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The Center for Early Modern History promotes scholarly inquiry into the interchange of peoples, goods, and ideas that marks the first era of global contacts, ca. 1300-1800. Since its founding, the Center has drawn on the talents of faculty and students from a variety of disciplines, with interests in many parts of the world, for a vibrant program of intellectual exchange.

Publications

New from CEMH

The center is happy to announce the publication of Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World, edited by Marguerite Ragnow and William D. Phillips. This volume, the third in the Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History series, brings together eight original essays that study complex religious interactions from a broad range of communities around the world.

Dramatic events involving religious leaders and their more zealous followers have intruded on the world’s stage in recent decades, bringing renewed attention to religion as a significant factor in modern society. This collection of essays, drawn from a conference inspired by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, explores religious conflict and accommodation in various places around the world in the early modern period. The individual studies, though focused on an earlier time, illuminate the challenges facing the early twenty-first-century world, some of which may be hauntingly familiar.

Professor James Tracy discusses the battle between Christianity and Islam in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean basin, what he calls the background war of the early modern period. His essay reminds us that these two groups of believers were long-standing enemies, both sides preoccupied with challenges to their own faith.

The relationship between religion and politics played out much differently in other parts of the early modern world and the studies in this volume reflect a complexity and diversity of experience that ranges from the conflicts within Christianity during the French Wars of Religion to the Mughal emperor Akbar’s attempts to forge mutual understanding among the varied cultures under his rule to the struggles between the Spanish and Chinese for supremacy in the Philippines. Religious conflict has long been a worldwide issue, as these essays attest, yet as they also demonstrate, accommodation was not only possible, it was often quite successful.

To order Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World, or any other CEMH title, visit our How to Order page.

New from Ming Studies

The Center is delighted to announce the publication of Jaret Weisfogel's book A Late Ming Vision for Local Community: Ritual, Law and Social Ferment in the Proposals of Guan Zhidao. It is the sixth title in the Ming Studies Research Series, published by the Society for Ming Studies and distributed by the Center for Early Modern History.

Guan Zhidao (1536-1608) was a Confucian thinker who was anxious to counter the moral confusion and social decay that accompanied the profound commercialization and urbanization occurring around the end of the Ming Dynasty. As Weisfogel puts it, "Guan Zhidao's world was falling apart." Guan Zhidao's response to this crisis was put forward in the form of "Proposals for Following the Men of Former Times to Safeguard Customs." Weisfogel's book is the first major scholarly study of Guan Zhidao and the only account in English of a late Ming thinker who has received less attention than many better-known contemporaries.

A promising young scholar in the field of Chinese intellectual history, Jaret Weisfogel wrote this book as a doctoral student at Columbia University. Tragically, he died of an illness shortly after its completion. Publication of this edited version was made possible by the support of the Weisfogel family and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Columbia University.

To order A Late Ming Vision for Local Community: Ritual, Law, and Social Ferment in the Proposals of Guan Zhidao, or any other CEMH title, visit our How to Order page.

New from CEMH in 2009

The Center is pleased to announce the publication of The Arab Lands in the Ottoman Era, edited by Jane Hathaway (Ohio State University). Wide in both geographic and chronological scope, this second volume of the Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History brings together eleven original studies in political, economic, social, religious, and even musical history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

The essays in this collection fit well into the most interesting developments in scholarship on the Arab lands in the Ottoman era because they recognize the impact of the empire on its component parts, an impact which varied greatly in time and space, but which was nonetheless real and significant. In keeping with scholarly trends in Ottoman history, the essays together complicate Ottoman history, making the Ottoman story richer, and tying it in different ways to world history. Few scholars are better suited than Jane Hathaway to organize and introduce a collection such as this one.

                                —Amy Singer, Tel Aviv University

To order The Arab Lands in the Ottoman Era, or any other CEMH title, visit our How to Order page.

Program Overview

The Center for Early Modern History (CEMH), established nearly a quarter-century ago at the University of Minnesota, is a major center for the interdisciplinary study of the early modern world from a comparative perspective. The Publications program is a natural outgrowth of CEMH's mission to promote research, collaboration, and publication in the field.

CEMH Titles

Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History publishes collections on a wide variety of early modern topics. Drawing upon the scholarship coming out of the Center’s conference series, these volumes consider the early modern world from a comparative or world history perspective. Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History continues the work of the earlier series Studies in Comparative Early Modern History, published by Cambridge University Press between 1993 and 2004.

Ming Studies Research Series, published by the Society for Ming Studies and distributed by the Center for Early Modern History, began in 1984 with the publication of Keith Hazelton’s Synchronic Chinese-Western Calendar. Since that time the series has published both reference works and scholarship that have become essential resources for the Ming studies scholar.

The Journal of Early Modern History, published by Brill, is closely affiliated with CEMH and maintains editorial offices at the Center. The journal offers peer-reviewed explorations of European, Asian, and American cultures in the early modern world, both through comparative studies and by the grouping of studies or book reviews on a particular theme.

 

Contact Information

Edward L. Farmer
Director of Publications
Phone: 612.624.7301
Email: efarmer@umn.edu

Jeff Hartman
Center Administrator
Phone: 612.625.0768
Email: cemhpubs@umn.edu

Publications Office
Center for Early Modern History
1030 Heller Hall
271 - 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Fax: 612.624.9813