New Books in Early Modern History

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten art

Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mād

For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim

Economic history has always emphasized the importance of long-distance trade in the emergence of modern financial markets, yet almost nothing is known about the Manila trade. The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) offers the first reconstruction of the capital market of

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the history of ancient and Medieval technologies. The pair use Long’s forthcoming book, Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), as a launchi