New Books in Early Modern History

This is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and the Celestial Order (University of California Press, 2011) exhaustively examines the science of the stars in order to understand the problems that drove Copernicus and later engagements with Copernicanism. Far more than a reception study, Westman uncovers the practices, of prognostication and knowledge production, that delimited the conceptual space available to scholars of the stars and the innovative ways that they attempted to generate and secure astral knowledge. Building on his earlier identification of the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus’s ideas Westman shows how confession, patronage, friendships and university networks all factored into the many faceted appeal of Copernican ideas, illustrating the difficulty of identifying a single unitary Copernicanism in the three generations after the first circulation of Copernicus’s own ideas. Painstakingly researched, often to the point of tracing who had access to which copies of books (and their all important annotations) the book asks us to re-evaluate the scientific revolution in favour of more nuanced understandings of early modern scientific movements.Dr. Westman has written a precis of the book that can be found at the Montreal Review . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), Avner Ben Zaken introduces readers to a wonderfully diverse cast of characters and texts to show how fundamental notions of modern science (and modernity in general) were established in cross-cultural exchanges across the globe. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 is a study of the ways that early modern science traveled among localities and cultures and was constituted by those travels, focusing on the example of post-Copernican cosmologies. In the course of this fascinating study, Ben Zaken considers what it means to talk about “incommensurable” cultures, and champions the historical power of the mundane and the marginal. Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism traces the composition, travels, and translation of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan as a way get at a history of debates about autididacticism in twelfth-century Marrakesh, fourteenth-century Barcelona, Renaissance Florence, and seventeenth-century England. This is an elegantly written and exhaustively researched world history of a single text on wildness, childhood, and nature, among many other themes that emerged and transformed in the very different contexts that the Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan was studied and engaged.Since these two books represent parts of a coherent intellectual project in progress, we spoke about them in both in terms of the broader issues that underpin Avner’s scholarly work. We talked a great deal about the craft of historical writing. Topics ranged from the opportunities and challenges of working at different historical scales and bringing micro- and macro-history into the same project, to how academic training leads young historians to study local cultures in a particularly monadic way. It was a very stimulating conversation for me, and I hope you’ll enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on–with the executioner’s aid–the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless.Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a necessary evil. They had come to view execution as a sort of ultimate banishment, and not as an opportunity for an object lesson. It was a tool for getting rid of people–the quicker and quieter, the better. In fact, the French government finally put an end to public executions in 1939 when one particular guillotine collided with photo journalism. No matter how speedy the blade, the shutter was faster.Historian Paul Friedland concludes his rich and expansive new book, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France (Oxford University Press, 2012), by drawing back the curtain on this aspect of the guillotine’s past. Even more importantly, moreover, Friedland demonstrates that modern preoccupations with exemplary deterrence as a justification for punishment have led to distortions in how we understand public executions as they happened in the past. He begins his study in the medieval period, where he observes that public executions functioned mainly as rituals for repairing damage to the social fabric. He then follows the thread over half a millennium, tracing many evolutions in attitudes and practice, but never finding deterrence theory at work quite as some commentators have.Paul Friedland is an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2011-2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters were “arguably the first media celebrities.” Upon their arrival at Louis XIV’s Court of Versailles, the sisters made a splash when Marie and the young King promptly fell in love. Ultimately, the couple’s relationship– which climaxed with a forced separation and Marie’s confinement in a convent– reads like something out of Shakespeare.Forced into advantageous mismatches that were, at turns, oppressive and abusive, the sisters jumped back into public view when Hortense, donning men’s clothing and making use of the new post coach service, left her husband and took to the road. Marie promptly joined her.At a time when it was borderline scandalous for women to travel unaccompanied by men, much less divorce them, the sisters darted about Europe, seeking refuge from the husbands who actively pursued them. The story of their escape seemed like something out of a novel and, for years, the whole of Europe was riveted. As Goldsmith writes, the sisters were “admired by libertines, feminists and free-thinkers but viewed by others as frivolous at best and threats to civil society at worst.”Both women penned memoirs, with that of Hortense being the first memoir written to which a woman signed her name. What is perhaps most striking about the sisters now is how brazenly unapologetic they were. As Hortense writes: “I know that a woman’s glory lies in her not giving rise to gossip, but one cannot always choose the kind of life one would like to lead.” She and her sister landed lives of adventure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, 2012), Sally Bedell Smith peels back the layers of mystique to reveal the very shy woman who is the current Queen. It isn’t so much a dismantling as a reevaluation, an effort to appreciate a figure who– though part of an institution that is seen by some as vestigial– is nonetheless deeply impressive and truly beloved.Smith interviewed over 200 people, 160 of whom are on the record as the queen’s relatives and friends–a fact that suggests that the 40 individuals who opted for anonymity are even grander higher ups. Though the book is not “authorized,” it carries significant clout. Buckingham Palace also offered Smith limited access to the Queen, so the author could see her subject in action and play witness to her quiet charm. That’s the biggest stamp of approval for which a royal writer can hope.Like many royal biographies, Elizabeth the Queen is filled with small, gossipy tidbits. We learn what the Queen eats for breakfast and what she carries in her ubiquitous handbag. But Smith also offers substantive insight into the less examined areas of the queen’s life, in particular her religious faith, her life pre-ascension and her relationship with the Queen Mother. The end result is a lively portrait of a hard-working woman who, in her own way, has represented “a new Elizabethan age.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), though, goes beyond trade- there was also lots of curiosity, in Britain and abroad, about the strange new peoples and products beginning to move more freely across the world than ever before. It is this aspect of British-Muslim interaction – (or more accurately interactions; the Islamic world was vast and encompassed a dizzying diversity of peoples and cultures) that Matar and MacLean emphasise- the wondering, bemused, gleeful, fascinated, at times despairing accounts of travellers, diplomats, traders -and pirates and their captives- as they sought to convey their impressions of the new worlds they encountered. Nor did everyone think the same; not every factor in Surat went fantee, and not every potentate and cleric disapproved of tobacco and coffee, which North Africans and Britons were wont to accuse each other of having introduced to their lands- and some people tried both lifestyles before settling on one- or neither. It was this celebration of the exotic that made the trading ports and cities of early modern Britain and the Islamic powers such fascinating places to be in- and MacLean and Matar’s book evokes perfectly the heady atmosphere of the contemporary world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chewing on raw turnips and sand, keeping both feet in a tub of cold water, reading with just one eye open (to give the other a chance to rest) and sleeping only every other night: no, I am not describing the typical life of a pre-tenure professor trying to get her book finished. Instead, these are just some of the sacrifices that compilers made in order to produce some of the most massive reference works in early modernity. In a work of extraordinary depth that ranges from antiquity through the eighteenth century (with stops in China and the modern world of the internet along the way), Ann Blair guides readers through the landscape of information management of early modern Europe. Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010) is many things at one: a richly textured history of early modern dictionaries and other reference works; an exploration of the emergence of the textual technologies like indexes that aided navigation through early modern texts; and a collection of stories about the lengths to which early modern authors would go to collect and manage information before the era of searchable word processing documents. Too Much To Know is a garden of paper, ready for harvesting by readers interested in a wide range of fields from book history to information technology to religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and advanced scholars, it’s not merely a dry textbook: The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011)is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal rulers unconcerned with the dynamics of the global economy? Philip Stern‘s book, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) explores just this: the changing boundaries and demarcations between corporate bodies and sovereign states, and the ‘rightful’ spheres of action of each. This is not to suggest that the English East India Company was a sort of half-way house, or that it occupied a zone of hybridity; it was merely that, in those days (as is perhaps increasingly the case again), the ‘business of government’ was often assumed by ‘corporations and non-state actors’; and they went about their job just as well as any political government with sovereign powers.So it was that the East India Company’s factors, based in coastal entrepots, built forts, codified law, brought in settlers, collected taxes, waged war, and generally laid down a framework for the governance of the environs they operated in- and carried on trade. The Company-State couldn’t carry on for ever though; as Stern points out, it eventually became a casualty of the ‘evolving definitions’ of what constituted an economic body and what constituted a political body, and eventually ceded all political space to the British Crown, even as its economic avatar just celebrated a quatercentenary of existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices