New Books in Early Modern History

Denise Z. Davidson joins Jana Byars to talk about Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters (Cornell UP, 2025). The book explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement.

Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters.

By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.
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Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.

Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.

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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Explosive sexual scandals, bitter domestic conflicts, and dramatic changes in fortune. Sex, marriage, and family life were matters of enormous consequence in the highly complex societies that formed across the early modern Dutch overseas empire. This was not only true for the colonial authorities that administered settlements on behalf of the Dutch East and West India Companies (VOC and WIC), but also for the people of various backgrounds and statuses that inhabited these places. Focusing primarily on the eighteenth century, this book explores how these disparate and unequally empowered groups contested the norms that governed intimate life in Dutch colonial outposts from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

Sophie Rose, Ph.D. (2023), is a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.
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Paola de Santo joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Ambassador and the Courtesan: Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy (U Delaware Press, 2026). Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers a comparative analysis of these two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society. While these two figures may appear unrelated, this book demonstrates their shared relation to the body politic, including the relationship of their very bodies to that metaphorical body. One imagines the early modern ambassador as traveling from one center of power to another, gathering news and disseminating it in writing, as well as negotiating in person. The courtesan, in contrast, is normally imagined employing her body in the service of entertaining elite clients in the enclosed space of the urban salon. These characterizations reinforce their very different roles in Renaissance Italian society and culture, but by placing them in dialogue, salient points of convergence emerge detailing how they were integral to the concurrent emergence of a modern subjectivity of the individual and the formation of the modern state.
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In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been known that this transition stemmed from Europe’s increasing exchanges with India, Persia, and the Arabic world. Yet much remains to be understood about how Indo-Arabic numerals—and the practical arithmetic they enabled—actually spread across Europe. As Dr. Raffaele Danna shows in The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600 (Harvard University Press, 2026), it was hundreds of ordinary merchants, schoolmasters, and artisans who nurtured these changes, thereby driving key advances in both commerce and mathematics.

Drawing on an original catalog of more than 1,200 practical arithmetic manuals, Dr. Danna charts the incremental spread of the new figures with unprecedented precision. While Italian merchants were the early adopters, it took nearly three centuries for Indo-Arabic numerals to become established in northern Europe. As Dr. Danna shows, adoption did not follow the routes of maritime trade. Rather, Indo-Arabic numerals moved gradually across the continent through inland networks of practitioners. Everywhere they went, the ten figures enhanced commercial practices and facilitated the emergence of a coherent language of mathematical craft. The growing social circulation of this knowledge, in turn, had a lasting impact on the economic trajectory of Western Europe. By the late sixteenth century, even academics were absorbing lessons from the vernacular tradition—a development that led to the first major breakthroughs in European mathematical theory since antiquity.

Combining economic history with the social history of mathematics, The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals illuminates the integral role of practical arithmetic in both intellectual and commercial transformations across Western Europe.

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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