Spring 2024 Reading List

I have been reading! I intend to read more! So much writing and so much teaching over the past few years, I’ve had very little time for general reading, as opposed to targeted reading, trying to find the answer to some very specific question in as little time as possible. That’s not really reading, so I’m trying to get back into the “practice”.  We have our Salem’s Centuries manuscript in now, and the semester is winding down, so I’ve ordered up a stack of books and am digging in. If you’re familiar with my reading lists you know there’s never a lot of fiction: novels cannot retain my attention unless I’m on a plane. Otherwise, I put them back in the stack and generally forget about them. I do have one novel on this list, Richard Harris’s Act of Oblivion, which is about the manhunt for two regicides in seventeenth-century New England, a topic I can’t resist. I haven’t started it yet, and I’ll be thrilled if I finish it. I like the idea of reading novels and I hope to return to fiction at some point, but that time is not now; I’m just too hungry for information, even when reading for pleasure. Most of these books are adjacent to some of my scholarly interests, but not spot-on, although I could have written this first one and wish I did!

This first batch of books (above) could be generally classified as early modern cultural history and I’m kidding, I certainly could not have written Jill Burke’s great book about beauty culture in Renaissance Italy. I included a few recipes for cosmetics in my book, The Practical Renaissance, and made both a mental and actual note (in one of my writing notebooks) to dig a little deeper into that realm but then forgot all about it. Burke’s book is both scholarly and accessible and if you’re interested in learning more about her topic check out the Wellcome Collection’s “Cult of Beauty” exhibit. Ulinka Rublack is another early modern historian whom I admire and her latest work is on the shifting patronage environment in that era, through the perspective of Albrecht Durer’s career. Like Burke, Rublack really opens what has been/could be a much more contained “world”.  Marcy Norton’s The Tame and the Wild. People and Animals after 1492 is also global in its orientation and focused on a topic which I explore in several of my courses (now that I think about it, ALL of my courses): how Europeans viewed the New World/ how the New World impacted the Old. In this case, all about animals. Spycraft is not quite out yet, but soon, and I really want to read it so I put it on this list. I just finished The Wisest Fool, a very engaging biography of King James I and VI, as I wanted to be all ready for the debut of Mary & George this week! Victoria Finlay’s Fabric: the Hidden History of the Material World, is one of those sweeping “commodity histories” which are always on my lists—I haven’t read this yet, but I enjoyed her last book on color.

The last three books are a bit more local: as noted above, Act of Oblivion is historical fiction, largely set in New England, Flee North is about the African-American shoemaker//abolitionist/author/ liberator Thomas Smallwood, and A House Restored is about the restoration of a Massachusetts house.  Flee North is the only book on this list with any sort of Salem connection: Smallwood worked with Charles Torrey, former minister at the Howard Street Church in Salem, to organze escapes of enslaved men and women from the Washington-Baltimore region. I believe that Lee McColgan, whose restoration of the first-period Loring House in Pembroke, Massachusetts is detailed in A House Restored, is going to be one of the speakers at Historic Salem’s annual meeting next month, so I will be reading his soon-to-be released book in advance.