New Books in British Studies

Throughout the seventeenth century, and on both sides of the Atlantic, William Perkins exercised enormous influence on the ways in which protestants approached the reading of the Bible and thought about the practice of preaching. For all that Perkins had a strong interest in theology, he was no mere dogmatician, as Andrew Ballitch shows in his new book.The Gloss and the Text: William Perkins on Interpreting Scripture with Scripture (Lexham Press, 2020) reconstructions Perkins’s approach to hermeneutics and exegesis, and shows just how complex a thinker was the Church of England clergyman who became one of the greatest influences on puritans.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the workings of the British Russia Company and the commercial entanglements of the British and Russian empires in the long eighteenth century.This innovative and highly readable monograph challenges the long-held views of Russian economic backwardness in the early modern period and stresses the importance of personal histories and individual agency in global economic dynamics. By focusing on diplomatic and commercial careers of a fascinating set of characters, Romaniello charts vibrant knowledge and information-sharing networks that were essential for the success of both empires in the Eurasian economic and geopolitical arenas.A non-conventional economic history, Enterprising Empires traverses the micro-historical and the macro-economic to reevaluate Russian commercial prowess before 1800 and illuminate an overlooked area of Anglo-Russian cooperation and rivalry.Matthew Romaniello is an Associate Professor of History at Weber State University and a historian of the Russian empire, commodities, and medicine. He is currently the editor of The Journal of World History and the former editor of Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies.Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2020) reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.Valerie Wayne is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in Honolulu. She was associate general editor for Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford UP, 2007) and editor of Cymbeline for the Arden Shakespeare, third series (Bloomsbury, 2017). She has edited three collections of essays and is Past President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Today we are joined by Sasha Abramsky, author of Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar (Akashic Books, 2020). Lottie Dod is not a familiar name among casual sports fans but should be. She won the first of her five Wimbledon titles when she was 15 and dominated tennis before walking away. Sticking to one game, she believed, was “appalling.” Dod then took up golf, winning a major women’s golf title. She also won a silver medal in archery at the 1908 Olympics. Dod also dabbled in skating, endurance bicycling, mountain climbing and even toboggan racing. Unlike Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Dod, however, was born before the golden age of sports, so few people have seen photographs or videos from her prime. Garbo-esque in later life, Dod kept to herself after her sports career. But her achievements sprang from the belief that there were no obstacles in her path. Abramsky, a freelance journalist who specializes in politics, is also an obsessive tennis fan. He stumbled upon Dod while visiting Wimbledon’s museum and was enchanted by her ability and career. Abramsky combines descriptive writing with research that pulls back the curtain to reveal an athlete whose feats remain stunning 60 years after her death and more than a century after her glory days.Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In this episode, I look at Eisler’s last days in England, where he found that the Oxford readership he had been promised before being sent to Dachau was taken by someone else, a paper shortage had put a stop to academic publishing, and that foreign Jews without visas were being imprisoned in a British internment camp on the Isle of Man. I also talk with astrology scholar Dr. Nicholas Campion about Eisler’s scathing criticisms of newspaper astrological columns and unpack Eisler’s final scholarly works on folklore, philology, and ethics. This episode officially concludes the story of Robert Eisler, but there will be a tenth and final episode in the near future that reflects on this project and academic podcasting as a whole after I have had time to hear some feedback. On that note, now that you have heard the story, I would love to hear what you think about it!Guests: Steven Beller (independent scholar), Nicholas Campion (Principal Lecturer in History at Bath Spa University and Director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture)Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb CrawfordAdditional voices: Brian Evans and Chiara RidpathMusic: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra.Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.Special thanks to the Warburg Institute and the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. Bibliography and Further Reading:Campion, Nicholas. History of Western Astrology: Volume II, the Medieval and Modern Worlds. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1951.———. “The Passion of the Flax.” Folklore 61, no. 3 (1950): 114-133.———.“The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation.” Ethics 59, no. 2, part 1 (January 1949):77-94.———. “Danse Macabre.” Traditio 6 (1948): 187-225.