Tag: Early Modern

Podcasts

The Resurrected Skeleton: An Interview

Wilt Idema’s new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) collects and translates variations of the tale of Master Zhuang in his encounter with a skeleton who comes back to life and wreaks all sorts of havoc in the lives of those around him. (In some versions, Zhuang … Continue reading The Resurrected Skeleton: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Spark from the Deep: An Interview

“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Turkel’s new book traces the emergence and inhabiting of an electric world through the span of human history and beyond. Embracing a “big history” approach to the archive, Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish … Continue reading Spark from the Deep: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Two Tibetan Studies Readers: An Interview

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a chronologically-organized set of essays that collectively introduce key topics and themes in Tibetan history from prehistory all the way through the … Continue reading Two Tibetan Studies Readers: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Imperial Illusions: An Interview

Kristina Kleutghen’s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press, 2015) guides readers into the scenic illusions of the Qing dynasty, focusing on pictorial illusions and the technologies that helped create and contextualize them in high Qing palaces, and especially under the … Continue reading Imperial Illusions: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

From Sight to Light: An Interview

A. Mark Smith’s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) suggests that the transition from ancient toward modern optics was accompanied by a turn in optical studies from a concern with explaining sight to a focus on light by optical scholars. In the course … Continue reading From Sight to Light: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Inventing Exoticism: An Interview

Benjamin Schmidt’s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch … Continue reading Inventing Exoticism: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Interview

Janet Gyatso’s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between medicine and religion in this context. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015) looks carefully at the “double movements” of medicine and religion from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries: … Continue reading Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Galileo’s Idol: An Interview

Nick Wilding’s new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of … Continue reading Galileo’s Idol: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Daughters of Alchemy: An Interview

Meredith K. Ray’s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks both at women’s practical … Continue reading Daughters of Alchemy: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Essays, Stories

The Elizabeths (A Working Paper)

On May 21 2015, I participated in a gathering at Princeton devoted to an experiment in “conjectural historiography”: imagining and memorializing historians who never existed, but should have. My contribution to this collective performance took the form of a memorial to four women, all named Elizabeth, all inspired by medical cases from The Casebooks Project, and all devoted to histories of and with basic material stuff. Here’s the text of … Continue reading The Elizabeths (A Working Paper)

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi