New Books in Early Modern History

Jeremy Duperteis Bangs, a leading expert in the history of the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, overturns stereotypes with exciting new analyses of colonial and Native life in Plymouth Colony, of religious toleration, and of historical memory. New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration (Brill, 2019) brings together a wealth of insi...

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By nigh...

The Japanese provincial city of Ichijōdani was destroyed in the civil wars of the late sixteenth century but never rebuilt. Archaeological excavations have since uncovered the most detailed late medieval urban site in the country. Drawing on analysis of specific excavated objects and decades of archaeological evidence to study daily life in Ichijōdani, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destru...

The story of the Constitution of the United States began long before the American Revolutionary War. This document was influenced by centuries old English law, and the final product was the result of months of debate, arguing, and compromises from representatives of 12 states, including its essential recognition of slavery, leading to further debates and conflict after the document was signed. Int...

Today’s guest, Erin Webster, is the author of The Curious Eye: Optics and Literature in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020). A book that casts its attention on the early modern period far and wide, The Curious Eye will be of interest to anyone interested in early modern mathematics, optic technology, poetic theory, and the contested relation of empiricism and empire. Erin is Profe...

As a young student at Christ’s College Cambridge, John Milton announced to the world that he was going to write the greatest poem that the world has ever seen. He didn’t want to sit among the epic geniuses Homer and Virgil, he wanted to surpass them. Decades later, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, reworking and embellishing the stories of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise and Satan’s fall from heaven t...

The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born good, but society corrupts them. He was unimpressed with the fixation on wealth that he saw in the French society. In fact, he felt it was evidence of a self-interested, degenerate society. He endeavored to write the formula for a more civically minded society, and in 1762, he published The Social Contract, a treatise i...

Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his l...

How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline?  The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from th...

In the face of a Korean cultural world preoccupied with newness, literary output from the more measured and regulated Choson period (1392-1910) can seem difficult to engage with for readers both inside and outside the country. But as Ksenia Chizhova’s Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday (Columbia UP, 2021) shows, a particular genre of late-Chso...

Tim Murtagh completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin. He was a historical consultant on the Dublin Tenement Museum at No. 14 Henrietta Street and a book based on this research will be appearing later next year. Since April 2020, Tim has been an Archival Research Fellow with the Beyond 2022 project, an international research project working to create a virtual reconstruction of the Public Record...

The extraordinary story of the Popish Plot and how it shaped the political and religious future of Britain In 1678, a handful of perjurers claimed that the Catholics of England planned to assassinate the king. Men like the "Reverend Doctor" Titus Oates and "Captain" William Bedloe parlayed their fantastical tales of Irish ruffians, medical poisoners, and silver bullets into public adulation and go...

The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural wor...

The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas (Basic Books, 2022), historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this pow...

Nancy November's edited volume String Quartets in Beethoven's Europe (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is the first detailed study of string quartets in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe. It brings together the work of nine scholars who explore little-studied aspects of this multi-faceted genre. Together, this book’s chapters deal with compositional responses to Beethoven’s string...

In an exciting new book titled Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Parris shows how early modern writing about care and sleep were deeply indebted with the Stoic principle of oikeiosis. While sleep could imperil the Christian soul, insomnia too could have deleterious effects on both communal and individual life. In Parris’s analysis, earl...

Professor Martin’s A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (Yale, 2022) is a survey of Early Modern European history from the Age of Discovery to the French Revolution with two important distinctions. First, Professor Martin views modernity through the enduring dream of the Apocalypse (which he calls the “stamp of modernity,” 250); second, he compares the...

Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture (Cornell UP, 2022), Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the div...

In this episode of the Vault, we hear Harry Berger’s talk about Leonardo da Vinci and Vassari’s "Lives of the Painters." Harry Berger was a scholar of Renaissance English literature who wrote books about art history, anthropology, and philosophy. He taught at UC Santa Cruz, where he was an emeritus professor until he died in 2021, at age 96. Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities ha...

Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century, especially in New England, understood their Puritan heritage as one with radical political and spiritual responsibilities. Kenyon Gradert's new book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) te...

Content Warning: discussion of execution gets a bit gruesome.  Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey, A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England (University of Alabama Press, 2022) provides a new perspective on the representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. A significant part...

Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) traces a tapestry of historical actors, empires, and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. Starting with an imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 to build a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and...

Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) traces a tapestry of historical actors, empires, and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. Starting with an imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 to build a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and...

In his fascinating and painstakingly research new book Messianic Ideas and Movements in Sunni Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2022), the noted scholar of Islam Yohanan Friedmann details the religious thought and political movements of multiple actors who made messianic claims in premodern and modern Islam, spanning sites including South Asia, North Africa, and the Sudan. Over the course of this book, we...

The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (U California Press, 2022) presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews...