New Books in Early Modern History

Michael Green joins Jana Byars to talk about his volume with co-editor Ineke Huysman, Private Life and Privacy in the Early Modern Low Countries (Brepols, 2023). This volume investigates the origins of one of the most important notions of the contemporary society: privacy. Based on case studies from the early modern Lo

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic. But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory. Charms and potions could still be fou

Alice Hunt’s Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade 1649-1650 (Faber and Faber, 2024) takes a chronological look at the current events, personalities, political struggles and cultural highlights of Britain’s short-lived but intense experiment in republicanism. From the deeply controversial execution of Charles I in J

The Unseen History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2025) locates and describes almost one thousand surviving copies of the first nine editions of Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis (IBP) published between 1625 and 1650. Meticulously reconstructing the publishing history of these first nine editions and

Andreas Beyer joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist (Reaktion, 2025). Benvenuto Cellini was a murderer, thief, lover of all genders, rival of popes and princes, as well as an ingenious artist. In his legendary autobiography, the Vita, Cellini describes hi

Enrique Fernández and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, eds. Death and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2024). In premodern Europe, the gender identity of those waiting for Doomsday in their tombs could be reaffirmed, readjusted, or even neutralized. Testimonies of this renegotiation of gender at the encounter with death is