New Books in Early Modern History

Mar 09 2025 1281 ep. 57 mins 335

New Books in Early Modern History Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of the Early Modern World about the new books

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Kristin A. Olbertson, "The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mar 09 2025 46 mins

The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Kristin Olbertson is the first comprehensive study of criminal speech in eighteenth-century New England, traces how the criminalization, prosecution, and punishment of speech offenses in Massachusetts helped to establish and legitimate a social and cultural r

Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mar 08 2025 51 mins

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP

Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Mar 08 2025 31 mins

Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Harvard UP, 2023) is a revelatory new account of the magus―the learned magician―and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe. In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus�

Anna Lise Seastrand, "Body, History, Myth: Early Modern Murals in South India" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mar 06 2025 44 mins

An astonishing variety of murals greet visitors to the temples and palaces of southern India. Beautiful in execution and extensive in scope, murals painted on walls and ceilings adorn the most important spaces of early modern religious and political performance. Scene by scene, histories of holy sites, portraits that incorporate historical figures into mythic landscapes, and Tamil

John Coakley ed et al., "The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World: Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

Mar 04 2025 48 mins

In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerbated existing and created new problems of piracy across the globe. The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam UP, 2024) addresses these early modern problems in three sections: first, states' attempts to exercise jurisd

Jenny Shaw, "The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery" (UNC Press, 2024)

Feb 23 2025 54 mins

The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery (UNC Press, 2024) is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Two of the women were his wives, two he enslaved, and one was a servant in his household. All were determined to make their way in a world that vastly and differentially

Megan Moran, "Gender and Family Networks in Early Modern Italy" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

Feb 23 2025 50 mins

Women from the Ricasoli and Spinelli families formed a wide variety of social networks within and beyond Florence through their letters as they negotiated interpersonal relationships and lineage concerns to actively contribute to their families in early modern Italy. Women were located at the center of social networks through their work in bridging their natal and marital families,

Martyn Percy, "The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England" (Hurst, 2025)

Feb 21 2025 49 mins

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. Martyn Percy offers a bold and unsettling truth: the British Empire and Great Britain are primarily English constructions, and the Church of England benefited from English enterprise and exploitation, serving as the spiritual arm of the imperial project. English Anglicanism

Noa Shashar, "The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

Feb 21 2025 42 mins

In The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648 - 1850 (Brandeis UP, 2024), Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the activity of rabbis whose Jewish legal rulings determined the fate of agunot, literally "chained women," who were often considered a marginal group. Who were these men and women? How did Jewish society deal with the dan

Lindsay O'Neill, "The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey Into and Out of Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Feb 21 2025 49 mins

In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free t