New Books in Early Modern History

In a Mexico City mansion on October 23, 1789, Don Joaquín Dongo and ten of his employees were brutally murdered by three killers armed with machetes. Investigators worked tirelessly to find the perpetrators, who were publicly executed two weeks later. Labeled the 'crime of the century,' these events and their aftermath have intrigued writers of fiction and nonfiction for over two centuries. Using a vast range of sources, Nicole von Germeten recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery, and highlights how the violence of the Mexican judiciary echoed the acts of the murderers. The Spanish government conducted dozens of executions in Mexico City's central square in this era, revealing how European imperialism in the Americas influenced perceptions of violence and how it was tolerated, encouraged, or suppressed. An evocative history, Death in Old Mexico: The 1789 Dongo Murders and How They Shaped the History of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2023) provides a compelling new perspective on late colonial Mexico City.Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is the Declaration of Independence unique? Does the Declaration prescribe a form of government? What is the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution? Allen C. Guelzo, Director of the James Madison Program's Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, joins the show to answer these questions and more. Guelzo's essay "Harry and me" can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A form at the origins of Western literature, the epic has always been theorized in contrast to other literary genres, those that would either perfect it (such as tragedy, according to Aristotle) or partially take its place, from the chivalric romance to the modern novel. Corrado Confalonieri's Torquato Tasso and the Desire for Unity: Jerusalem Delivered and a New Theory of the Epic (Torquato Tasso e il desiderio di unità: “La Gerusalemme liberata” e una nuova teoria dell’epica) critically traces three different historical phases in the theorization of the epic: the classical poetics of Aristotle and Horace, the debates about poetics and poets in sixteenth-century Italy, and Hegelian philosophy and later twentieth-century theories of literary genres. The point of theoretical and interpretative reference throughout the volume is Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). The book’s final chapter undertakes a careful rereading of Tasso’s magnum opus that overcomes the traditional dichotomy between epic unity and novelistic variety by demonstrating how unity remains a desire rather than a result.Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the histories of diplomacy and sociality. Her publications have appeared in The Italianist and the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, with forthcoming research on the intersections across affect, masculinity, early modern poetics, and Baroque opera. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did American Catholics go from subjects to citizens? Who is the "godfather" of the First Amendment? How can spiritual and temporal duties be reconciled? Michael Breidenbach, Associate Professor of History at Ave Maria University, joins the show to answer these questions and discuss his new book, Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York City, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown’s forces took New York City, much of it mysteriously burned to the ground.The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution (Yale UP, 2023) is the first book to fully explore the Great Fire of 1776 and why its origins remained a mystery even after the British investigated it in 1776 and 1783. Uncovering stories of espionage, terror, and radicalism, Benjamin L. Carp paints a vivid picture of the chaos, passions, and unresolved tragedies that define a historical moment we usually associate with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices.Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty.But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates in Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2022), if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her "city on a hill" with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.Ana Schwartz is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America and of several peer reviewed essays that have appeared in Early American Literature, New Literary History, J19, and, most recently, in American Literature, for which she is the 2022 winner of the Norman Foerster Prize for best essay of the year. She is currently at work on a second monograph, Ordinary Unhappiness: A Social History of the Soul. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monica Calabritto of Hunter College talks to us today about her new book, Murder and Madness on Trial: A Tale of True Crime from Early Modern Bologna, out this year, 2023 from Penn State University Press. On October 24, 1588, Paolo Barbieri murdered his wife, Isabella Caccianemici, stabbing her to death with his sword. Later, Pablo would claim to have acted in a fit of madness--but was he criminally insane or merely pretending to be? In this riveting book, Mònica Calabritto addresses this controversy by reconstructing Paolo's life, prosecution, and medical diagnoses. Skillfully combining archival documents unearthed throughout Italy, Calabritto brings to light the case of one person and his family as insanity ravaged their financial security, honor, and reputation. The very notion of insanity is as much on trial in Paolo's case as the defendant himself. A case study in the diagnosis of insanity in the early modern era, Barbieri's story reveals discrepancies between medical and legal definitions of a person's mental state at the time of a crime. Murder and Madness on Trial bridges the micro-historical dimensions of Paolo's murder case and the macro-historical perspectives on medical and legal evidence used to identify intermittent madness. A tragic and gripping tale, Murder and Madness on Trial allows readers to look "through a glass darkly" at early modern violence, madness, criminal justice, medical and legal expertise, and the construction and circulation of news. This erudite and engaging book will appeal to early modern historians and true crime fans alike.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For readers of historical biography, meet Alice Spencer Stanley Egerton—the 16th century English noblewoman who was determined to bring her family into the upper strata of society. Born the daughter of an upstart sheep farmer in 1560, Alice’s marriages and maneuvers into and through aristocratic circles as well as the judicial system point to one clear example of a woman relying on her own influence to navigate a society that was not necessarily receptive women exercising power. Although Spencer faced lawsuits, tragedy, scandal, libel, and perhaps even witchcraft, she would never be derailed from doing everything to elevate her family and establish a dynasty and legacy of her own. In A Woman of Influence: The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England (Atria Books, 2023), Dr. Vanessa Wilkie brings together a well-researched account and clear writing to piece together a narrative from sources that challenges both entrenched ideas of late-Tudor and early-Stuart era women, and sympathetically navigates the horrifying and salacious details of the Castlehaven Trials of 1631.Liz Barrett is currently history PhDing at Lehigh University. CSA Farmer, mother of 3, and veteran of the USMC. Lives in suburban Philadelphia where she reads and writes a lot, and really likes old stuff. On Twitter: @lizcantlose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Elizabeth Elbourne traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842.Dr. Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblowers and entrepreneurs who operated across Australia, Canada and southern Africa; and the Buxtons, a family of British abolitionists who publicized information about what might now be termed genocide towards Indigenous peoples while also pioneering humanitarian colonialism. By recounting the conflicts that these interlinked families were involved in she tells a larger story about the development of British and American settler colonialism and the betrayal of Indigenous peoples.Through an analysis of the changing politics of kinship and violence, Dr. Elbourne sheds new light on transnational debates about issues such as Indigenous sovereignty claims, British subjecthood, violence, land rights and cultural assimilation.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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