New Books in Early Modern History

Visitors around the world have travelled to Europe to see the tall spires and stained glass windows of the continent’s Gothic cathedrals: in Cologne, Chartres, Milan, Florence, York and Paris. The trappings of Gothic architecture have become shorthand for “medieval Europe”.Yet in Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe (Hurst: 2020), Diana Darke investigates the Islamic origins of Gothic architecture, tracing its history through pre-Islamic Syria through the Islamic empires to the tall European cathedrals between the 12th and 17th centuries. The book sold out on its first day of sale, in part due to its review in The Guardian, which called the book "an exhilarating, meticulously researched book that sheds light on centuries of borrowing."In this interivew, Diana Darke and I talk about the origins of what we consider to be “Gothic architecture”, how those styles came to Europe, how this history of cultural and intellectual exchange may have gotten lost, and what we miss when we code something as fully “European”, fully “Islamic”, or fully any kind of culture.Diana Darke is an Arabist and cultural expert who has lived and worked in the Middle East for over thirty years. Among her better-known books are The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival and My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, where you can find its review of Stealing from the Saracens. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Federalist no. 2, John Jay considered the ‘wide spreading country’ of the American republic. It was, he argued, as if the land itself was fashioned by the hand of Providence, which ‘in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together’.When we think of early American political thought, we tend to overlook the powerful influence of the natural environment on the formation of settlement in both theory and practice. Seminal studies of the ideological origins of the American Revolution approached colonial political ideas as largely derivative from the deep wells of Anglophone ideas, and framed largely in opposition to Britain. Yet, as Jefferson reminded his British audience in the Declaration of Independence, it was important to consider the ‘circumstances of our emigration and settlement here’. Or, as a writer in 1620s Virginia explained, colonial law was a product of the ‘nature’ and ‘novelty’ of the place.In American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775 (Oxford UP, 2019), Mark Somos recovers a powerful and coherent theme in colonial political thought, a ‘constitutive’ state of nature that identified the American colonies that would declare independence as a natural community in a ‘state of nature viewed as irreducibly and unexchangeably American'. Mark Somos holds the Heisenberg Position at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull, where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane K. Wickersham (Associate Professor of History, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Amanda L. Scott (Assistant Professor, Penn State University) about her new book The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020).Neither wives nor nuns, the seroras fulfilled an essential religious role in early modern Basque communities. Amanda L. Scott explores the lives of the devout laywomen who cared for and maintained churches and shrines in the Basque country, and in so doing reconceptualizes how to frame the social and religious limitations placed on early modern women.Seroras performed essential religious work in their communities; yet they only made simple promises (rather than holy vows), rendering their religious vocations more flexible and their lifestyle more autonomous. Using a wide variety of archival sources, in over seven chapters Scott analyzes the seroras’ relationships with diocesan officials and local communities. Despite the Tridentine-era efforts to more strictly regulate the lives of religious women, Scott finds that both episcopal authorities and communities had a vested interest in negotiating and maintaining the seroras in their religious roles. They were seen as essential to the maintenance of the church, physically and spiritually, and as collaborators in furthering some aspects of Tridentine reform. Scott sensitively explores these women’s work, and the complexities, ambiguities, and conflicts engendered by their autonomous religious status. Scott, in this important book, closely examines the lived experiences of seroras to reach a new understanding of the nature of religious reform in early modern Iberia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales about their book Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense (Abbreviated Press, 2020).The Códice Casanatense, or Codex Casanatense 1889 as it is formally known, is a 16th-century Indo-Portuguese collection of some 76 captioned watercolours now held in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. Deposited there at the beginning of the 18th century, it resided in almost complete obscurity for two and half centuries and was not brought to scholarly attention until the 1950s. It has never been discussed in detail for the general reader.Painted by an Indian artist, and annotated in Portuguese, the Codex is a remarkable work of collaboration that portrays the peoples, costumes and customs of a region extending from Africa to China. This region, crossed by Portuguese explorers and traders, maps on what is now commonly called the Maritime Silk Road. Lively and evocative, the Códice Casanatense is a unique historical record that provides a human window into an Asia that Europeans were only just entering and a first testimony of an encounter that would transform the world.Although the painter has deep connections with Indian artistic traditions, he also drew upon the illustrations in Balthasar Sprenger's iconic 1509 Die Merfart, while the Codex itself was a source for the illustrations in Jan Huygen van Linschoten's classic end-of-the-century Itinerario. Both influenced and influencing, the Codex is unveiled as an archetypal example of East-West cultural and intellectual fusion.Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books and publisher of Chameleon Press. He was also a founder of the Man Asian Hong Kong International Literary Festival.Juan José Morales is an entrepreneur and historian who has published a variety of works ranging from poetry anthologies to works on arts and culture.Jenny Peruski is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her research focuses on ornamentation and bodily adornment in coastal eastern Africa. She can be reached by email at jperuski@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 changed the lives of English republicans for good. Despite the Declaration of Breda, where Charles II promised to forgive those who had acted against his father and the monarchy during the Civil War and Interregnum, opponents of the Stuart regime felt unsafe, and many were actively persecuted. Nevertheless, their ideas lived on in the political underground of England and in the exile networks they created abroad. While much of the historiography of English republicanism has focused on the British Isles and the legacy of the English Revolution in the American colonies, this study traces the lives, ideas and networks of three seventeenth-century English republicans who left England for the European continent after the Restoration. Based on sources from a range of English and continental European archives, Gaby Mahlberg’s The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration (Cambridge University Press, 2020) explores the lived experiences of these three exiles - Edmund Ludlow in Switzerland, Henry Neville in Italy, and Algernon Sidney - for a truly transnational perspective on early modern English republicanism.Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeppe Mulich's new book, In A Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Cambridge University Press, 2020) highlights the revolutionary fervor, political turmoil, conflict, and chaos in the Leeward Island region of the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These tense dynamics created opportunities for interconnected politics, laws, and networks in this "microregion" as British, Danish, French, Spanish, and Swedish actors both competed and cooperated with one another. By exploring the transnational networks involved in trade, slavery, smuggling, privateering, and marronage, he emphasizes the border-crossing nature of life in the Leeward Islands that fostered conflicts between local interests and imperial policy and subverted formal imperial boundaries and claims to sovereignty. All-in-all, Dr. Mulich argues that this early period of "globalization" was in-part initiated from the bottom-up, with local peoples, local concerns, and various cross-border networks encouraging regional integration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How was the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim communities theologically and spatially imagined in the premodern world? How did religious hierarchies map onto notions of place and spatial distinction and hierarchies? In her dazzling new book Minding their Place: Space and Religious Hierarchy in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma (Brill, 2020), Antonia Bosanquet addresses these questions through a detailed and theoretically charged reading of the famous and crucially important legal text/compendium Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma by Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawzīyah (d.1350). Bosanquet forcefully argues that one must approach this text not just as a legal compendium, but as a critical repository of premodern Muslim social imaginaries on the question of interreligious difference. In our conversation, we discuss a range of issues including literary precedents for Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma, spatial mappings and religious hierarchies, “relational” space and everyday Muslim-non-Muslim encounters, and the eschatological status of non-Muslim children. This lucidly written and analytically exciting book will spark interest among specialists and non-specialists alike.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the book we are here to talk about today, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, a 2019 Harvard University Press release. In this book, Professor Strocchia continues the work of her career: recentering the discourse to include the formative contributions of women in the Italian Renaissance. Through a discussion of Medici women, convent pharmacists, and hospital nurses, Strocchia adeptly argues that women played a leading role in the development of Renaissance medicine.Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At the book’s center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel’s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens.Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. She reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.Akash Ondaatje is a Research Associate at Know History. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Audrey Horning revisits the fraught connections between Ireland and colonial Virginia. Both modern scholars and early modern colonialists themselves viewed English incursions into Ireland and North America as intimately related. But the precise nature of this relationship has been a matter of contention. In the standard narrative, British efforts to establish plantations in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prefigured the colonization of Virginia. But Horning shows that such causal connections break down upon closer scrutiny.Ireland in the Virginian Sea deftly brings the tools of archaeology and historical scholarship to bear on British colonialism across the Atlantic. Horning shows that, while colonial ventures in both Ireland and Virginia were personally and financially entangled, the two responded to their unique cultural and geographical contexts. Attempts to impose unidirectional causality dissolve under the burden of Horning’s formidable body of textual and archaeological evidence. What emerges instead is a much more sensitive narrative that accounts for, rather than suppresses, the chorus of voices on either side of the British Atlantic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices