using a combination of textual and ethnographical studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The transfer of power is something every must state attend to (and preferably by peaceful means). Remarkably, this fundamental aspect of statecraft was governed by custom rather than law into the eighteenth century in Russia. In Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia: The Transfer of Power 1450-1725 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Paul Bushkovitch traces the history of how tsars (and earlier, grand princes) came to the Russian throne. Overturning generations of scholarship, Bushkovitch shows that there were various means by which a ruler came to govern Russia. Russian grand princes often designated their eldest sons to the throne in their lifetime, but primogeniture was neither codified nor the only option. The Russian elite on certain occasions elected the new tsar, and women multiple times found themselves at the pinnacle of state power. Deploying decades of erudition and archival sleuthing, Bushkovitch offers a thought-provoking front row view on the evolution of determining the heir and succession politics in early modern Russia.Erika Monahan is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Cornell UP, 2021) is a fascinating study of a crucial early modern cadre of "go-betweens:" the Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans. Blending a creative mix of quantitative methods, prosopography, and the systematic close reading of texts produced or translated by the dragomans, the book shows how, far from being simple intermediaries, the dragomans actively engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire, refracting the knowledge thus acquired across Europe.The book takes a three-pronged approach: it first focuses on the dragomans themselves, exploring how, particularly Venetian dragomans, were recruited, trained, and eventually grew to create an influential cast of subordinate elites enmeshed in both Ottoman and Veneto-Habsburg patterns of representation and consumption. The book then delves into different texts translated or produced by dragomans (relationi, translations of Ottoman charters, grammar books, and even pictorial representations) to examine the self-representation and mediation strategies developed by this specialized cast of interpreters. The final chapters of the book explore the legacy of the dragomans, notably how they contributed to the definition, in Europe, of a Turkish canon of letters that would coalesce into the discipline known as Orientalism.The Dragoman Renaissance offers two substantial contributions to our understanding of diplomacy, mediation, and even incipient Orientalism in the early modern Mediterranean. First, it challenges Eurocentric assumptions still pervasive in Renaissance studies by showing the centrality of Ottoman imperial culture to the articulation of European knowledge about the Ottomans. By studying the sustained interactions between dragomans and Ottoman courtiers in this period, Rothman, therefore, disrupts common ideas about a singular moment of "cultural encounter," as well as about a "docile" and "static" Orient, acted upon by extraneous imperial powers. Second, Rothman creatively uncovers how dragomans mediated Ottoman ethno-linguistic, political, and religious categories to European diplomats and scholars, showing how these intermediaries did not simply circulate fixed knowledge. Rather, their engagement of Ottoman imperial modes of inquiry and social reproduction shaped the discipline of Orientalism for centuries to come.Thanks to the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the e-book editions of The Dragoman Renaissance are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open and other repositories.Natalie Rothman, associate professor at the University of Toronto, specializes in early modern Mediterranean history, the history of cultural mediation, genealogies of Orientalism, and the relationship between translation and empire. She is currently continuing her research on intermediaries on The Dragoman Renaissance research platform Ian F. Hathaway, a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), focuses on mobility, identification, and cross-cultural diplomacy in the early modern Mediterranean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luis Lobo-Guerrero is one of the three editors of this volume—Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires—and one of the six contributing authors. He wrote the preface, “Poseidonians and the Tragedy of Mapping European Empires,” and the first two chapters, “Mapping and the Making of Imperial European Connectivity” and “Mapping and the Invention of the Early ‘Spanish’ Empire.” In this interview, Professor Lobo-Guerrero discusses the role of the map in imperial imagination over time. Thinking in terms of connectivity, Lobo-Guerrero discusses the new empires that leapt the Atlantic (or rather, “Ocean Sea”) into the unknown, and later dominated our world. In this conversation, Lobo-Guerrero relates the example of Juan de la Cosa’s 1500 mappa mundi and how this extraordinary specimen of cartography reveals the mentality of its makers and their understanding of the world.Here's a link to a high quality image of the map discussed.Here's a link to the previous interview with Lobo-Guerrero on his first book in the series.Dr. Lobo-Guerrero is professor of History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen. His works in post-structuralist thought, the history of early modern science, historical epistemology, and geopolitics—including topics of biopolitics and security and the big questions of globality and connectivity. He has written Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk (2012), Insuring War: Sovereignty, Security and Risk (2013), and Insuring Life: Value, Security and Risk (2016), as well as two edited volumes, Imaginaries of Connectivity (2019), and Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires (2021), the book he discusses today.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zwingli: God's Armed Prophet (Yale, 2021) is a major new biography of Huldrych Zwingli--the warrior preacher who shaped the early Reformation. Zwingli (1484-1531) was the most significant early reformer after Martin Luther. As the architect of the Reformation in Switzerland, he created the Reformed tradition later inherited by John Calvin. His movement ultimately became a global religion. A visionary of a new society, Zwingli was also a divisive and fiercely radical figure. Bruce Gordon presents a fresh interpretation of the early Reformation and the key role played by Zwingli. A charismatic preacher and politician, Zwingli transformed church and society in Zurich and inspired supporters throughout Europe. Yet, Gordon shows, he was seen as an agitator and heretic by many and his bellicose, unyielding efforts to realize his vision would prove his undoing. Unable to control the movement he had launched, Zwingli died on the battlefield fighting his Catholic opponents.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Revisiting Japan's Restoration: New Approaches to the Study of the Meiji Transformation (Routledge, 2021) presents the reader with thirty-one short chapters that capture an exciting new moment in the study of the Meiji Restoration. The chapters offer a kaleidoscope of approaches and interpretations of the Restoration that showcase the strengths of the most recent interpretative trends in history writing on Japan while simultaneously offering new research pathways.On a scale probably never before seen in the study of the Restoration outside Japan, the short chapters in this volume reveal unique aspects of the transformative event and process not previously explored in previous research. They do this in three core ways: through selecting and deploying different time frames in their historical analysis; by creative experimentation with different spatial units through which to ascertain historical experience; and by innovative selection of unique and highly original topics for analysis. The volume offers students and teachers of Japanese history, modern history, and East Asian studies an important resource for coming to grips with the multifaceted nature of Japan’s nineteenth-century transformation.The volume will also have broader appeal to scholars working in fields such as early modern/modern world history, global history, Asian modernities, gender studies, economic history, and postcolonial studies.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices