Early Modern Europe
09 May 2024 09:11
See also: Alchemy; Demonology; Erasmus; Millenarianism; the Renaissance (a sub-period); the Scientific Revolution; the Witch-Craze
- Recommended (naturally, very misc.):
- Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State
- Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce
- Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past [Extends somewhat before and after the Renaissance proper]
- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
- Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680--1750
- Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680--1715
- Jacob L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories
- Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477--1806
- A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
- Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History
- Robert Mandrou, From Humanism to Science, 1480--1700
- Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe [Politics and Pendula]
- Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500--1800
- Richard H. Popkin, The History of Skepticism: From Erasmus to Descartes
- Jay A. Smith, Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast
- Jonathan Spence, >The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
- Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton [Which is necessarily also a book about many other things...]
- Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity
- Ruldof and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution
- Recommended with substantial reservations:
- Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern [The subtitle is totally over-the-top and unjustified, and so is a lot of the argument]
- Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe
- Modesty forbids me to recommend:
- Christopher N. Warren, Daniel Shore, Jessica Otis, Lawrence Wang, Mike Finegold and CRS, "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks", Digital Humanities uarterly 10:3 (2016) and Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
- To read:
- Walter G. Andrews and Memhmet Kalpakli, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society
- Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
- Catalin Avramescu, The Intellectual History of Cannibalism
- Rosalind Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662--1785
- William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550--1640
- Fernand Braudel
- Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice
- David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates
- Cunningham and Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe
- Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Expereince and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570--1715
- Robert S. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe
- Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
- Paula Findlen
- Don Garrett and Edward Barbanell (eds.), Encyclopedia of Empiricism [Focusing on the 17th and 18th centuries]
- Oscar Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250--1650
- Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age
- Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
- Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past
- John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy [Color me skeptical]
- Henry Heller, Labour, Science, and Technology in France, 1500--1620
- R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540--1770
- Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe
- Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages
- Andreas Kalyvas and Ira I. Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns
- Henry Kamen, Empire [History of the Spanish empire, 1492--1763]
- Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe
- Richard Lachmann, Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe [Or, how capitalism was born from the quarrels of tyrants]
- Antonia Lolordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy
- Katherine A. Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200--1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society
- John A. Lynn II, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe
- Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450--1750 [via David Auerbach]
- Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500--1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology
- John Levi Martin, "The objective and subjective rationalization of war", Theory and Society 34 (2005): 229--275 [Pace Weber and Foucault, "[c]lose attention to the question of rationalization and the history of infantry warfare, however, suggests that far from representing a watershed change from non-rationalized to rationalized war, the early-modern period was more like other rapid expansions of armies based on recruitment of commoners, and had little to do with the distinctive characteristics of the emerging nation-states."]
- Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
- Steven M. Nadler
- William G. Naphy, Plagues, Poisons and Potions: Plague Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps, 1530--1640
- Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change
- Anthony Ossa-Richardson, The Devil's Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought
- R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800
- Geoffrey Parker
- Emperor: A New Life of Charles V
- Success Is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe
- Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century
- Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
- David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe
- Annabel Patterson
- Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England
- Early Modern Liberalism
- Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History [i.e., a new interpretation of the history of the Whigs]
- Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain
- J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
- Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science
- Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain
- Meredith K. Ray, Daughters of Alchemy Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy
- John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton
- Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice
- Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism
- Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe
- James D. Tracy, Europe's Reformations, 1450--1650
- Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe
- Margaret Dauler Wilson, Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy
- Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History
- Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism
- Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
