New Books in British Studies

The Puritans of Early America did not start out with gendered society and piety. Instead, Monica D. Fitzerald suggests, growing tensions between lay men and clergy over what was perceived as a feminized piety led toward a gradual separation of masculinity and femininity into distinct spheres. In Puritans Behaving Badly: Gender, Religion, and Punishment in Early America (Cambridge UP, 2020), Fitzgerald presents original research in the church disciplinary records of censure cases among Puritan congregations in the first three generations of American Puritanism. The records tell a fascinating story about how, even though the Puritan ministers advocated a holistic spirituality that was at once inwardly pietistic and externally dutiful, the lists of sins and confessions recorded in the chronicles of church discipline cases indicate that only men were being held accountable for sins of duty and honor, and only women for sins of personal spirituality and heart religion. Filled with vivid tales of squabbles, rifts, and deadly rivalries, Fitzgerald's book is sure to fascinate and delight readers interested in the development of religion and culture in early America. Follow Monica on Twitter (@mofitz66), or visit her book page on Cambridge Core.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. Memory and the English Reformation (Cambridge UP, 2020) shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied in texts, material objects, images, physical buildings, rituals, and bodily gestures. Attentive to the roles played by denial, amnesia, and fabrication, it also considers the retrospective processes by which the English Reformation became identified as an historic event. Examining dissident as well as official versions of this story, this richly illustrated, interdisciplinary collection traces how memory of the religious revolution evolved in the two centuries following the Henrician schism, and how the Reformation embedded itself in the early modern cultural imagination.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

John Heilbron, professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of our most distinguished - and prolific - historians of science. His latest book, The Ghost of Galileo In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2021), records how, during a tour of an English country house, he stumbled across what might be the earliest visual reference to Galileo outside portraiture. Heilbron's quest to understand this reference has resulted in a long and extraordinary account of debates in early modern science, religion, and medicine. Heilbron explains that there are reasons why a jobbing artist, working in the royalist base of Oxford during the first English civil war, might include in a double portrait of a tutor and his melancholy pupil this reference to recent trends in cosmology. In this lavishly illustrated and copiously argued book, Heilbron sets new agendas for our understanding of the politics of royalism, the material contexts of portraiture, and the religious significance of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Laura Eastlake’s Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature were at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire. These manifold and often contradictory representations were used as vehicles equally to capture the martial virtue of Wellington and to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde.In the works of Thomas Macaulay, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, among others, Rome emerges as a contested space with an array of possible scripts and signifiers which can be used to frame masculine ideals, or to vilify perceived deviance from those ideals, though with a value and significance often very different to ancient Greek models.Using approaches from literary and cultural studies, reception studies, and gender studies, and ranging across the topics of education, politics, empire, and late Victorian decadence, this volume offers the first comprehensive examination of the importance of ancient Rome as a cultural touchstone for nineteenth-century manliness and Victorian codifications of masculinity.Dr. Laura Eastlake is a senior lecturer in English literature at Edge Hill University in the UK, with degrees in the Classics, classical reception, and Victorian literature, with additional research interests in sensation fiction, Victorian humour and substance-use, and the late-Victorian Gothic. Check out her exhibition at The Atkinson museum: Fatal Attraction: Lilith and Her Sisters.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Michael Hattem’s Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale, 2020) is a fascinating new look at how eighteenth-century Americans thought about the past. Not merely an academic exercise, history was a catalyst of colonial and early republican identity. This historical consciousness was not, Hattem argues, static—on the contrary, as North Americans went from British subjects to rebels to independent Americans, so too did their attitudes toward the past change.Hattem roots his analysis in a broad range of evidence spanning from history books to almanacs, newspaper articles, novels, and museums. How did North Americans think about the colonial past? How did they understand their past in relation to the British past? How immediately relevant was the past to their own political activities? How did thinking about the past foster national unity? All these questions and many more besides find nuanced engagement in Past and Prologue, a book that is sure to appeal to anyone interested in how America came to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' The words of Sir Edward Grey, looking out from the windows of the Foreign Office in early August 1914, are amongst the most famous in European history, and encapsulate the impending end of the nineteenth-century world.The man who spoke them was Britain's longest-ever serving Foreign Secretary (in a single span of office) and one of the great figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (Penguin, 2020) is a magnificent portrait of an age and describes the three decades before the First World War through the prism of his biography, which is based almost entirely on archival sources and presents a detailed account of the main domestic and international events, and of the main personalities of the era. In particular, it presents a fresh understanding of the approach to war in the years and months before its outbreak, and Grey's role in the unfolding of events. Thomas Otte, Professor of Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia, one of the leading, if not the leading historian dealing with 19th and early 20th century Diplomatic and International politics has written a thoroughly splendid book which will provide both the academic and the lay educated reader with a mine of historical information and insights. By all means do read a book which has been named the New Statesman’s book of the Year for 2020 and which Martin Pugh in the TLS calls ‘a magisterial account that is unlikely to be bettered Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

How can the history of women’s work in film and TV help address inequality today? In Women’s Activism Behind the Screens: Trade Unions and Gender Inequality in the British Film and Television Industries (University of Bristol Press, 2020), Frances Galt, a Teaching Associate in history at Newcastle University, looks at the history of women’s struggles for equality within unions in the screen industry, to show the lessons of how gender equality has progressed and receded since the 1930s. The book draws on a rich blend of archival, oral history, and policy document research, presenting the context for key moments in the fight to support the status of women in the film and television industries. A fascinating history, with crucial lessons for contemporary activism, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island in the late eighteenth century and began to gradually abolish slavery. Yet the continued presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century has practically vanished from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities.Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. She tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who traveled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status. Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how color-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialization. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2020) offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean.Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Her books include Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (2014) and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (second edition, 2015).Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In the centuries since her execution in 1536, Anne Boleyn’s presence in Western culture has grown to extraordinary proportions. In The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen (Palgrave Macmillan), Stephanie Russo describes the various ways in which her life has been interpreted and how these interpretations reflect the interests and developments of their respective eras. This process began with her contemporaries, who began memorializing her even before her death. That she was the subject of so much of their attention reflected in no small measure her prominent role in England’s adoption of Protestantism, which exerted a predominant influence in how she was interpreted for over a century and a half. As the controversies in England over religion ebbed in the 18th century the focus became more exclusively upon Anne as a person, as her activities and her relationships proved an enduring source of material for both novelists and playwrights. Russo shows how this interest as only grown over time, with Anne Boleyn’s life today serving as subject matter for everything from postfeminist novels to salacious cable television series – all of which help perpetuate our interest about this enigmatic and elusive figure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life—yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination.Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton UP, 2019) documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter’s nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer’s writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales.By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant’s son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooknetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies