New Books in Early Modern History

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, discussing how and when these amanuenses became visible in manuscript and occasionally in print and explaining why they were uniquely positioned to shape the posthumous legacy of their principal.

Taking an in-depth look at the later Renaissance, she reconstructs the private lives and academic pursuits of leading figures from the period such as the renowned humanist Erasmus, the reformer Martin Bucer, and Paris professors Adrien Turnèbe and Petrus Ramus. Dr. Blair paints multifaceted portraits of the servants, students, and family members who assisted in their work, drawing on sources ranging from scholarly texts in both draft and published forms to correspondence, annotations, biographical accounts, and household rules. Panoramic in scope, In the Scholar’s Workshop challenges conventional views about authorship and attribution while affirming the enduring importance of collaboration in scholarly work today.

Guest: Dr. Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her books include Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age and (with Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton) Information: A Short History.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Once Upon A Tome

The World She Edited

Monsters in the Archives

Your Art Will Save Your Life

The Artists Joy

Becoming The Writer You Already Are

The Other Side of the Desk

Reflection in Motion

Working with Academic Librarians

Archival Etiquette

The AI Mirror

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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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 see himself as simply King of England. Drawing on archival sources from across the British Isles, Dr. Steven Veerapen reveals how Henry fashioned an image of himself as a law-abiding and benevolent emperor who dreamed of uniting England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and swathes of France under Tudor rule.

Yet the image was false and the dream a nightmare for his queens, his ministers and many of his subjects. This new portrait shows Henry for what he really was: a self-aggrandising actor who, by fair means and foul – murder plots, marriage negotiations and military ventures – did all he could to realise his imperial fantasy.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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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 of empires in North America.

At the heart of the book is Peter Schuyler, a Dutch-American
mayor of Albany, Indian Affairs commissioner, and militia colonel who
earned deep trust among the Iroquois. Decades ahead of his time in his
respect for Native diplomacy and sovereignty, Schuyler helped forge and
sustain a fragile alliance between English colonists and the
Haudenosaunee (Five Nations of the Iroquois) during a decade of brutal
warfare. That alliance, known as The Covenant Chain, not only blocked
French ambitions in the region, but also shaped the political and
military landscape of the American frontier for the next one hundred
years.

Told
through multiple perspectives, the book also follows two unforgettable
Indigenous figures during the conflict. Lawrence, a Mohawk war captain,
serves as Schuyler’s compatriot on the battlefield, working for and
navigating the survival of his people. Hilletie van Olinda, a biracial
Mohawk-Dutch woman, becomes a key translator and diplomatic go-between,
using her language skills and cultural fluency to mediate between the
Iroquois and English.

Across
a decade of war, espionage, and political intrigue—from the 1689
Leisler’s Rebellion and 1690 Schenectady Massacre to the climactic Grand
Settlement of 1701—these intertwined stories reveal the human cost and
political complexity behind one of early America’s most consequential
alliances.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Ocean covers an impressive sweep of
history, from the late eleventh century through the early nineteenth,
and yet the authors manage to retain a human element. Their judicious
inclusion of micro-histories and primary-source quotation, as well as
their lively prose, helps the reader enter into what it may have felt
like to live through these developments, to participate in the era when
"France became France, and the Atlantic became a world."
Crucially, their attention to the non-European actors in this story and
women's worlds and work makes the book a helpful corrective to top-down
approaches to imperial histories. Beyond the Ocean is a must-read for Atlantic world scholars, but has value for anyone interested in early modern Europe or cultural exchange.

Elspeth Currie
is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where
she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.
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In 1644 four norcini
or 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 points to an underlying
reality—that in the early seventeenth century, a series of popes
dramatically increased the amount of food and wine consumed by Romans,
culminating in a per capita consumption of over a pound of meat per day
during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (d. 1644).

The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) traces the efforts and
activities of a range of actors who strove to bring meat to the Roman
table. Dr. Bradford A. Bouley shows how Rome’s preoccupation with food
was the result of papal policy in the aftermath of the Reformation;
food, and especially meat, served as religious and political propaganda,
symbolizing the correctness of the Catholic faith and demonstrating the
extent of papal power. Dr. Bouley details the dramatic reorganization
of Roman foodways needed to satisfy this demand for meat, as large herds
of animals had to be funneled from the countryside to the city. This
consumption was ultimately not sustainable, triggering a crisis that
fueled sensational rumors
of murder and cannibalism and eventually, Dr. Bouley contends, sparked
the outbreak of civil war, as vassals rebelled against papal oversight. The Barberini Butchers
recovers this significant episode in food, environmental, and cultural
history, one that brings early modern politics and history into
conversation with concerns over human use of natural resources and
consumption of animal products that continue to resonate clearly today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices