New Books in Early Modern History

Charles, First Marquis of Cornwallis (1738-1805), was a leading figure in late eighteenth-century Britain. His career spanned the American War of Independence, Irish Union, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the building of the Second British Empire in India--and he has long been associated with the unacceptable face of Britain's colonial past. In Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutiona...

Kimberly Anne Coles is Professor of English at the University of Maryland; her first book, Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2008. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Today, we are discussing Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early...

The crossbow is an iconic weapon of the Middle Ages and, alongside the longbow, one of the most effective ranged weapons of the pre-gunpowder era. Unfortunately, despite its general fame it has been decades since an in-depth history of the medieval crossbow has been published, which is why Dr. Stuart Ellis-Gorman’s detailed, accessible, and highly illustrated book The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon F...

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the region. But, as Michael Witge...

The term cacica was a Spanish linguistic invention, the female counterpart to caciques, the Arawak word for male indigenous leaders in Spanish America. But the term’s meaning was adapted and manipulated by natives, creating a new social stratum where it previously may not have existed. This book explores that transformation, a conscious construction and reshaping of identity from within. Cacicas f...

The Story of Religion in America: An Introduction (Westminster John Knox Press, 2021) presents the broad scope of the story of religion in the American colonies and the United States. While following certain central narratives, including the long shadow of Puritanism, the competition between revival and reason, and the defining role of racial and ethnic diversity, the book also tells the story of...

In Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land During the British Civil Wars (Manchester UP, 2020), Dr. David Brown examines the transformation of England's trade and government finances in the mid-seventeenth century, a revolution that destroyed Ireland. In 1642 a small group of merchants, the 'Adventurers for Irish land', raised an army to conquer Ireland but sent it i...

Medieval and Renaissance Cyprus was a fascinating place of ethnic, cultural, and religious encounters. Following almost nine centuries of Byzantine rule, Cyprus was conquered by the Crusaders in 1191, becoming (until 1571) the most important stronghold of Latin Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean—first under the Frankish dynasty of the Lusignans, and later under the Venetians. Modern histori...

Francine Friedman's Like Salt for Bread: The Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Brill, 2021) is the only comprehensive treatment in any language of a rather “exotic” Balkan Jewish community. It places the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the context of the Jewish world, but also of the world within which it existed for around five hundred years under various empires and regimes. The Bo...

Joy Wiltenburg's book Laughing Histories: From the Renaissance Man to the Woman of Wit (Routledge, 2022) breaks new ground by exploring moments of laughter in early modern Europe, showing how laughter was inflected by gender and social power. "I dearly love a laugh," declared Jane Austen's heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and her wit won the heart of the aristocratic Mr. Darcy. Yet the widely read Earl o...

In Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, Leonato says, “I pray thee peace; I will be flesh and blood. / For there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently, / However they have writ the style of gods / And make a push at chance and sufferance.” These lines serve as the inspiration for the title of a new book from today’s guest, Donovan Sherman. The Philosopher's...

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than three hundred daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island. The plan: to wreak havoc on the Pacific coastline, raiding cities, mines, and merchant ships. The booty: the bright gleam of Spanish gold and the chance to become legends. S...

Today’s guests are Dennis Austin Britton and Kimberly Anne Coles who have co-edited a special issue of Spenser Studies in 2021, on “Spenser and Race.” Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia; his previous book Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance, was published through Fordham University Press in 2014. Dennis is the former b...

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...

As COVID-19 disrupted maritime trade with China, the world was again reminded of the importance of shipping in global commerce. The roots of Nordic maritime trade relations with Asia go back centuries, and this history reveals interesting details about early Finnish interaction with China. For example, the Swedish East India Company’s 18th century trade voyages produced the first-ever Finnish acad...

Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private.  In Petrarch: E...

Sarah Fox's fascinating new book Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England (U London Press, 2022) rewrites all that we know about eighteenth-century childbirth by placing women’s voices at the center of the story. Examining childbirth from the perspective of the birthing woman, this research offers new perspectives on the history of the family, the social history of medicine, community and neighb...

In Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Dr. Ricardo Herrera presents a major new history of the Continental Army’s Grand Forage of 1778. Dr. Herrera uncovers what daily life was like for soldiers during the darkest and coldest days of the American Revolution: the Valley Forge winter. Here, the army launched its largest and...

Focusing on timber in Qing China, Dr. Meng Zhang's new book, Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (U Washington Press, 2021) traces the trade routes that connected population centers of the Lower Yangzi Delta to timber supplies on China's southwestern frontier. She documents innovative property rights systems and economic incentives that convinced landowners to invest years in...

Advisory: this episode discusses the literary representation of self-harm and suicide, in particular, how writers such as Shakespeare and Milton often treated the subject in unserious or trivializing ways. In 1643, the writer Thomas Browne introduced the word “suicide” into the English language. Eventually, “suicide” would become a monolith in how we think about self-harm and self-killing. “Suicid...

Manuscripts teem with life. They are not only the stuff of history and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence we have of entire lives, long receded. Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers (Riverrun, 2021) tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived...

The ongoing debate surrounding who gets to determine the subjects of public commemoration, particularly in the form of statues, has become more heated over the past few years. In his timely book, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues (Aurum Press, 2021), Peter Hughes examines the long history of statues being used to articulate the values of rulers, governments, organizations, and average citiz...

In Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment (UNC Press, 2022), Cristina Ramos tells us the story of Mexico city’s oldest public institution for the insane, the Hospital de San Hipólito. This institution, founded in 1567, was the first mental hospital in the New World. Remarkable as this fact may be, this book is not simply about the singularity of this institution­­­...

James Stafford teaches at Columbia University, where he specializes in the political and intellectual history of Ireland, Britain and Western Europe since 1750, with a particular interest in questions of political economy and international order. In this interview he discusses his new book The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848 (Cambridge UP, 2022), which offers a...

The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith's puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The wo...