New Books in Early Modern History

Contemporary historians and other scholars of the body frequently use "writing" and "inscription as metaphors. Katherine Dauge-Roth's Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (Routledge, 2019) is an absorbing book that emphasizes literal, material forms of writing the body, taking skin as a "privileged surface," a physical site of expression, experience, and representation. Examining different types of corporeal marking from the later part of the sixteenth century through the eighteenth, the book focuses on inscription "from the outside," such as tattoos and branding, as well as marks on skin believed to have been made by supernatural forces, including stigmata and the "Devil's mark," the traces of God or of demonic possession/collaboration.Examining a range of cases from France and the "French Atlantic" context, the book engages with the histories of Christianity, witchcraft, travel, settler colonialism, slavery, crime, and punishment. It takes up questions of religious belief, spirituality, gender, and sexuality within a broader context of great cultural and political upheaval, emergent and shifting technologies of writing and identity. Moving from convents and sites of pilgrimage to colonial and prison contexts, the chapters work as distinct case studies in conversation with multiple, complex historiographies that are linked to one another in and through bodily signs and markings. Along the way, Dauge-Roth complicates our understandings of agency and power, public and private, the role of the state, and the fashioning of the self throughout this period of French, European and imperial history. A history of early modern France, Signing the Body also holds much that will fascinate readers interests in the longer trajectory of body marking right up to 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 its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Post-Reformation Era, 1559-1689 (Oxford UP, 2020) traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.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

Stanley Mirvis' The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition (Yale University Press, 2020) offers an in-depth look at the Portuguese Jews of Jamaica and their connections to broader European and Atlantic trade networks. Based on last wills and testaments composed by Jamaican Jews between 1673 and 1815, this book explores the social and familial experiences of one of the most critical yet understudied nodes of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora. Stanley Mirvis examines how Jamaica's Jews worked as traders, planters, pen keepers, physicians, fishermen, and metalworkers, and reveals how they remained both rooted in local Jamaican contexts as well as part of the larger Atlantic Jewish Diasporic community and networks.  R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Political Theorist Jason Frank, the John L. Senior Professor of Government at Cornell University, has written a new book, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly (Oxford UP, 2021), that explores the concept of “people out of doors” and how we think about demonstrations by citizens in the streets, popular assemblies, and other configurations of the voice of the people. The idea of “the people” is a key component of democratic thinking and democratic theory, and Frank’s analysis examines these concepts and ideas as they have also evolved over the years since the Age of Revolution. Historians and sociologists have spent time researching and writing about popular assemblies and the role of the crowd, but political theory, as a discipline, has not provided much work on these concepts. The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly is an attempt to at least open the conversation in political theory, integrating some of the analysis by major political thinkers where they have confronted these concepts of the “people out of doors” and how they have responded to this important and understudied area of democratic theory.The issue of the people, in the streets, demonstrating, at the barricades, protesting, is part of our understanding of democracy, and it is the actual visual presentation of the power within democracy. This is part of Frank’s discussion of the aesthetic in democratic theory. He notes that aesthetic considerations are essential, this is how democratic people imagine and experience themselves as a people, as a form of government, as the power of the state. The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly is an interdisciplinary examination of the move towards democratic politics in the Age of Revolution, integrating analysis of work by Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Edmund Burke along with visual iconography, paintings and artistic renderings of the people as political body, and poetic and fictional works that dive into this same discussion. The Democratic Sublime examines the basis of democracy not so much as the constitutional frameworks or political institutions that came to replace so many monarchies or colonial powers, but as the much more ephemeral assembly of the people themselves, and how the people see and understand themselves in this context.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the new book, How the Army Made Britain a Global Power: 1688-1815, published by Casemate, acclaimed historian and commentator Professor Jeremy Black, looks at this neglected, but ultra-important topic. Between 1760 and 1815, British troops campaigned from Manila to Montreal, Cape Town to Copenhagen, Washington to Waterloo. The naval dimension of Britain's expansion has been superbly covered by a number of excellent studies, but there has not been a single volume that does the same for the army and, in particular, looks at how and why it became a world-operating force, one capable of beating the Marathas as well as the French. This book will both offer a new perspective, one that concentrates on the global role of the army and its central part in imperial expansion and preservation, and as such will be a major book for military history and world history. There will be a focus on what the army brought to power equations and how this made it a world-level force. The multipurpose character of the army emerges as the key point, one seen in particular in the career of Wellington: while referred to disparagingly by Napoleon as a 'sepoy general,' Wellington's ability to operate successfully in India and Europe was not only impressive but also reflected synergies in experience and acquired skill that characterized the British army. No other army matched this. The closest capability was that of Russia able, in 1806-14, to defeat both the Turks and Napoleon, but without having the transoceanic capability and experience enjoyed by the British army. The experience was a matter in part of debate, including over doctrine, as in the tension between the 'Americans' and 'Germans,' a reference to fields of British campaigning concentration during the Seven Years War. This synergy proved best developed in the operations in Iberia in 1809-14, with logistical and combat skills utilized in India employed in a European context in which they were of particular value. The book aims to further address the question of how this army was achieved despite the strong anti-army ideology/practice derived from the hostile response to Oliver Cromwell and to James II. Thus, perception and politics are both part of the story, as well as the exigencies and practicalities of conflict, including force structure, command issues, and institutional developments. At the same time, there was no inevitability about British success over this period, and it is necessary to consider developments in the context of other states and, in particular, the reasons why British forces did well and that Britain was not dependent alone on naval effectiveness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Dr. Emilia Bachrach about In the Service of Krishna: Illustrating the Lives of Eighty-Four Vaishnavas from a 1702 Manuscript in the Amit Ambalal Collection (Mapin, 2020).The Pushtimarg, or the Path of Grace, is a Hindu tradition whose ritual worship of the deity Krishna has developed in close relationship to a distinct genre of early-modern Hindi prose hagiography. This bookintroduces readers to the most popular hagiographic text of the Pushtimarg which tells the sacred life stories of the community's first preceptor Vallabhacharya (1497-1531) and his most beloved disciples. This book focuses on the only extant Chaurasi Vaishnavan ki Varta manuscript dated to the beginning of the 18th century, now in artist Amit Ambalal's collection. The volume will appeal to scholars and students of Indian art and literature, to those who have grown up in the Pushtimarg tradition, and more broadly to those with an appreciation for the distinct ways in which pictures can tell stories that unite the everyday with intimate experiences of the Divine.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to David Potter about his new book Disruption: Why Things Change (Oxford UP, 2021).Disruption is about radical change-why it happens and how. Drawing on case studies ranging from the fourth century AD through the twentieth century, we look at how long-established systems of government and thought are challenged, how new institutions are created and new ideas become powerful. While paying attention to the underlying political, intellectual, economic and environmental sources of social disruption, we will see that no matter what similarities there might be between forces that shake different societies, these underlying factors do not dictate specific outcomes. The human actors are ultimately the most important, their decisions drive the conclusions that we see over time. Through our case studies we can explore successful and unsuccessful decision making, and the emergence of the ideas that conditioned human actions. We'll explore the development of Islam and of Christian doctrine, of constitutional thought, of socialism and social Darwinism. We'll look at how these ideas, all of them emerging on the fringes of society became central.Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern Eureaopn history at the University of Florida. He can be reached at crsbb32@ufl.edu or on twitter @craig_sorvillo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), Dr. Jill Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. By analyzing a wide range of genres and a diverse range of venues, Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers’ techniques to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Ingram shows that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Rather, marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike.Dr. Jill Ingram is associate professor of English at Ohio University.Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. In The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skillfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasizing the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fueled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world.David Veevers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has published articles in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of Global History, and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize in 2014. He is co-editor of The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550 to 1750 (2018).Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After over a decade of king-less government, civil war, and political and religious revolution, the restoration of the Stuart monarchy created a complex situation for those religious dissenters who had enjoyed a brief period of political freedom outside the English church. In The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England: 'The Wonders of the Lord' (Royal Historical Society, 2019) George Southcombe employs a series of case studies to explore the religious and print cultures of religious nonconformity. The Presbyterian poet and satirist Robert Wild shows the paradox of those "moderate puritans" who had helped restore the monarchy which led to their own social exclusion. The General Baptist Thomas Grantham helps us to learn about the possibilities and limits of friendship between dissenters and establishment clergy. The Quaker John Whitehead provides a vignette into the development of Quaker theology in the Restoration. And the Fifth Monarchist Vavasor Powell and Particular Baptist Benjamin Keach show the popularity of Calvinism and apocalyptic hermeneutics all the way through the seventeenth century. Southcombe's study explores the way dissenters used print to create a richly variegated culture that contributed to the development of Restoration political parties and religious denominations. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices