New Books in Early Modern History

Sir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), tells the story of Western European fascination with the Ottoman empire and Islam between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the latter half of the 18th century. This beautifully argued, erudite monograph traces a textured encounter betw...

Miniature ivory anatomical models or “manikins” were first created in the late 17th century, but their history as props for man-midwives, or even as kunstkammer objects, has not been fully explored. In this podcast episode, Dr. Cali Buckley, of the Pennsylvania State University College, discusses how manikins grew as figures that mechanically and emotionally engaged with its owners, arousing their...

In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains an accompanying "fugue" music scored for three voices. Historians of alchemy have long understood this...

The Protestant Reformation looms large in our cultural imagination. In the standard telling, it’s the moment the world went modern. Casting off the shackles and superstitions of medieval Catholicism, reformers translated the Bible into the vernacular and democratized religion. In this story, it’s no wonder that Protestantism should give birth to liberalism. But this story is wrong, or so argues Ja...

In The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), Martyn Rady, Masaryk Professor of Central European History at University College London, tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built -- and then lost -- over nearly a millennium. From modest origins in what is to-day southern Germany and Switzerland, the Habsburgs gained control first of Austria in the 12th century and then the...

Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric notions of long-term historical change by drawing upon the histories of societies based on wet-rice cultivation to chart an alternate pattern of social evolution and state formation. It traces inter-state linkages and the growth of commercialization without...

Stefan Bauer has written an outstanding study of one of the most important Catholic historians in early modern Europe. Bauer, who has just taken up a new position teaching history at Warwick University, UK, has spent much of the last decade working on the life and work of Onofrio Panvinio. The result, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform (Oxford...

In his new book, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (UNC Press, 2020), Dr. Jeffrey Erbig charts the interplay between imperial and indigenous spatial imaginaries and shows the critical role that indigenous actors played in imperial border-making between the Spanish and the Portuguese in the Río de la Plata region during the mid-to-late eighteenth ce...

Young women and men sought out each other’s company in the workshops, cabarets, and streets of Old Regime Lyon, and evidence of these relationships lingers in documents and material objects conserved in Lyon’s municipal and departmental archives. How did young workers spend time together? When would they initiate sexual relationships outside of marriage? What resources did they marshal to manage p...

Historians of early modern religion recognise the importance of the development of covenant theology in the formation of Calvinism. Harrison Perkins, who teaches systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary and serves as assistant minister of London Presbyterian Church, has recently published what promises to be one of the most important accounts of the development of Reformed covenantal...

On the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival in the new world of the Mayflower, Dustin Benge and Nate Pickowicz have written a lively and accessible account of America’s earliest English immigrants. Their new book, The American Puritans (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020) presents nine mini-biographies that outline key events in the lives of individuals including Anne Bradstreet, John Eliot, Jo...

David Tavárez is a historian and linguistic anthropologist; he is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Vassar College. He is a specialist in Nahuatl and Zapotec texts, the study of Mesoamerican religions and rituals, Catholic campaigns against idolatry, Indigenous intellectuals, and native Christianities. He is the author or co-author of several books an...

Adriaan Neele, who is director of the doctoral programme and Professor of Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, has edited an outstanding collection of essays on Petrus van Mastricht. This new book, Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Text, Context, and Interpretation (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2020), combines work by new and well-established scholars to examine the ways in w...

For the people of the Dawnland, they were floating islands. The sails resembled clouds, and the men gathered on deck looked like bears. When Europeans came ashore, whether Danes in what would become Newfoundland, English settlers in the land they named ‘Virginia’, their mastery of the oceans did not translate into supremacy on land. Small conflicts in colonial enslaves evolved into trans-Atlantic...

Kenneth Austin, who teaches history at the University of Bristol, UK, is well-known for his work on Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. His new book, The Jews and the Reformation (Yale University Press, 2020), offers the most thorough description and analysis of its subject to date. Austin describes the long and complex history of the two traditions, shows how both religions defined themselve...

The essays in Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Brill) explore the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society. By tracing pivotal judicial concepts such as ‘right of necessity’ and ‘subjective rights’ back to their medieval versions, and by situating them in unexpected contexts such as the Franciscans’ theory of poverty and colonization or...

Omar H. Ali’s Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford University Press, 2016), provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar. It offers a rare look at an individual who began in obscurity in the Horn of Africa and reached the highest levels of South Asian political and military affairs in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ambar's rise from sla...

In her new book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge UP, 2020), Dr. Pernille Røge charts the confluence and reciprocal impacts of ideas and policies espoused by political economists, colonial administrators, planters, and entrepreneurs to reform the French empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Due to this diffusion of...

The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō) is the masterwork of Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist sect in Kamakura-era Japan. It is one of the most important Zen Buddhist collections, composed during a period of remarkable religious diversity and experimentation. The text is complex and compelling, famed for its eloquent yet perplexing manner of expressing the core precepts...

Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices of early modernity brings to light the emergence of the early modern global south. In The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Differ...

Ananya Chakravarti’s The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and The Imagination of Empire in Modern Brazil and India (Oxford University Press), recovers the religious roots of Europe's first global order, by tracing the evolution of a religious vision of empire through the lives of Jesuits working in the missions of early modern Brazil and India. These missionaries struggled to unite three...

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Tamar Herzig, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, the Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E Curiel Institute for European Studies, and as the Vice Chairperson of the Historical Society of Israel about her new book, A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press). Dr. Herzi...

How has philosophy transformed human knowledge and the world we live in? Philosophical investigation is the root of all human knowledge. Developing new concepts, reinterpreting old truths, and reconceptualizing fundamental questions, philosophy has progressed―and driven human progress―for more than two millennia. In short, we live in a world philosophy made. In this concise history of philosophy's...

Shankar Nair’s new book Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2020) is an intellectually daring and dazzlingly imaginative study of scholarly interactions, made visible through translation, between Sanskrit and Arabo-Persian philosophical traditions in premodern South Asia. Centered on the 16th-century Persian transla...

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the r...