Decolonial Ventures in Early Modern History

Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern LegacyMarriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Frances E. Dolan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 235.

Notes on Contributors

Reviewed by: The Idea of Principles in Early Modern Thought: Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Peter R. Anstey Daniel Schneider Peter R. Anstey, editor. The Idea of Principles in Early Modern Thought: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp. xvi + 303. Cloth, $140.00. This book is a collection of essays that relate in some way to the notion of a principle as it appears in early modern thought. Essays by James Franklin, J. C. Campbell, Alberto Vanzo, Anstey, and William R. Newman provide a survey of the usage of principles within particular subjects: the principles of early modern mathematics, equity law, corpuscularism, and chemistry or alchemy, respectively. Other essays, by Kristen Walsh and Michael LeBuffe, clarify a particular early modern thinker's understanding and usage of the term 'principle.' Walsh's essay concerns Newton's usage and understanding of the term, while LeBuffe's concerns Spinoza's. Other essays, by Daniel Garber and Kiyoshi Shimokawa, clarify how an early modern thinker, or a pair of thinkers, understand and use a particular principle or set of principles to do philosophical work. Garber's essay considers Leibniz's principle of the equality of cause and effect, while Shimokawa's considers the principles that Grotius and Hume use in their accounts of the origin of justice and its relation to utility. Sophie Roux's essay (a wonderful example of the high level of scholarship found in this collection) examines disputes concerning, and contemporaneous to, the two comets of 1664, and shows the role principles played (and failed to play) in demarcating the positions within these disputes. Scholars looking for a sustained investigation into the idea of principles in the early modern period will be disappointed. This is not on account of any failure on the part of these authors, but rather on account of there being no such thing. As this collection makes clear, the early modern period reveals no single idea of principles. Indeed, the only attempt at offering a broad discussion of various early modern ideas of principles is in the excellent introduction by Anstey. Still, this collection succeeds in satisfying its description within this same introduction, namely, as a "preliminary sounding of the subject" (1) of the nature and role of principles in the early modern period. Of the essays offering a "sounding" of principles as they appear within a particular subject, James Franklin's insightful and fascinating "Early Modern Mathematical Principles and Symmetry Arguments" stands out as particularly useful. Franklin's survey of mathematical principles effectively illustrates a dominant early modern conception of mathematics as a science of quantity that yields deductive knowledge of the real world. Likewise, among the essays offering an analysis of particular thinkers' use of the term 'principle,' Kristen Walsh's essay "Principles in Newton's Natural Philosophy" stands out in its significance. Walsh argues persuasively that, in the Principia, Newton used the term 'principle' to signify the functional role of a proposition within his theories. Walsh argues that if, in the Principia, Newton describes a proposition as a principle, he does so because the proposition satisfies two conditions: one, it has been deduced from the phenomena, and two, it serves as a premise in further deductions. Walsh shows how these two simple constraints systematize Newton's otherwise unsystematic usage of 'principle' in the Principia. Walsh's essay is well argued, well researched, and important. Newton scholars will undoubtedly find it of interest. The essays in this collection are all solid works of scholarship. As a collection however, they do not fit together in a very useful way. On the one hand, it will be the rare scholar who can engage deeply with the material covered in each and every essay. On the other hand, it will be the rare researcher of early modern thought who does not find at least some essays in the collection to be of use. The collection would have benefited from a tightening of its theme or perhaps even a tightening of the approaches with which the essays address the theme. As it stands, this "preliminary sounding" of the study of early modern principles lacks a cohesive focus. But the quality of the essays shows that further volumes investigating principles...

Performing the Sea: Fortune, Risk, and Audience Engagement in<i>Pericles</i>

<i>Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America</i> (Allison P. Coudert)

If we wanted to find out what it might have felt like to have lived at a certain time and place, then according to one popular way of understanding their value, autobiography and biography would be...

Notes on Contributors

Reviewed by: The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World Karen Oslund (bio) The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. By John F. Richards. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xiv+682. $75. The Unending Frontier is an ambitious contribution to the fields of early modern history, world history, and environmental history. John Richards identifies a series of environmental changes occurring as a result of developing state structures in the early modern period—among them, the settlement of frontiers, biological invasions from the Old World to the New, and the search for new energy resources. He traces these changes through an impressive number of case studies, including Tokugawa Japan, colonial Brazil, and the indigenous people of Russian Siberia, as well as the better-known examples of the Spanish in the New World and early modern Britain. As these examples demonstrate, people all over the early modern world faced similar environmental issues, such as the pressure that expanding states and rising populations placed on the land. Richards describes different strategies by which various states met these challenges. His juxtaposition of chapters on early modern Britain and Tokugawa Japan is particularly effective. While Japan dealt with the crises of late-eighteenth-century famines with severe austerity measures, forest conservation programs, and intensification of fishing and whaling, the Tudor and Stuart rulers sought to expand their resources by draining wetlands and by switching the primary energy source from wood to coal in response to the depletion of the forests. As Richards notes, the British failure to recognize limits to growth was the more usual for early modern states, and the chapters on frontier settlement in Russia, whaling and walrus hunting, and Dutch and Chinese settlement on Taiwan provide other examples of the "windfall mindset in frontier societies" (p. 619) that Richards argues characterizes the early modern world. This book could have been even more interesting for historians of technology if the comparison between different ideologies of control of nature presented in the chapters on Japan and Britain had been pursued consistently throughout the entire volume, rather than treating the various chapters as self-contained narratives about different early modern societies and their treatment of the environment. As it stands, historians of technology will probably find the final section of the book the most useful. "The World Hunt" discusses the fur hunt in North America and Siberia, whaling and walrus hunting, and cod fishing in the North Atlantic. In the previous three sections, some of the details about technologies of land reclamation or logging tend to be glossed over; here Richards gives more attention to the comparative analysis of different techniques of whaling and fishing. Although [End Page 861] the book is not directly aimed at historians of technology, and does not provide any new analytic approaches to this field, it is a useful synthesis of information about a variety of tools and technologies used in the early modern world. The major weakness of Richards's book is in fact its analytic content. The Unending Frontier, as Richards explains in the preface, grew out of his teaching of environmental history and world history and reflects his deep commitment to world history as both a pedagogic and scholarly field. The book is an invaluable resource for anyone teaching similar courses, and also useful for classes in early modern European history, Atlantic history, or colonial American history. However, its breadth does not lend itself to close and rigorous argument, even in the chapter on the Mughal Empire, which is Richards's field of expertise. At times repetitious, this lengthy volume would have benefited from more careful editing, especially in the chapter on Russia, which conflates the time line of events and is likely to confuse the general reader. This does not prevent Richards from setting forth interesting insights in individual chapters—showing, for example, that in colonial Mexico and Brazil, Spanish and Portuguese settlement initially reduced pressure on land resources rather than increasing it, although this entailed devastating effects on the native populations. Readers of The Unending Frontier cannot fail to be persuaded by the amount of evidence presented for Richards's main contention, that during the early...

Notes on Contributors

Medieval and Early Modern - Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500. By Olivia Remie Constable. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 320.

This study will explore the relationship between violence, emotion and power in early modern drama ranging from the Elizabethan to the Caroline period and including the works of: Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, William Davenant, Philip Massinger, and John Ford. The dramatic texts in this thesis will be read in conversation with early modern proto-psychological, medical, philosophical, and theological doctrines on the passions in order to demonstrate how the drama of the period reflects and reveals the various early modern discourses of emotion, and how in turn, these discourses illuminate new meanings within the drama. Excessive passion in early modern tragedy usually results in violence and, more often than not, proves fatal. This study will consider extreme emotions such as grief, anger, love, lust, and jealousy and their transformative effects which provoke the bloody, violent, and ultimately fatal endings of early modern tragedies. Not only will this study examine this correlation between emotion and death from a proto-psychological and medical point-of-view, but also as a consequence of and reaction against the social and political power hierarchies of early modern society. This thesis will consider power in two ways: the power that the passions have on the vulnerable human body and how this provokes violent responses, and the ways in which these acts of passionate violence are used by playwrights to comment on, reveal, and criticise the socio-political hegemonic discourses of early modern society. Specifically, this exploration of emotion and power will take into account, the early modern patriarchal family and gender roles, the Protestant and Catholic churches, their authority figures and the religious power struggles of the period, early modern conceptions of race and foreign cultures, and the role of the monarch and debates about what constitutes the idea ruler. This study makes an original contribution to knowledge through its examination of previously understudied plays by dramatists such as Philip Massinger and William Davenant. Additionally, this study extends the existing remit of scholarship on early modern drama that uses the history of emotions as a framework, by considering the representations of emotion on the early modern stage, as well as affectual responses to the drama itself in plays that have until now been absent or underrepresented in this area of research, such as Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1586) and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603). Finally, this study will re-examine the passions in plays which are more frequently studied by emotions scholars such as Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), a play renowned for its exploration of sexual jealousy, and the works of John Ford, known for their engagement with and allusions to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), to offer new insights into the various representations of emotion which are present in these plays.

Notes on Contributors

“Arab Wests” is defined by long and complex processes of mobility, cultural exchanges, and imperial encounters in the Western Mediterranean and across the Atlantic in the early modern period. Two novels, Granada: A Trilogy (1994) by Radwa Ashour and The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami (2014), reimagine Arab culture in early modern literary imagination across multiple geographies in the Western Mediterranean and the New World. The two narratives reflect significant aspects of the importance of the late 15th to early 16th centuries to the development of Arab culture in the early modern world—a historically unique time that coincides with advancing global capitalism and its constitutive relations and derivative effects such as slavery, dispossession, conquest, and territorial expansion in North Africa and the Spanish conquest of the New World. This period saw major transformations in trade routes, shifting the center of exchange to the transatlantic sphere and making Iberia an important hub for launching early modern global capitalism. All these new shifts in politics and material economies indicate that the center of action, previously located farther east, would soon be displaced to the Ibero-Maghreb and the Atlantic. Within this purview, the analytical trope of “Arab Wests” offers a site to reimagine the Western Mediterranean cultures and polities as interactive gravitational coordinates in the rapidly changing power balance in the early modern age. The Arab communities and cultures of the regions of al-Maghrib and al-Andalus have been configured and represented in these two novels in relation to each other as well as through their connections to the New World in the early modern period. Given that the history of Spain is intricately connected to and dependent on that of the Arab Muslims in Iberia, the so-called Moors, these narratives highlight the continuities and iterations of the colonial politics of conquest, exile, and dispossession between the three geographical locations of al-Maghrib, al-Andalus, and the New World. They also challenge the narrow view and understanding of early modern Atlantic world history and its Eurocentric models of analysis and interpretation. The interconnected model of early modern history demonstrates how Arab Muslim cultural history in the Western Mediterranean is not only relevant to understanding the major socio-cultural and political transformations in North Africa and Iberia at that time but is also an integral and significant player in imagining and rewriting the “frontier” and the account of the emerging global Atlantic history in which Africa, Europe, and the Americas are linked through diverse forms of exchanges as well as conflicts. Ashour’s and Lalami’s texts, which draw on a rich and diverse repertoire of Arabic conventions of writing and storytelling, put “Arab West” historical fiction within a transatlantic network of narratives through their rhetorical content and textual dynamics, which also resonate with 21st-century issues such as racial identity politics, global Arab diasporic identity, and transnational forms of belonging. Despite the historical remoteness of the context of these fictions, the narratives are animated by an immediacy that corresponds and speaks to our modern sensibilities, especially the global realities that emerged post-9/11, the increasing awareness of systemic racism, and the call for more engaging and rigorous revisionist readings of imperial histories as well as more ethical representations of our interconnected past legacies.

Notes on Contributors

I feel fortunate to be able to discuss the topics presented in these articles. Their temporal focus on the 17th century is fortunate as well. European history should make much greater use of the research on 17th-century Muscovy than it does now. A recent textbook on European history in the early modern period, defined as beginning around 1450 and ending with the French Revolution, demonstrates this. Without much explanation, the author divides the long period she treats into two blocks, one of which comprises the 17th and 18th centuries. The implicit rationale for this choice is the rise of the modern sciences. For all its merits, this synopsis of early modern European history treats Muscovite or Russian history only briefly and not always adequately. (1) This is a pity, because a closer look at Muscovite history would show the reader a different 17th century, one little affected by the sciences but that offers many points of reference for a comprehensive study of early modern European history. The articles presented here deal with a range of topics: economic expansion in a premodern framework; the logic of the transfer of military technology; the everyday experience of a religious and secular culture that was divided along lines of rank and status; and royalty, and modes of identifying the ruler as well as oneself, at a specific stage in the development of writing. The authors include questions about economic agency and material culture, thereby building a bridge to the better Soviet historiography on Muscovy, which still remains to be integrated into present-day scholarship. But these works can also help integrate Muscovite history into the mainstream of the historiography on the early modern period, notably the study of state building. Analyzing the early modern concept of Policey and its significance for Russia, I would like to present one of the various possible ways of doing this. My view is, of course, a limited one: I am mainly, though not exclusively, referring to trends in the German research on the period, and hence also to works dealing with the German territories of the Holy Roman Empire. To begin, a few words about how these articles extend and modify central themes of the existing research on Muscovy. Isolde Thyret studies a large monastery's successful strategies of land acquisition in an age when monastic landownership was subjected to legal restrictions. Her protagonists act as aggressive entrepreneurs within a traditional system of exchange. The behavior of these self-confident clerics is somewhat reminiscent of the entrepreneurship of the 17th-century Stroganov family: while expanding into Siberia, they used means to sponsor icon painting in a distinctive style. (2) Thyret builds on the theme of self-confident clerical lordship (Herrschaft) recently discussed by Georg Michels, (3) but she adds important new aspects. The abbots showed a remarkable instinct for economic expansion at the expense of other church institutions. Stressing that the abbots pursued not only economic but also spiritual aims, the author elaborates on the topic of piety and expansion (in the sense of strategically acquiring the means to enhance one's economic potential) and shows that over all, Orthodoxy could motivate expansion as effectively as Calvinism could. Like any stimulating case study, this one leaves the reader with questions about possibilities for generalizing the results: if successful entrepreneurship was typical of large monasteries, what was it that made the monks of another famous large monastery, Solovki, so discontented that they became fervent supporters of religious dissent? Donald Ostrowski deals with the importation of new arms technology into Muscovy. For earlier historians of Eastern Europe, it was important to discuss from whom their countries borrowed military technology, since this was seen as an important indicator of membership in wider cultural networks. …