New Books in Early Modern History

In my work with pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexican pictorial texts, I often wish I could talk with the people who authored them. In the academic setting, sometimes we forget that these documents represent conversations about what was happening in the lives of many people at the time they were created and that some aspects of these materials that we have found in archives or ancient cities are still part of the cultural heritage and daily lives of the descendants of the creators. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano helps us realize that the study of popular culture also can mean the sharing of knowledge. Ruiz Medrano's research in the tiny town of Santa Maria Cuquila has led to a new way of thinking about our pasts and how they connect with our presents.Ruiz Medrano's book Mexico's Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010 is a best-selling work on popular culture from the University of Colorado Press. Indigenous Communities traces a new context for our Amerindian heritage. Ruiz Medrano examines local administrative power and the resolution of community issues as functions of life today in much the same way as they were 500 years ago. At the same time, these communities are also rooted in the twenty first century. Many community members have relatives and friends in the United States. They keep in touch with cell phones and text messages while also seeking answers in their pictorial documents and oral and cultural accounts. Ruiz Medrano has become their student and her book offers a fascinating study of past and present, and of a community of teachers for this scholar-student. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.”Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest inexplaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe-those of France and England-only began to examine the African in earnest at the same time that their plantation- and slave-based colonies in the Caribbean came on line in the seventeenth century. “Colonial expansion” and “Scientific Revolution” ran together, it seems, and it is in their confluence that we see the origins of modern color-based racial discourse.That discourse, as Curran shows, was first worked out in what are sometimes called “Travel Accounts,” books that look for all the world like ethnographies. Europeans wrote thousands of them about every corner of the globe (Full disclosure: long ago I wrote a book about early European ethnographies of Old Russia). These books, in turn, provided grist (or “data”?) for the scientific mills of “naturalists” back home. At the same time these naturalists were looking outward for the origins of human difference, other scientifically-minded types were looking inwards. They were medical doctors, and more particularly anatomists. They wondered why, in the mechanical sense, black skin was black, and so they took black skin apart looking for mechanisms. And of course these twin discourses, ethnographic and medical, were intertwined with a third–that centered on the ethics of the then booming Atlantic slave-trade. Europeans wondered what science could tell them about the rightness or wrongness of African slavery.This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of the origins and forms of “Blackness.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework?In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthesis of four hundred years of philosophical thought about the nature of ordinary objects, such as cats or dogs or stones. After examining hundreds of original texts (many only available in the original Latin) Pasnau focuses on metaphysical debates involving the central scholastic concept of substance, understood as a composite of matter and form. He discusses the crushing effect of the Inquisition on innovative metaphysical thought in this period, emphasizes the continuity of scholastic views even among critics of scholasticism, and considers why the dominant metaphysics that succeeded the scholastic framework, which he calls corpuscularianism, was not inevitable. Indeed, as he points out, the new metaphysics brought with it a host of new difficulties that are by now familiar, such as the mind-body problem, the nature of identity over time, and the distinction between appearance and reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most Americans could tell you who George Washington’s wife was. (Martha, right?) Most Americans probably couldn’t tell you who Thomas Jefferson’s wife was. (It was also Martha, but a different one of course). They might be able to tell you, however, who Thomas Jefferson’s alleged concubine was, as she has been in the news a lot lately. (His slave, Sally Hemings). But actually there were a lot of women in Jefferson’s life–or should we say a lot of women had Jefferson in their lives.Virginia Scharff tells us about the most important of them (including Martha and Sally) in her literary-yet-historical new book The Women Jefferson Loved (HarperCollins, 2010). The “Jefferson Women,” if it may be allowed, were an interesting bunch. They were sturdy, intelligent, and sometimes rich. Jefferson did love them, but he didn’t really think they were the equals of men. He was hardly alone in this opinion. Even children of the Enlightenment like Jefferson felt God had made women for a distinctly womenly role, and Jefferson felt it was his duty to make sure they played it. Suffice it to say that they were pregnant a lot and became very good at managing domestic life on a plantation. That, of course, is nothing to discount, for in so doing they created the domestic and emotional context within which Jefferson lived. They were an important part of his world, and he of theirs. Thanks to Virginia for bringing this world alive for us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and foremost, understanding the human body. Naturally, then, the philosophes and their successors paid close attention to the body. They cut it up, took it apart, measured it and attempted to see how it worked. They were most interested in one part in particular–the human head. It was the seat of the human characteristic the Enlightenment scientists admired most: intelligence. If one could get a handle on the human cranium, then one would understand what it meant to be human. Or at least so they thought.In her fascinating new book The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Ann Fabian introduces us to a group of American philosophes who began to collect and study human crania in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, they took most of their cues from their European counterparts. They did, however, adapt craniology to a peculiar American context. Living in a social order in part built on supposed racial difference, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Africans mattered. Their work could support the suppositions of slavery, or not. Moreover, living in a social order that was at the very time they were working involved in a quasi-genocidal campaign against indigenous peoples, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Native Americans mattered as well. Their work might buttress the movement for Indian removal, or it might not. And being people of the “New World,” the American skull collectors knew that they were looked down upon by many of their European colleagues. They needed to collect skulls aggressively in order to establish craniology as an American science.As one might expect, the American skull collectors were, by our lights, a strange bunch. Racists, imperialists, and nationalists to be sure. But also scientists, curators, and founders of physical anthropology. Thanks to Ann for bringing them to us in all their contradictory richness.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar.” I’ve scratched a Russian (I won’t say anything more about that) and I can tell you that the saying is false: all I found was more Russian. It’s true, however, that Russians have always known a lot about Tatars because they’ve lived cheek-by-jowl with them for many centuries. Before the beginning of European contact with Russia in the sixteenth century, Russians didn’t really think the Tatars were terribly exotic. They were just neighbors, albeit occasionally hostile and profoundly heretical ones. The same could be said of the early modern Russian view of, say, Poles and Germans.Things changed, however, when the Russians decided they weren’t just “Russians” but were also “Europeans.” That happened, roughly, in the eighteenth century. The Europeans, not being terribly experienced with the peoples of eastern climes, had some rather odd notions about the folks they often called “Orientals.” Over time, the Europhilic Russian elite began to assimilate the Europeans’ views of “Orientals.” The process by which they did so, and the cultural consequences thereof, are the topic of David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye‘s lucid, witty, and thought-provoking Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (Yale UP, 2010). David explores how the Russians came to construct their own unique “Orient,” one that wasn’t exactly like the Western version and yet was clearly different from the thing itself. For unlike their imaginative European counterparts, the Russians–in my reading–could never really accept the Western image of “Orientals.” They knew the Tatars and other Asian peoples too well and could see that the Western view didn’t match. And then there was the needling suspicion that they themselves were “Orientals”. Thus Russian “Orientalism” was hardly the supposedly subtle yet powerful tool of pith-helmeted, empire-building, expansionists, but instead an attempt at self-understanding.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name (Free Press, 2009). As Toby points out, medieval Europeans thought the earth had three parts–Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem at the dead center and water all around. (And no, they didn’t think the earth was flat…). But in 1507 a peculiar item appeared–the Waldseemuller map— that outlined a fourth part of the world called “America,” with the Atlantic Ocean on the one side and an unnamed ocean on the other. Here’s the really curious thing though: at that time no European had ever seen what we now call the “Pacific Ocean.” Balboa was the first to see it, and he didn’t do so until 1513. So where did Waldseemuller and his colleagues get the idea that there was a continent between Europe and Asia and that an undiscovered ocean separated Asia from it? Was it just a good (educated) guess, or did the mapmakers have information that has not come down to us? You want the answer? Well you can listen to the interview and then go buy the book. All will be reveled!Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’ll be honest: I have a Ph.D. in early modern European history from a big university you’ve probably heard of and I couldn’t name a single female writer of the Renaissance before I read Sarah Ross’s new book The Birth of Feminism. Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Harvard University Press, 2009). Does that make me a bad person? No, other things make me a bad person. But it does make me and my entire field ignorant, for as Sarah points out there were quite a number of female intellectuals in the Renaissance. They were, so to say, waiting for us to pay them the attention they deserve. Sarah does a nice job of unearthing them, telling us how they came to be intellectuals, and giving us a good idea of what they wrote about and why. That’s quite an achievement in itself, but there is more. Sarah also makes a bold claim, one that I’m sure will have the field of Renaissance studies atwitter (no, not twitter as in “tweets”). She argues that these women intellectuals were sort of proto-feminists, not in the Gloria Steinem sense, but an important sense nonetheless. They proposed that, via humanist education, women could have as much “virtue” (NB: from the Latin word for “man,” vir) as men. And they not only argued this was the case, they demonstrated it by means of their writing. This act, Sarah convincingly proposes, was a crucial early step in the movement toward the idea that women were, well, equal to men. And, I should add, she offers lots of other meaty stuff for those interested in the history of gender, the history of the family, intellectual history, and the Renaissance generally. Read the book and then you, too, will be relieved of the embarrassment of not being to name a single female Renaissance writer.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices