New Books in Early Modern History

The extra Calvinisticum, that the eternal Son maintains his existence beyond the flesh during his earthly ministry and perpetually, divided the Lutheran and Reformed traditions during the Reformation. K. J. Drake's book The Flesh of the Word: The Extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the emergence and development of the extra Calvinisticum in the Reformed tradition by tracing its exposition from Ulrich Zwingli to early Reformed orthodoxy. Rather than being an ancillary issue, the questions surrounding the extra Calvinisticum were a determinative factor in the differentiation of Magisterial Protestantism into rival confessions. Reformed theologians maintained this doctrine in order to preserve the integrity of both Christ's divine and human natures as the mediator between God and humanity. This rationale remained consistent across this period with increasing elaboration and sophistication to meet the challenges levelled against the doctrine in Lutheran polemics. The study begins with Zwingli's early use of the extra Calvinisticum in the Eucharistic controversy with Martin Luther and especially as the alternative to Luther's doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ's human body. Over time, Reformed theologians, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Antione de Chandieu, articulated the extra Calvinisticum with increasing rigor by incorporating conciliar christology, the church fathers, and scholastic methodology to address the polemical needs of engagement with Lutheranism. The book illustrates the development of christological doctrine by Reformed theologians offering a coherent historical narrative of Reformed christology from its emergence into the period of confessionalization. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world.Émigrés: French Words That Turned English (Princeton UP, 2020) demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as “creolizing keywords” that both connect English speakers to—and separate them from—French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete.At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dominant impression of Russia in the news media and politics, even today, is that it is and always has been an autocratic power controlled by a single despotic ruler. But historians of the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries have long realized that this vision was to some extent a myth projected by the central authorities to support a system that was in fact oligarchic but competitive in nature. A fundamental step in recognizing the gap between that myth and reality was the identification of marriages between aristocratic clans as a determinant in political alliances, followed by a new understanding of patron-client relations and other interpersonal connections within the elite.In The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russian Rulers, 1495–1745 (Northern Illinois UP, 2021), Russell E. Martin explores the ways in which the weddings of tsars and lesser members of the royal family worked to integrate brides and their families into the elite while moderating tensions among the nobility. The whole occasion was elaborately choreographed and developed over time as the needs of the original dynasty, the Daniilovichi, to extend and sustain the lineage by managing the number of heirs gave way to the new Romanov dynasty’s attempts to establish its legitimacy, followed by a squabble for power between two branches of the later Romanovs (Peter the Great and his descendants). And the stakes were high—the book is full of examples of poisoned brides, recalcitrant exiles, bridegrooms executed for failing to judge the balance correctly, and more. Through this in-depth but beautifully written study, we gain a new appreciation of the importance of ceremony and ritual in creating and promoting visions of how the world does and should work at specific points in time.C. P. Lesley is the pen name of Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, a historian of Muscovite Russia who hosts New Books in Historical Fiction. Under her real name, she translated and edited The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest novel, Song of the Sisters, appeared in 2021. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every Sunday, Christians all over the world recite the Nicene Creed as a confession of faith. While most do not know the details of the controversy that led to its composition, they are aware that the Council of Nicaea was a critical moment in the history of Christianity. For scholars, the Council has long been a subject of multi-disciplinary interest and continues to fascinate and inspire research. As we approach the 1700th anniversary of the Council, The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea (Cambridge UP, 2021) provides an opportunity to revisit and reflect on old discussions, propose new approaches and interpretative frameworks, and ultimately revitalize a conversation that remains as important now as it was in the fourth century. The volume offers fifteen original studies by scholars who each examine an aspect of the Council. Informed by interdisciplinary approaches, the essays demonstrate its profound legacy with fresh, sometimes provocative, but always intellectually rich ideas.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lyle D. Bierma's Font of Pardon and New Life: John Calvin and the Efficacy of Baptism (Oxford UP, 2021) is a study of the historical development and impact of John Calvin's doctrine of baptismal efficacy. The primary questions it addresses are (1) whether Calvin taught an "instrumental" doctrine of baptism, according to which the external sign of the sacrament serves as a means or instrument to convey the spiritual realities it signifies, and (2) whether Calvin's teaching on baptismal efficacy remained constant throughout his lifetime or underwent significant change. Secondarily, the work also examines whether such spiritual blessings, in Calvin's view, are conferred only in adult (believer) baptism or also in the baptism of infants, and what impact Calvin's doctrine of baptismal efficacy had on the Reformed confessional tradition that followed him. The book examines all of Calvin's writings on baptism-his Institutes, commentaries on Scripture, catechisms, polemical writings, and consensus documents-chronologically through five stages of his life and then analyzes the doctrine of baptismal efficacy in eight of the major Reformed confessions and catechisms from the age of confessional codification. It concludes that Calvin did indeed hold to an instrumental view of baptism; that this doctrine underwent change and development over the course of his life but not to the extent that some in the past have suggested; that his view of the efficacy of infant baptism was consistent with his doctrine of baptism in general; and that versions of Calvin's teaching can be found in many, though not all, of the major Reformed confessional documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline.A History of Art History (Princeton UP, 2019) shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance—Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari—measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however—Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich—struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline.Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief.Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under Chingghis Khan and his successors, who came to control much of Eurasia in the mid-thirteenth century. In the past few decades, scholarship has started emphasizing other aspects of the three hundred year Mongol project--after all, waves of destruction don't tend to also be referred to by names like "Pax Mongolica," or "the Mongolian Peace."In this majestic new study, Marie Favereau (Paris Nanterre University) takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. For three centuries, the Mongol Empire was no less a force for global development than the Roman Empire. The Horde--ulus Jochi, one of the four divisions of Chingghis Khan's Empire--was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its unique political regime--a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility--reswarded skillful administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative.The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard UP, 2021) is an ambitious, accessible, beautifully written portrait of an empire little understood tand too readily dismissed. Challenging conceptions of nomads as peripheral to history, Marie Favereau makes clear that we live in a world inherited from the Mongol moment.Christopher S Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing.Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people’s politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Bryant Reeves challenges traditional notions of secularization in the 18th century. The podcast explores the challenges of identifying atheism in the 17th and 18th centuries, Pope's connection between unbelief and bad belief, the dystopia of unbelief in poetry and novels, debates on the relationship between sympathy, benevolence, and God, the use of letters and satire in a novel, and the exploration of religious context and the role of hymns in forging communities in the 18th century.

Gary Lee Steward's Justifying Revolution: The Early American Clergy and Political Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the patriot clergymen's arguments for the legitimacy of political resistance to the British in the early stages of the American Revolution. It reconstructs the historical and theological background of the colonial clergymen, showing the continued impact that Stuart absolutism and Reformed resistance theory had on their political theology. As a corrective to previous scholarship, this work argues that the American clergymen's rationale for political resistance in the eighteenth century developed in general continuity with a broad strand of Protestant thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in history at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices