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This book opens a window on a forgotten and glorious time—the life of colonial Mexico. Here is the color of that era in a mosaic of life—a worldly ambitious archbishop, a beautiful nun-poetess, a Creole scholar torn between faith and scientific learning, poetasters, inquisitors—and in the background, the first glimmers of Mexican nationalism. Baroque in its intricate pattern of caste and custom, rich with silver pouring from its mines, the feudal society of Old Mexico lives in this account of a vanished time.

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.
 
Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, financiers, officials, surgeons, notaries, ship captains, and others began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the world of slave trading used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their calculations with the aim of protecting their financial interests rather than of caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.

A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, it shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

Traces how conscience—inner moral conviction—came to shape public life, fueling martyrdom, free speech, and political revolts

Bold Conscience: Luther to Shakespeare to Milton is a sweeping, original study of how conscience became one of the most powerful ideas in early modern England. Tracing the emergence of what Joshua R. Held calls the “bold conscience,” the book shows how inner moral conviction moved from the realm of private guilt to public action, fueling debates about authority, obedience, free speech, and resistance. By placing conscience at the center of literary, religious, and political conflict, Bold Conscience reveals a vital intellectual throughline linking the Reformation to the birth of modern ideas of liberty and toleration.

The book unfolds chronologically, beginning with Martin Luther and Henry VIII and moving through Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry VIII, John Donne’s court sermons, and John Milton’s polemical and poetic works, including Areopagitica and Paradise Lost. Each chapter combines close literary reading with historical and theological analysis, showing how conscience operates across genres—drama, sermon, pamphlet, and epic poetry. Joshua R. Held is a distinguished scholar of early modern literature whose work bridges literary criticism, intellectual history, and religious studies, bringing clarity and narrative energy to complex debates.

Bold Conscience will appeal to scholars and students of early modern literature, Shakespeare, Milton, and Reformation history, as well as readers interested in the origins of religious freedom and political dissent. It will also engage anyone concerned with how moral conviction shapes public life then and now.

Enlightenment-era writers had not yet come to take technology for granted, but nonetheless were—as we are today—both attracted to and repelled by its potential. This volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence, examining technology’s influence on Enlightenment British literature, as well as the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology. Offering a counterbalance to the abundance of studies on literature and science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, this volume’s focus encompasses approaches to literary history that help us understand technologies like the steam engine and the telegraph along with representations of technology in literature such as the “political machine.” Contributors ultimately show how literature across genres provided important sites for Enlightenment readers to recognize themselves as “chimeras”—“hybrids of machine and organism”—and to explore the modern self as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”