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PODCAST

New Books in Early Modern History

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

00:30:30

All Around Is Fairy Ground: Pleasure and the Regency...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/10/05

Regency gardens dazzled with colour, invention and theatricality: trellises heavy with roses and jasmine, shrubberies designed for intrigue and lawns enlivened with pools, grottoes and fanciful ornaments. Yet behind this world of perfume and spectacle lay a striking social shift. In a domain long defined by men, women began to play an active role, influencing Humphry Repton and other designers to realize their visions of pleasure grounds. These gardens became stages for al fresco entertainments,

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01:04:30

Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/10/03

The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system, Luc Bulten presents a gateway into everyday social realities surrounding caste, conjugality, (forced)

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00:28:12

How Were Foreign Languages Taught in Early Modern...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/09/23

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Professor Dr. Natalia Filatkina, Dr. Kerstin Roth and Research Associate Miriam Hinterholzer. All three work at the University of Hamburg in Germany on a long-term research project, called FSL Digital, that investigates language history, language attitudes and everyday communication in the context of multilingualism in early modern Europe.As part of this project, today’s guests annotate and analyse multilingual foreign

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00:56:40

Arthur der Weduwen, "The Last Invasion of England:...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/09/22

In popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife of James’s nephew, the Dutch William III of Orange. Devoted to her husband, Mary would not accept the crown alone, and so William and Mary were crowned together, securing a smooth dynastic succession. The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada (Princeton UP, 2026) recounts the forgotten campaign that carried

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39:14

Marjolijn Bol, "The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/09/11

Panel painters in both the middle ages and the fifteenth century created works that evoke the luster of precious stones, the sheen of polished gold and silver, and the colorful radiance of stained glass. Yet their approaches to rendering these materials were markedly different. InThe Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100–1500(UChicago Press, 2023), Dr. Marjolijn Bol explores some of the reasons behind this radical transformation by telling the history of the two oil painting

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57:42

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/09/08

Erin Maglaque's new bookPresence: A Hidden History of the Female Body(Astra House, 2026),is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to write that flowed from the body?"Presenceis her answer. The book draws from a vast array of archival and

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51:30

Aonghus MacKechnie, "Edinburgh: City of Romanticism"...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/09/01

Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating the country’s still-flourishing and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh’s most emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and stone built cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland had by the 1820s become one of Europe’s great centres of Romanticism, due both to the majestic

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37:36

Holly Crawford Pickett, "The Drama of Serial...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/08/28

After mounting London’s outdoor pulpit known as St. Paul’s Cross on 8th December, 1588, Anthony Tyrrell found himself perched before a skeptical audience. He stood in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral to declare his recantation of Catholicism and return to England’s official Protestant Church. The trouble was he had been there before – in January of the same year, in fact – to do the same thing. On that occasion, however, he had shocked on-lookers by delivering an anti-Protestant tirade

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39:00

Tatiana Seijas, "American Metropolis: The Making of...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/08/23

Mexico City was America's largest city in the seventeenth century – a genuine metropolis. InAmerican Metropolis: The Making of Mexico City(Cambridge University Press, 2026), Dr. Tatiana Seijas reveals a rich tapestry of stories about essential workers who remade and transformed the city during this period. Her narrative style carries readers to a unique place and time with residents from around the world who sold food, facilitated transportation, provided care, and valued the city's silver. Free and

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60:57

Amy Blakeway, "War and Governance in Scotland,...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/08/19

Drawing from local archives alongside national and international records,War and Governance in Scotland, 1543-1559: Destruction, Reconstruction and Reform(Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Amy Blakeway argues that warfare was the defining feature of government and politics in Scotland for the two decades following the death of James V. It demonstrates that beyond the direct effects of invasion, the need to raise unprecedented taxation, as well as warfare’s secondary consequences, such as plague and price

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47:56

Caro Pirri, "Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/08/10

Today’s guest, Caro Pirri, is the author ofColonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement(Oxford University Press, 2025). This book explores how early modern colonial travel writing informed the London theater’s spatial and placemaking conventions. It suggests that what the stage found most compelling about narratives of colonial settlement was their failure to claim interpretive control over unfamiliar places and people. The book goes on to link colonial

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59:10

In The Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/08/06

For centuries, many of the world’s most influential thinkers relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying.In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship(Princeton UP, 2026)introduces readers to these unsung scribes, assistants, and collaborators, showing how the scholarly enterprise is rarely as solitary as we tend to think. Dr. Blair traces how the learned have relied on helpers since antiquity,

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37:00

Steven Veerapen, "Overlord: A New History of the Life...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/08/06

Henry VIII is England’s most famous king. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant, the religious disruptor and the much-married glutton.Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII(Birlinn, 2026) is a groundbreaking study of Henry’s life examines and destroys many of the long-repeated myths about this complex monarch: he was not particularly gluttonous, not particularly prudish, and not particularly messy in his religious changes. Nor did he

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45:03

Samuel Marquis, "Empire and Frontier: Colonel Peter...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/08/04

Empire and Frontier: Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Valiant Iroquois in King William's War: 1689-1701 (Pegasus Books, 2026) by Samuel Marquis presents a powerful episode of early American history, revealing the very human story of friendship and alliance between Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Iroquois during King William’s War (1689–1701). Like Philbrick’s Mayflower and Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, this new book reveals how fragile alliances and cross-cultural diplomacy changed the course

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79:32

Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth, "Beyond the...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/07/28

In Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions(Oxford University Press, 2026), Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth reveal the vast and complex world of France's Atlantic enterprises in the premodern era. Drawing upon years of archival work, Hodson and Rushforth demonstrate how France's overseas activities created its empire, intentionally or not, and how these distant places built the French state and used it for their own ends. Beyond the

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49:08

Bradford A. Bouley, "The Barberini Butchers: Meat,...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/07/18

In 1644 four norcinior pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome themselves, who had become so obsessed with meat that they turned a blind eye to such horrendous acts. This fabricated story

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118:52

Peter C. Mancall, "Contested Continent: The Struggle...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/07/11

InContested Continent: TheStruggle for America, c.1000-1680 (Oxford UniversityPress, 2026), the newest installmentof the acclaimedOxford History of the United States series,Peter C. Mancall recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions of Indigenous women and men as well as Europeans and Africans. This history spans the continent from the North Atlantic to the West Indies and includes the entire Atlantic basin, telling a new story about the origins of major aspects of

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37:31

Amélie Junqua and Geoffrey Day, "Too Good to Waste:...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/07/11

Paper was a precious commodity in the eighteenth century: every sheet was made by hand. There was therefore a significant market in recycling substandard paper from paper mills and discarded proofs and sheets from printers and booksellers for secondary use, alongside a black market in which stealing and receiving stolen paper took place on a vast scale. A single piece of paper could be termed ‘waste’ and yet sold for cash three times in succession, on each occasion performing a useful

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78:49

Kit Chapman, "The Age of Alchemy: How Early...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/07/09

The first chemists were Sri Lankan forgers who crafted unimaginably strong steel millennia before it should have been possible. They were alchemists in Roman Egypt, who designed apparatus still in use today. They were Stone Age leatherworkers, Tang Dynasty herbalists and Mayan stoneworkers. The Enlightenment is usually credited with the origins of chemistry, but in truth, the science blossomed gradually. As early innovators distilled, smelted, forged and fermented their way through

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62:25

Peter Ross, "Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in...

New Books in Early Modern History ·

2026/07/01

In Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London (Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Peter Ross, step into the kitchens, streets and chop houses of Georgian London—one day, one city, countless appetites. From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns, coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate houses, soup shops and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bustled with vendors offering early versions of fast food: hot green peas, baked potatoes, suet

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