———.The Royal Art of Astrology: With a Frontispiece, Sixteen Plates, Forty-Eight Illustrations in the Text and Five Diagrams. London: Herbert Joseph, Ltd., 1946.The Mass Observation Archive. http://www.massobs.org.uk/.Scholem, Gershom. “How I Came to the Kabbalah,” Commentary 69, no. 5 (May1980): 39-53.Follow us on Twitter: @averysquarepegAssociate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at collinb1@ohio.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher, was a pioneer in making gendered and familial practice a critical parameter of cultural difference. His work was widely disseminated at home and abroad, translated into French and German and closely read by philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking Millar’s writings as his basis, Nicholas B. Miller explores the role of the family in Scottish Enlightenment political thought and traces its wider resonances across the Enlightenment world.John Millar’s organisation of cultural, gendered and social difference into a progressive narrative of authority relations provided the first extended world history of the family. In John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Voltaire Foundation, 2017), Nicholas B. Miller examines contemporary responses and Enlightenment-era debates on polygamy, matriarchy, the Amazon legend, changes in national character and the possible futures of the family in commercial society. He traces how Enlightenment thinkers developed new standards of evidence and crafted new understandings of historical time in order to tackle the global diversity of family life and gender practice. By reconstituting these theories and discussions, Miller uncovers hitherto unexplored aspects of the Scottish contribution to European debates on the role of the family in history, society and politics.Nicholas B. Miller is Assistant Professor of History at Flagler College.Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The reissue and revision of Martin James’ State of Bass: The Origins of Jungle/Drum & Bass (Velocity Press, 2020) examines the origins and progression of British Junglism in the 1990s.Rave culture’s clashes with UK government and police drove the scene into a dark space, but jungle/drum & bass emerged to capture a new audience of youth, creating what James labels as the first truly Black British music scene. James draws on interviews with key participants in the early junglism scene, examining social, cultural, and musical roots of the scene that became a global phenomenon.Originally published in 1997, State of Bass: The Origins of Jungle/Drum & Bass extends the original text to include the award of the Mercury Prize to Reprazent and brings new perspectives to the story of the UK’s most crucial subterranean scene.Martin James is an internationally published music critic who has contributed to some of the UK’s leading music magazines.Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Olivia Weisser, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, to talk about her 2015 Yale University Press release, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. Olivia Weisser can be described as an historian of Early Modern England, an historian of medicine, and as a gender historian. This book sits right at the intersection of all three of these subfields and contributes to our understanding of the lived experience of religion, the lived experience of gender, ideas about ‘nature,’ and, of course, the history of medicine. Through its investigation of the gender-specific ways women and men talk about their illnesses, Weisser argues that illness is a construction, ongoing, that is specific to space and time, age, class, country of origin, race, and, specifically in this discussion: gender.Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective. 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 we understand the legacy of colonialism within contemporary society?In Bordering Britain Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nadine El-Enany, a senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law, historicises immigration law and ideas of citizenship in Britain, connecting the project of building a nation after the end of empire to whiteness, colonial violence, and racism.The book analyses legislation and case law, along with the social and historical context of immigration in Britain, to demonstrate the continued, systemic, violence at the heart of the British state.The book is essential reading across law, history, and the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The province of Odisha, previously “Orissa,” was the first linguistically organized province of India. In Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1953 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Pritipuspa Mishra explores how the idea of the vernacular has a double effect, serving as a means for exclusion and inclusion. She argues that while regional linguistic nationalism enabled nationalism’s growth, it also enabled the exclusion of groups such as the adivasis, who become invisible as a minority in Odisha. Her book traces the role of the vernacular from colonial decisions about governance and education up through the creation of a linguistic homeland in Odisha. Along the way she looks at the construction of literary categories, the idea of the political subject, and the range of views about multilingualism in nationalist discourse. It concludes with a reflective postscript on the continuing impact of linguistic nationalism on adivasi communities in India.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies