New Books in Early Modern History

Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Victoria Sparey examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare's plays. Using early modern medical knowledge and an understanding of contemporary theatrical practices, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of 'signs' associated with an individual's physical maturation. Each chapter explores the implications of different 'signs' of puberty, in verbal cues, facial adornments, vocal traits and body sizes, to illuminate how Shakespeare presents vibrant adolescent selves and stories.By analysing female and male puberty together in its discussion of adolescence, Shakespeare's adolescents provides fresh insight into the age-based symmetry of early modern adolescent identities. The book uses the adolescent's state of transformation to illuminate how the unfixed nature of adolescence was valued in early modern culture and through Shakespeare's celebrated characters and actors.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guilds were prominent in medieval and early modern Europe, but their economic role has seldom been studied. In The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2019), Sheilagh Ogilvie offers a wide-ranging examination of what guilds did and how they affected pre-modern economies. As Ogilvie explains, guilds were particularized institutions which created and enforced privileges for their members while denying them to outsiders. This authority was granted to them by rulers and governments, and depended on their intricate relationship with the public authorities. Their privileges entitled guilds to determine who could participate in a profession, the quality of the items their members produced, and the technological innovations their members could adopt. Ogilvie looks at all aspects of guild activities to show their wide-ranging impact on the economies of their time, and the ways they pursued their members’ interests even when it stifled growth for the rest of society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond, in the form of stays, corsets, hoop petticoats and crinolines, right up until the twentieth century. With a nuanced approach that incorporates a stunning array of visual and written sources and drawing on transdisciplinary methodologies, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Sarah Bendall explores the relationship between material culture and femininity by examining the lives of a wide range of women, from queens to courtiers, farmer's wives and servants, uncovering their lost voices and experiences. It reorients discussions about female foundation garments in English and wider European history, arguing that these objects of material culture began to shape and define changing notions of the feminine bodily ideal, social status, sexuality and modesty in the early modern period, influencing enduring Western notions of femininity.Beautifully illustrated in full colour throughout, Shaping Femininity is the first large-scale exploration of the materiality, production, consumption and meanings of women's foundation garments in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. It offers a fascinating insight into dress and fashion in the early modern period, and offers much of value to all those interested in the history of early modern women and gender, material culture and consumption, and the history of the body, as well as curators and reconstructors.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Pacific Ocean is twice the size of the Atlantic, and while humans have been traversing its current-driven maritime highways for thousands of years, its sheer scale proved an obstacle to early European imperial powers. Enter Lope Martin, a forgotten Afro-Portuguese ship pilot heretofore unheralded by historians. In Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery (Mariner Books, 2021), UC-Davis history professor and Bancroft Prize winner Andrés Reséndez tells the story of Martin and the broader history of trans-Pacific travel in the 16th century. Part environmental history, part imperial expeditionary tale, and part swashbuckling adventure, Reséndez recounts thousands of years of Pacific history, tracking the long story of connection between the western coast of the Americas and the eastern coast of Asia. In doing so, he reveals just how dynamic and metropolitan early imperial Spanish maritime culture was, and broadens our horizons beyond the usual stories of well known explorers such as Columbus and Magellan. By unearthing the long-ignored story of Martin, Conquering the Pacific reveals a rich history of excitement, danger, and of human resilience under remarkable circumstances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period.In The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia's Pacific Lowlands (U Texas Press, 2024), Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a "periphery" was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are used to thinking of ourselves as living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. In The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Nicholas Popper shows that earlier eras had to grapple with the same problem—how to deal with too much information at their fingertips.Popper reveals that early modern Britain was a society newly drowning in paper, a light and durable technology whose spread allowed statesmen to record drafts, memoranda, and other ephemera that might otherwise have been lost, and also made it possible for ordinary people to collect political texts. As original paperwork and copies alike flooded the government, information management became the core of politics.Focusing on two of the primary political archives of early modern England, the Tower of London Record Office and the State Paper Office, Popper traces the circulation of their materials through the government and the broader public sphere. In this early media-saturated society, we find the origins of many issues we face today: Who shapes the archive? Can we trust the pictures of the past and the present that it shows us? And, in a more politically urgent vein: Does a huge volume of widely available information (not all of it accurate) risk contributing to polarization and extremism?Listen to Nick Popper speak with New Books Network about Walter Ralegh's "History of the World" and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) on New Books Network here.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos Geroulanos to discuss his new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) to discover how claims about the earliest humans and humankind’s true beginnings inform political and social practices to this day.How do the various stories we tell about human origins, including those about neanderthals, homo sapiens, killer apes, noble savages, and missing links shape the modern world? Have you followed a keto diet, become aware of your reptile brain, idealized a pre-modern state of existence or demonized others as behaving like Neanderthals? Geroulanos explains how accounts of prehistory arise in particular historical moments to solve contemporary problems, often linked to but as often quite apart from actual scientific knowledge. The Invention of Prehistory provides a crucial and timely examination of how the pursuit of understanding humanity's beginnings has been intertwined with agendas of war and domination.Further Listening on the Think About It podcast: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “The Social Contract” with Melissa Schwartzberg Michel Foucault on Truth and Knowledge with Ann Stoler Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” with Peter Brooks The Alarmingly Relevant Hannah Arendt with Richard Bernstein Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science.The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement.A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science.Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.Alexander Statman is a Distinguished Scholar and JD candidate at the UCLA School of Law and a former A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-MadisonMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the collapse of the Mughal Empire. The story highlights the unique role played by Jain and Hindu bankers in the daily affairs of Islamic, Hindu, and early colonial forms of Indian government.Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge UP, 2024) features brazen emperors, sickly princes, irate governors, and quick-witted matriarchs who commanded banking networks across cities. It explores unlikely rivalries, flaky friendships, and daring tycoons who gambled vast sums as a way to hedge against political uncertainty.Sheth employs unconventional sources to tap into the thrilling lives of moneyed persons. Excerpts from Persian diaries, Gujarati poems, French trading manuals, Marathi letters, Sanskrit hymns, and Dutch shipping records tell new tales and are presented in English translation for the very first time.Spanning several political dynasties and still thriving today as a billion-dollar family firm in its fourteenth generation, the entrepreneurs featured in this book help us see state power and social change through fresh eyes. How did capitalists outsmart politicians, and what insights can we gain for our own times?You can get 20% off the price of this book with code BRE2023 at Cambridge University Press.Brittany Puller is a PhD candidate in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examines caste, kinship, and community in the making of Sikh misls in eighteenth-century Punjab.Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The enigma of William Shakespeare's religious beliefs has long tantalized scholars and enthusiasts alike. Vernon Press's latest publication, Christian Shakespeare?: A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in His Christian Context (Vernon Press, 2022), dives deep into this mystery. The collection of essays, edited by renowned scholars Michael Scott and Michael J. Collins, invites a discourse on the profound impact of Christian faith and the religious controversies of Shakespeare’s era on his poetry and plays.The contributors, unrestricted by any particular theoretical framework, freely explore the complex interplay between the medieval and the early modern, the Catholic and the Protestant, which colored Shakespeare’s England. This exploration reveals the openness of Shakespeare’s work to interpretation, highlighting the careful and sensitive readings by the contributors.Despite the depth of analysis, the true nature of Shakespeare’s Christianity remains as indeterminate and elusive as ever. The essays collectively capture the breadth of opinions on Shakespeare’s stances, from being ambiguously evasive to taking definitive stances on the religious and political turmoils of his time.Michael Scott, Fellow and Senior Dean at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, is a distinguished Shakespearean scholar with numerous publications under his belt, including Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist and Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction. He has delivered lectures globally, from the USA to China, enhancing the understanding of Shakespeare's works worldwide.Michael J. Collins is a Teaching Professor of English and Dean Emeritus at Georgetown University. His editorial works include Reading What’s There: Essays on Shakespeare in Honor of Stephen Booth. Collins has contributed extensively to the academic dialogue on teaching Shakespeare and reviewing Shakespearean performances.Vernon Press – Bridging Scholarly Ideas and Global ReadershipVernon Press stands out as an independent publisher of scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences. Their mission is crucial — to make scholarly ideas accessible to a broader audience while maintaining high standards of originality and intellectual rigor. Through their diverse catalog, Vernon Press engages with global readers, contributing to academic and public discourse.Dessy Vassileva, the Marketing & Design expert at Vernon Press, brings a 360º multidisciplinary approach to her work at Vernon Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices