New Books in Early Modern History

Labels on a map: Surrey. Lower Norfolk. The Isle of Wight. Northumberland. Middlesex. Not a map England, but of the British colonies of Virginia and Maryland published in 1673. This is a map that proclaims empire: from the prominent royal arms, to the ships riding at anchor out in what is labelled the ‘North Sea’. It is both a map of land and of water: rivers open into the interior like great high...

In today’s episode, we catch up with Paul Lay, editor of the leading journal History Today, and a senior research fellow in early modern history at the University of Buckingham. Paul is the author of a brilliant new account of the British republic. Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (Head of Zeus, 2020) is the most up to date and accessible narrative of the crucial perio...

Emily Colbert Cairns’ book, Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), traces the biblical figure of Esther, the secret Jewish Queen, as she is reinvented as the patron saint for the early modern Sephardic community. This hybrid globetrotter emerges repeatedly in dramatic texts, poetry, and even visual representation in the global S...

In his Relation of the second voyage to Guiana, published in 1596, George Chapman put the imperial ambitions of England into a telling verse couplet. ‘Riches, and Conquest, and Renowne I sing. / Riches with honour, Conquest without bloud’. For the metropolitan gentlemen of early 17th-century London, the colonising project in Virginia was deeply bound up with the tastes and social lives of statesme...

Ingrid Horrocks talks about the way women travelers, specifically women wanderers, are represented in late-eighteenth century literature, particularly in the work of women writers. Horrocks in an associate professor in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 (Cambridge Unive...

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early...

Though traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Chŏngjo has benefited in recent decades from a wave of new scholarship which has reassessed both his reign and his role in Korean history. The latest to do so is Christopher Lovins, who in his book King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea (State University of New Yor...

In his notes for a speech to be delivered in the House of Commons in the wake of American Independence, the MP and imperial reformer Edmund Burke observed that ‘Some people are great Lovers of uniformity - They are not satisfied with a rebellion in the West. They must have one in the East: They are not satisfied with losing one Empire - they must lose another. Lord North will weep that he has not...

This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, David D. Hall provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms o...

In Greek mythology Prometheus is the trickster Titan who gives fire to humanity. As Wilson Jeremiah Moses explains in his book Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus (Cambridge University Press, 2019) America’s third president demonstrated many of the same traits as this legendary figure over the course of his long life of intellectual activity. As Moses reveals, this is reflected in the malleable...

Chet Van Duzer's new book Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), presents the first detailed study of one of the most important masterpieces of Renaissance cartography. By transcribing, translating into English, and detailing the sources of all of the descriptive texts on the map, as well as the sources of many of the images, th...

The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Liverpool University Press, 2019) is the first scholarly monograph devoted to the comprehensive analysis of the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (r. 1762-1796), as well as the first to examine the conventions of letter-writing by an 18th-century monarch after Louis XIV. Presenting a rich history of Catherine’s personal development as a let...

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasti...

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 2015; paperback edition, 2018), delves deeper into issues concerning anthr...

Paula McQuade, professor of English literature at DePaul University, is the author of a brilliant new account of Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2017). This book opens up an entirely new field for the study of early modern women’s writing, but it also pushes beyond other scholarly conventions to prompt new discussions about the purpose and...

The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. Gerald Leonard, Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and Saul Cornell, Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University...

Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston and Philadelphia while mocking the scattered settlements of the French. Colonial founders characterized their social experiment as a ‘City on a Hill’, and texts that promoted colonization listed the size...

Gerry Milligan’s Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2018) takes as its subject the woman warrior in early modern Italy as she was and as she was represented across varied types of texts, both literary and historical. What emerges is a discursive construction of the role gender played in the concept of warfare during this time period....

Jeremy Black’s impressive new book offers an enormously wide-ranging account of the social, political and religious cultures in which England’s greatest dramatist was formed and found success. England in the Age of Shakespeare (Indiana University Press, 2019) draws together Black’s expansive reading in Shakespeare’s contexts with extensive knowledge of the canon of his plays. Black, a professor of...

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlanti...

The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed of women who were determined to make their grievances known. Furious at the ever rising price and scarcity of bread, Parisian market women, known as Dames des Halles, joined with other revolutionaries to...

Bianca Premo’s award-winning book The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, makes a powerful yet seemingly simple claim: during the eighteenth century, illiterate ordinary litigants in colonial Spanish America created enlightened ideas and practices by suing their social superiors in higher numbers and with n...

From 1667 to 1676, a pivotal controversy played out among several mathematical luminaries of the time, partly in the proceedings of the Royal Society but partly in private correspondence. The controversy concerned whether an infamous problem of Ancient Greek geometry, the quadrature of the central conic sections (better known as squaring the circle), could be solved using the classical tools of st...

Chocolate – nothing is more irresistible for a decadent treat or a rich drink to warm you on a cold winter’s evening. In eighteenth-century Venezuela, cacao became a life source for the colony. Neglected by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. But, they found a solution in trading the highly coveted luxury good, cacao, for the necessities of...

There are few better guides to the “long eighteenth century” that J. C. D. Clark, emeritus professor of history at the University of Kansas, whose sequence of ground-breaking books have contested prevailing assumptions about religion, politics and early modernity even as they have worked to construct a chastened but compelling account of British and American society from the Restoration to the Gre...