Early Modern History

Yong Chen, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, discusses the historical forces that turned Chinese food, a cuisine once widely rejected by Americans, into one of the most popular ethnic foods in the U.S.

Martha Howell, professor of history at Columbia University and the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow, discusses the meaning attached to goods—both humble and luxurious—during the Renaissance. The era is considered by many to be the first age of commercial globalism.

Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg Institute in London, delivers the inaugural annual lecture honoring David Zeidberg, recently retired Avery Director of the Library. In his presentation, Sherman traces the modern field of cryptography back to the Renaissance and asks what role the invention of printing played in the keeping of secrets.

In the 16th century, the unified Latin Christianity of the Middle Ages broke apart. New Protestant churches and a reformed Catholic church created new theologies, new liturgies, and new ways of imagining what early Christian life and worship were like. Anthony Grafton, professor of history at Princeton University, discusses how the new histories were ideological in inspiration and controversial in style, but nonetheless represented a vital set of innovations in western ways of thinking about and representing the past. This talk is part of the Crotty Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded Dec. 7, 2017..

The 16th-century ethnographic study known as the Florentine Codex included a richly detailed account of natural history of the New World. In this lecture, Alain Touwaide—historian of medicine, botany, and medicinal plants—compares the Codex and contemporary European herbal traditions. He suggests that they represent the opposition between unknown and known—a dynamic force that led to many discoveries in medicine through the centuries. Recorded Dec. 5, 2017.

Markku Peltonen, professor of history at the University of Helsinki and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow, discusses why the famous philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) placed the blame for the English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s at the door of schoolmasters. This talk is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded Nov. 15, 2017

If England’s King Charles II and his courtiers had had their way, most of eastern North America would have been the personal property of about a dozen men who dreamed of wielding virtually absolute power over their vast domains. Daniel K. Richter, professor of history and director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow, explores this neglected chapter in American history and why it still matters. Recorded Nov. 8, 2017.

David Loewenstein, Erle Sparks Professor of English and Humanities at Penn State, discusses the daring originality of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” This year marks the 350th anniversary of the great poem’s first publication in 1667. This talk is part of the Ridge Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded Nov. 1, 2017.

Historian Daniela Bleichmar, co-curator of the exhibition “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin,” discusses the surprising and little-known story of the pivotal role that Latin America played in the pursuit of science and art during the first global era. This talk is part of the Wark Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded Oct. 16, 2017.

John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and the Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, presents an account of Potosí, the great South American silver mine and boomtown that galvanized imperial Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, fueled the rise of capitalism, destroyed native peoples and cultures en masse, and changed history—for good or ill? This talk is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded April 12, 2017.

Greg Walker, Regius Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, discusses Sir David Lyndsay’s remarkable play, “A Satire of the Three Estates”, probably the most dramatically and politically radical piece of theater produced in 16th-century Britain. Recorded Mar. 1, 2017.

Mary Terrall, professor of the history of science at UCLA, discusses French botanist Michel Adanson, who spent almost five years in Senegal in the 1750s. Terrall reconstructs Adanson’s sojourn in a French trading post, where he studied African natural history with the help of local residents. This talk is part of the Dibner Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Jan. 25, 2017

Margo Todd, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow, examines the campaign of the mostly lay judiciaries of the Calvinist Scottish kirk, or church, to impose a strict and highly invasive sexual discipline on their towns in the century following the Protestant Reformation. This talk is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded Dec. 7, 2016.

Steve Hindle, W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at The Huntington, explains how one particular map might be used to reconstruct who did what for a living, and who lived next door to whom, in 17th-century rural society. Recorded Nov. 9, 2016.

Carla Gardina Pestana delivers this Society of Fellows lecture at The Huntington. In 1685, after he supported the invasion of the Duke of Monmouth, who aimed to take the throne from his uncle, James II, the “Chyrurgion” (surgeon) Henry Pitman was transported to labor on the Caribbean island colony of Barbados as a convicted rebel. Four years later, Pitman returned to England to publish an account of his servitude, escape, encounters with privateers, and other “strange adventures”. "A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman" reveals a 17th-century English Caribbean fraught with brutality.

Norman Jones, professor of history at Utah State University, talks about his decades-long effort to understand how English men and women in the Elizabethan era perceived the structures, meanings, and purposes of life.

Carla Gardina Pestana, professor of history at UCLA, will argue for the importance of Cromwell's effort and its outcome. Oliver Cromwell got only to Jamaica despite sending a massive expeditionary force to conquer the Spanish West Indies. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Andrew O’Shaughnessy, vice president of Monticello and professor of history at the University of Virginia, dispels the incompetence myth surrounding the loss of the American colonies and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory. This talk was part of the Nevins Lecture series at The Huntington.

Dena Goodman, professor of history at the University of Michigan, discusses a group of young men whose passion for science guided them through the turmoil of the French Revolution and into leadership roles in the decades that followed.

Simon Winchester, author of The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, tells the extraordinary story of British surveyor, William Smith.

Clive Holmes, emeritus fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, will provide a context for the 1692 determination by the Puritan clergymen of the Cambridge Association concerning spectral evidence in witchcraft trials. This talk is part of the Crotty Lecture series at The Huntington.

Felicity Heal, emeritus fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, discusses the importance of gifts and patronage in the lethally competitive court of Henry VIII. This talk is part of the Crotty Lecture series at The Huntington.

Thomas Cogswell, professor of history at UC Riverside reconstructs the polemical campaign waged in the early 1650s by John Milton and other republicans to destroy the personal and political reputation of Charles II. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell discusses one of the most exciting, controversial, and extravagant periods in the history of fashion: the reign of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 18th-century France. She explores the exceptionally imaginative and uninhibited styles of the period leading up to the French Revolution, as well as fashion’s surprising influence on the course of the Revolution itself. This is part of the Wark Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Alain Touwaide explores some iconic sites in the Mediterranean world—Pompeii, Constantinople, Baghdad, Cordoba, Granada, and Padua, among others—and examines archaeological fields and early manuscripts that illustrate the relationship between humans and nature through time and space. Since ancient times, humans have recognized the therapeutic benefits of nature and have built gardens that helped restore health, both physical and spiritual.Touwaide is scientific director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions and research associate at the Smithsonian Institution.

Matthew Fisher, associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, discusses the earliest collections of medieval English manuscripts, the fires that almost destroyed them, and the radical changes in archival procedures that followed. This is part of the Zambrano Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Kathleen Wilson, professor of history at Stony Brook University and the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow, discusses the revolutionary changes in body politics and polity that occurred in England during the late 18th century, as symbolized by the activities and representations of Admiral Horatio Nelson and his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton. This is part of the Distinguished Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Susan Juster, professor of history at the University of Michigan and the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow, discusses the changing nature of blasphemy and blasphemy prosecutions in early modern England and the North American colonies. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture series.

Tim Harris, professor of history at Brown University and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow, examines the causes of the English Civil War and the significance of the revolutionary upheavals in 17th-century England, Scotland, and Ireland. A book signing follows. This is part of The Huntington's Distinguished Fellow Lecture series.

Keith Wrightson, professor or history at Yale University, investigates the idioms used in 16th- and 17th-century England to date events and express the passage of time. This is part of The Huntington's Crotty Lecture series.

Susan Brigden, Langford Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford, discusses the diplomatic consequences of when Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, and how it broke the unity of Christendom. Brigden is the author of Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest.

Niklas Frykman discusses the rise and fall of the mutinous Atlantic, and why today we might once again wish to remember those long lost struggles for maritime democracy. Frykman is assistant professor of history at Claremont Mckenna College and is a Barbara Thom Fellow at The Huntington in 2013¬–14.

John Morrill of Cambridge University draws on eyewitness testimony to examine the exceptional violence and disruption brought about by the Irish Massacres of 1641–42. Morrill chaired the editorial board for the project that put 8,000 survivor statements online at the 1641 Depositions website. This was the 2013–14 Crotty Lecture at The Huntington.

Valerie Traub explores the “Age of Discovery,” when European cartographers and anatomists developed novel strategies for representing the human body in their atlases of the world and its inhabitants. In the process she speculates on the effects of their illustrations on the emergence of the concept of “the normal.” Traub is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Michigan and the Dibner Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for 2013–14.

James Simpson discusses how Early Modern English literature and visual culture responded to evangelical absolutism. Simpson is professor of English, Harvard University, and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington in 2013–14.

Theresa M. Kelley explains that in the years leading up to the French Revolution, writers of political prophecy such as Mary Shelley celebrated—or mourned—what they believed lay ahead. Yet after the Reign of Terror, writers became more wary of imagining a desired future. In this talk she considers how this new wariness of prophecy transformed Romantic understanding of time, possibility, and change. Kelley is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Avery Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington in 2013–14.

Alison Games explores an ordeal that took place in 1623, when Dutch traders in the Spice Islands tried, tortured, and executed 20 English merchants and Japanese soldiers. The English later dubbed it the “Amboyna Massacre.” Games is professor of history at Georgetown University and the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington in 2013–14.

Lawyers and clergymen constituted the most dynamic professions in post-Reformation England. Brooks considers their interactions and ideas in an age of “revolutionary” political and confessional conflict. Brooks is professor of history at Durham University and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for 2012–13.

Steve Hindle uses a 1572 murder case from the small town of Nantwich, in northwest England, to explore the nature of violence in the past and how historians attempt to measure it by sifting through archival records. Hindle is The Huntington's W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research. He was introduced to the audience by Steven Koblik, president of The Huntington.

Frances Dolan discusses how people in 17th-century England distinguished between credible and incredible stories in witchcraft trials. She also explains how today’s scholars evaluate surviving stories as historical evidence. Dolan is professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for 2011–12.

Histories of the Renaissance woman usually conclude that she was “chaste, silent, and obedient” (with the notable exception of Elizabeth I). Claire McEachern, professor of English at UCLA, discusses four extraordinary sisters—Mildred, Anne, Elizabeth, and Katherine Cooke—whose lives as intellectuals, reformers, wives, and mothers challenge the assumptions about was possible for women in the 16th century.

Halloween might seem a childish holiday, but it often has been at the center of cultural conflict, notes Nicholas Rogers, professor of history at York University in Toronto and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington. Rogers examines how Halloween has sparked contentious debate on many fronts: about the use of urban space, alternative religious practices, Latino identity, and more.

Historian Peter Mancall, director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, discusses his new book, "Henry Hudson’s Fatal Journey," about the tragic final voyage of the 17th-century Arctic explorer.