Panel painters in both the middle ages and the fifteenth century created works that evoke the luster of precious stones, the sheen of polished gold and silver, and the colorful radiance of stained glass. Yet their approaches to rendering these materials were markedly different. In The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100–1500 (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Marjolijn Bol explores some of the reasons behind this radical transformation by telling the history of the two oil painting techniques used to depict everything that glistens and glows—varnish and glaze.

For more than a century after his death, the fifteenth-century painter Jan van Eyck was widely credited with inventing varnish and oil paint, on account of his unique visual realism. Once this was revealed to be a myth, the verisimilitude of his work was attributed instead to a new translucent painting technique: the glaze. Today, most theories about how Van Eyck achieved this realism revolve around the idea that he was the first to discover or refine the glazing technique. Bol, however, argues that, rather than being a fifteenth-century refinement, varnishing and glazing began centuries before. Drawing from an extensive body of recipes, Dr. Bol pieces together how varnishes and glazes were first developed as part of the medieval art of material mimesis. Artisans embellished metalwork and wood with varnishes and glazes to imitate gold and gems; infused rock crystal with oil, resin, and colorants to imitate more precious minerals; and oiled parchment to transform it into the appearance of green glass. Likewise, medieval panel painters used varnishes and glazes to create the look of enamel, silk, and more.

The explorations of materials and their optical properties by these artists stimulated natural philosophers to come up with theories about transparent and translucent materials produced by the earth. Natural historians, influenced by medieval artists’ understanding of refraction and reflection, developed theories about gems, their creation, and their optical qualities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife of James’s nephew, the Dutch William III of Orange. Devoted to her husband, Mary would not accept the crown alone, and so William and Mary were crowned together, securing a smooth dynastic succession. The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada (Princeton UP, 2026) recounts the forgotten campaign that carried William and his army to English shores and led directly to James’s fall, bringing a revolutionary age vividly to life—and rewriting the history of Britain, Europe and the transatlantic world more widely.

In this bold work of revisionist history, Dr. Arthur der Weduwen tells the momentous story of the Dutch Armada, describing the immense risks and near failures of the last seaborne invasion of England—which occurred exactly one hundred years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The sixteen thousand Dutch troops who accompanied William were not on hand for moral support. They came with sword, musket and cannon. Dr. der Weduwen argues that the political revolution in Britain could not have been achieved without the willpower, might and resources of William and the Dutch nation, and explains why the Dutch Republic, a small state that celebrated peace and commerce above all else, would dare to undertake a reckless preemptive military strike on its more powerful neighbour.

Transforming our understanding of the Glorious Revolution and Britain’s ascendancy as a global powerhouse, The Last Invasion of England relies entirely on contemporary sources, many from leading protagonists who prepared and executed the invasion, evoking the historical realities of the women and men who lived during turbulent and uncertain times.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Professor Dr. Natalia Filatkina, Dr. Kerstin Roth and Research Associate Miriam Hinterholzer. All three work at the University of Hamburg in Germany on a long-term research project, called FSL Digital, that investigates language history, language attitudes and everyday communication in the context of multilingualism in early modern Europe.

As part of this project, today’s guests annotate and analyse multilingual foreign language textbooks from the 15th to 17th centuries.

Today’s guests discuss these textbooks, the research project, and what historical foreign language manuals can tell us about language attitudes and expectations of foreign language learning.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to write that flowed from the body?" Presence is her answer. The book draws from a vast array of archival and printed sources to illustrate the realities of women's physical experiences in early modern Europe, from eating, pregnancy, abortion, birth, nursing, sleeping, working, and dying. Maglaque intersperses her historical narrative with personal accounts, demonstrating the ways in which studying the past can impact our lives today. For anyone interested in women's history, the history of labor, early modern health and medicine, or simply the purpose and potential of historical study, Presence is the book to read.

Erin Maglaque is a historian of early modern Europe and gender. She teaches at Durham University and writes for publications including the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more here

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Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating the country’s still-flourishing and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh’s most emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and stone built cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland had by the 1820s become one of Europe’s great centres of Romanticism, due both to the majestic Highlands, and to Edinburgh itself as city of Romanticism. Additionally, Edinburgh developed as the main centre and hub for travellers drawn to Romantic Scotland through the work of James ‘Ossian’ Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott: visitors including Schinkel, Mozart, Verne, Turner, Haydn, amongst innumerable others.

Edinburgh: City of Romanticism (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Aonghus MacKechnie also provides a long-overdue counterbalance to the contrastingly much-examined and much-published topic of Enlightenment Edinburgh, showing how this and Romantic Edinburgh have comfortably co-existed. It examines how Edinburgh’s Romanticism was similarly driven by intellectuals, amongst whom were Enlightenment figures and artistically talented individuals, and it discusses the legacy of those who contributed to the Romantic cityscape of today; an architecture that provides much of the character of the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and of the city that countless tourists come daily to see.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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After mounting London’s outdoor pulpit known as St. Paul’s Cross on 8th December, 1588, Anthony Tyrrell found himself perched before a skeptical audience. He stood in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral to declare his recantation of Catholicism and return to England’s official Protestant Church. The trouble was he had been there before – in January of the same year, in fact – to do the same thing. On that occasion, however, he had shocked on-lookers by delivering an anti-Protestant tirade instead of his promised recantation. How could Tyrrell, a serial convert, who eventually changed church affiliation as many as ten times, overcome the doubts of his suspicious audience? Tyrrell and similar converts who made multiple conversions understandably aroused suspicions of hypocrisy that made the performative character of public recantation troublingly evident. Yet as Holly Pickett argues in The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), these performative elements are actually indispensable to any conversion, whether an individual’s first or fifteenth.

Serial converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of conversion.

Michael Shaw is a PhD student in Historical Theology at Union College, Belfast, and a Visiting Tutor at the Irish Baptist College. His research focuses on the thought of the Independent Puritan theologian Jeremiah Burroughs (1599–1646). His primary research interests lie in historical theology, particularly early modern Baptist and Congregationalist theology and ecclesiology. He also serves as the Associate Pastor at Strandtown Baptist Church, Belfast.

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Mexico City was America's largest city in the seventeenth century – a genuine metropolis. In American Metropolis: The Making of Mexico City (Cambridge University Press, 2026), Dr. Tatiana Seijas reveals a rich tapestry of stories about essential workers who remade and transformed the city during this period. Her narrative style carries readers to a unique place and time with residents from around the world who sold food, facilitated transportation, provided care, and valued the city's silver. Free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia, immigrants, and Native Americans pursued opportunities in a wealthy, yet deeply unequal environment, where working people claimed parts of the city for themselves. They carved out spaces to create new businesses and protect their livelihoods, altering the cityscape itself in the process. American Metropolis brings Mexico City to life from the perspective of the working people who transformed this early modern metropolis.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Drawing from local archives alongside national and international records, War and Governance in Scotland, 1543-1559: Destruction, Reconstruction and Reform (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Amy Blakeway argues that warfare was the defining feature of government and politics in Scotland for the two decades following the death of James V. It demonstrates that beyond the direct effects of invasion, the need to raise unprecedented taxation, as well as warfare’s secondary consequences, such as plague and price inflation, disrupted communities throughout Scotland, engendering enhanced social control. These effects endured for many years after the peace of 1550: new laws were passed to manage those who had collaborated with the invaders and taxation remained high.
The post-war decade was one of reconstruction, and it was this which drove religious reformation in 1559-60. The book shows that appreciating the scale of the crown’s ambition places the Scottish state’s development closer to that of its European counterparts.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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