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Interviews with scholars of the Early Modern World about the new books
Explosive sexual scandals, bitter domestic conflicts, and dramatic changes in fortune. Sex, marriage, and family life were matters of enormo...
Paola de Santo joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Ambassador and the Courtesan: Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy (U Delaw...
In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that be...
The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tiffany Jo Werth explores how stones, rocks, and the broad...
Today, I interview Vin Nardizzi, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, about his new monograph Marvellous Vegetables i...
The story behind the mythical figure of "the Wandering Jew" is one of the most fascinating tales in European history. In I, Wandering Jew, N...
Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Dr. Francis Young's Fairies: A...
In American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (U Georgia Press, 2026), Dr. Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple quest...
Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe ( Cambridge UP, 2025), Penny Robert's latest book, takes us into the world...
Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof join Jana Byars to talk about their new book, The Burgeoning European Print Trade: The Distribution of Prints...
Naming new discoveries is central to science, and for centuries, Latin dominated this process. The resulting terminology still shapes modern...
Fossil Consumerism: Energy, Ecology and Everyday Life in the Early Modern Low Countries (Leuven UP, 2026) by Dr. Wout Saelens explores how t...
Awash in a sea of rum describes the years between the 1670s and the 1830s in the colonies that would later become Canada. Millions of litres...
How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the perio...
In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores th...
The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters (Harvard UP, 2026) is...
An innovative approach in the field of material culture and consumption studies, Life in the Georgian Parsonage: Morals, Material Goods and...
In Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Michael Bycroft argues that gems wer...
Leah Astbury's new book, Making Babies in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2025), explores the ideals and realities that governed generat...
From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his repu...
In the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially a...
Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nat...
From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the firs...
Auctions and the Consumption of Second-Hand Goods in Georgian England (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Dr. Sara Pennell & Professor Jon Stobart provide...
There have long been whispers, coming from the castle; from the village square; from the dark woods. The great lady-a countess, from one of...
In Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) Dr. Lynneth Miller Renber...
In The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India (Oxford UP, 2025), Elaine Fisher reconstructs Vīraśaiva origins from un...
In 1706, Edinburgh was on the brink of a popular uprising. Men and women took to the streets to protest the planned union with England, fear...
In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Ve...
Thomas Kuehn, Professor Emeritus at Clemson University talks about his new book, Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge Universit...
Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment (Routle...
A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation,...
In small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in th...
Saundra Weddle joins fellow Venetianist Jana Byars to talk about her pathbreaking new release, The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of t...
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, venereal disease, or the 'pox,' was a dreaded diagnosis throughout Europe. Its ghastly marks, a...
In eighteenth-century America, genealogy was more than a simple record of family ties—it was a powerful force that shaped society. Lineage:...
The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa (U Chicago Press, 2025) by Professor Tob...
Women and Work Through a Comparative Lens: Gender and the Urban Labor Markets of Premodern Brabant and Biscay explores women's economic role...
Execution, State and Society in England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge UP, 2023) by Dr. Simon Devereaux provides the first comprehensive account of e...
Alison Rowlands, professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Essex, joins Jana Byars to talk about her classic book, Wit...
Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy (Cornell UP, 2025) is a study of the practice of vendetta among th...
Elwin Hofman joins Jana Byars to talk about the volume he edited with Magaly Rodríguez García & Pieter Vanhees, The Business of Pleasure: A...
Samuel Fullerton joins Jana Byars to talk about Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England (Manchester UP 2024) to celebrate its paperback rel...
Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connect...
Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenm...
Bandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel (Cornell UP, 2023) uses the classic novel The Water Margin...
Clare Griffin's book Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) introduces the reader to the...
In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretat...
The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discour...
Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700 (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) by Dr. Danielle Alesi exam...