New Books in Early Modern History

When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning in  Creating an Informed Citizenry:...

Regency gardens dazzled with colour, invention and theatricality: trellises heavy with roses and jasmine, shrubberies designed for intrigue and lawns enlivened with pools, grottoes and fanciful ornaments. Yet behind this world of perfume and spectacle lay a striking social shift. In a domain long defined by men, women began to play an active role, influencing Humphry Repton and other designers to...

The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Professor Dr. Natalia Filatkina , Dr. Kerstin Roth and Research Associate Miriam Hinterholzer . All three work at the University of Hamburg in Germany on a long-term research project, called FSL Digital , that investigates language history, language attitudes and everyday communication in the context of multilingualism in...

In popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife of James’s nephew, the Dutch William III of Orange. Devoted to her husband, Mary would not accept the crown alone, and so William and Mary were crowned together, securing a smooth dynastic succession. The Last Invasion of...

Panel painters in both the middle ages and the fifteenth century created works that evoke the luster of precious stones, the sheen of polished gold and silver, and the colorful radiance of stained glass. Yet their approaches to rendering these materials were markedly different. In The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100–1500 (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Marjolijn Bol explores s...

Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to wri...

Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating the country’s still-flourishing and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh’s most emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and stone built cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland had...

After mounting London’s outdoor pulpit known as St. Paul’s Cross on 8th December, 1588, Anthony Tyrrell found himself perched before a skeptical audience. He stood in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral to declare his recantation of Catholicism and return to England’s official Protestant Church. The trouble was he had been there before – in January of the same year, in fact – to do the same thing....

Mexico City was America's largest city in the seventeenth century – a genuine metropolis. In American Metropolis: The Making of Mexico City (Cambridge University Press, 2026), Dr. Tatiana Seijas reveals a rich tapestry of stories about essential workers who remade and transformed the city during this period. Her narrative style carries readers to a unique place and time with residents from around...

Drawing from local archives alongside national and international records, War and Governance in Scotland, 1543-1559: Destruction, Reconstruction and Reform (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Amy Blakeway argues that warfare was the defining feature of government and politics in Scotland for the two decades following the death of James V. It demonstrates that beyond the direct effects of invasion, the nee...

Today’s guest, Caro Pirri, is the author of Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book explores how early modern colonial travel writing informed the London theater’s spatial and placemaking conventions. It suggests that what the stage found most compelling about narratives of colonial settlement was their failure...

Henry VIII is England’s most famous king. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant, the religious disruptor and the much-married glutton. Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII (Birlinn, 2026) is a groundbreaking study of Henry’s life examines and destroys many of the long-repeated myths about this complex monarch: he was not particular...

For centuries, many of the world’s most influential thinkers relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying. In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship (Princeton UP, 2026) introduces readers to these unsung scribes, assistants, and collaborators, showing how the scholarly enterprise is rarely as...

Empire and Frontier: Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Valiant Iroquois in King William's War: 1689-1701 (Pegasus Books, 2026) by Samuel Marquis presents a powerful episode of early American history, revealing the very human story of friendship and alliance between Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Iroquois during King William’s War (1689–1701). Like Philbrick’s Mayflower and Gwynne’s Empire of the Summ...

In Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2026), Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth reveal the vast and complex world of France's Atlantic enterprises in the premodern era. Drawing upon years of archival work, Hodson and Rushforth demonstrate how France's overseas activities created its empire, intentionally or not,...

In 1644 four norcini or pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome themselves, who had become so...

Paper was a precious commodity in the eighteenth century: every sheet was made by hand. There was therefore a significant market in recycling substandard paper from paper mills and discarded proofs and sheets from printers and booksellers for secondary use, alongside a black market in which stealing and receiving stolen paper took place on a vast scale. A single piece of paper could be termed ‘was...

In Contested Continent: The Struggle for America, c.1000-1680 (Oxford University Press, 2026), the newest installment of the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series, Peter C. Mancall recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions of Indigenous women and men as well as Europeans and Africans. This history spans the continent from th...

The first chemists were Sri Lankan forgers who crafted unimaginably strong steel millennia before it should have been possible. They were alchemists in Roman Egypt, who designed apparatus still in use today. They were Stone Age leatherworkers, Tang Dynasty herbalists and Mayan stoneworkers.  The Enlightenment is usually credited with the origins of chemistry, but in truth, the science blossom...

In Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London (Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Peter Ross, step into the kitchens, streets and chop houses of Georgian London—one day, one city, countless appetites. From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns, coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate houses, soup shops and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bust...

The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France (Princeton UP, 2026) is a dramatic account of how slavery and race profoundly influenced the course of the French Revolution and had a central impact on the lives of key leaders, including Mirabeau, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon. Acclaimed historian Jeremy D. Popkin brings this often-forgotten sto...

What does a 16th century ruler reveal about the nature of power, past and present? Istanbul, 1538. The greatest of the Ottoman Sultans is at the pinnacle of world power, while his family and future are at the mercy of their own dynastic law: whichever of his five sons succeeds him must eventually kill all the others. So why not get a head start? For the next fifteen years, as Suleyman the Magnific...

The Power of Publishing in Early Modern Tibetan Buddhism (Lexington Books, 2025) is a rich exploration of the history of Tibetan books during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Looking at this ‘golden age’ of book production, Benjamin Nourse focuses on two core topics: What was driving Tibetan publishing in the eighteenth century, and what happened as a result of that growth? How...

Between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on canvas instead of wood or walls. Nowhere was more important to this shift than Venice, where painters experimented with canvas with remarkable creativity and innovation. In Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting (Princeton University Press, 202...