Books like Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism — picked by fans

This older book remains one of my favorites because it challenges a number of easy assumptions about queenship, mental illness, and political strategy. Juana was the third child of Isabella and Ferdinand, trained and educated to marry for diplomatic alliance, but never expected to reign in her own right. Yet early modern dynastic strategy was at the mercy of mortality and fertility, and Juana eventually became the unlikely monarch of Spain and the mother of the powerful line of Habsburg kings of Spain. Juana is typically dismissed as mentally unstable following the death of her husband. This book reexamines this stereotype, arguing that her eccentric behavior may have been strategic given the limitations placed upon her by her family, and deployed intentionally to protect herself and her children’s inheritance.

Published way back in 1554, this revolutionary novel is irreverent, amusing, and gloriously critical of the hypocrisy of 16th century Spanish society and, by extension, our own times. The main character is a destitute scoundrel named Lazarillo who seeks to better his fortunes while in the service of a brutal priest and host of other unseemly characters. By creating an anti-hero who is a witty misfit and outcast, and by portraying Spanish society as morally bankrupt, the author earned the wrath of the Spanish monarchy – which banned the novel – and the Catholic Church, which placed it on its Index of forbidden literature. My novel is also on the Church’s list of forbidden books, so I feel a special kinship with the unnamed author of this groundbreaking work.    

No list of books about early modern Spain would be complete without something on the infamous Spanish Inquisition. Historians are well aware that Inquisition trials were complex, full of coercion and secrecy, but also sometimes appropriated by individuals for their own purposes. This is an extremely accessible introduction to the Spanish Inquisition, told through “autobiographies” of six prisoners, such as Islamic and Jewish converts, a prophet, and a transgender individual. The collection includes transcriptions of the actual trials, plus brief analyses that guide readers through religious, social, gender, and political themes.

This book centers the experience of global empire on the ordinary women left behind in northwest Spain. In many parts of the peninsula, the empire was felt most acutely and at the day-to-day level through absence: Galicia, in particular, had extremely high levels of male migration, creating communities dominated by women. Drawing upon court cases, marriage contracts, testaments, and Inquisition records, Allyson Poska shows how peasant women seized legal and social power in the sometimes-permanent absence of their spouses, eschewing norms on sexuality, property, and family.

In the introduction, dated July 1978, Mattoso writes. … my purpose in writing this book was to discover what life was really like for the slaves in Brazil … This book is addressed to an audience of general readers. I have therefore felt free to dispense with the usual scholarly apparatus of extensive footnotes and bibliography … Its title … signals my intention to adopt the standpoint of the slaves themselves … to trace the various stages in the lives of the slaves as individuals and of the slave group as a community.

This book weaves together two strikingly different stories about slavery that are separated by centuries and hundreds of miles. Ballard's powerful and riveting book not only demonstrates how exploitation in the Americas transcends time and space, it also offers evidence of good deeds by everyday people to combat such lingering evil.

This book opened my eyes to the effectiveness and consistency of the Republicans elected to Congress in 1860 in advancing their antislavery agenda, for example, by immediately abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and requiring any new states to prohibit slavery in their Constitutions.

This book describes the earnestness with which these members of the Senate and House pursued their antislavery agenda over the vehement objections of the Democrats from states that had remained in the Union. At the same time, they were quite sensitive to the defects in the original Constitution that had permitted slavery within any of the original 13 states that had retained it. So, they amended the Constitution not once but three times to put an end to slavery and establish political equality in the United States. 

In 2007, I was writing a biography of Liverpool merchant William Davenport, who had made his fortune via the slave trade.

As I researched Davenport’s dry ledgers and letterbooks, I was fortunate to have Marcus Rediker’s exceptional The Slave Ship to hand. Pushing back against the “violence of abstraction” inherent to the accounts of slavers like Davenport, Rediker’s book exposed the horrors of the Middle Passage in unflinching detail.

His book is also filled with powerful individual stories of captives, captains, and crewmen that demonstrated to me the importance of writing “human histories” of the slave trade.

What does it mean to be free—and how can you prove that you are? Millward’s utterly engrossing book demonstrates how significant Black women’s reproductive sexuality was to their pursuit of freedom. Following the formal end of US participation in the international slave trade in 1808, white enslavers placed unprecedented demands on enslaved Black women to bear more children. Because the laws defined the child according to the mother’s free or unfree status, enslaved women literally birthed the property of white enslavers. But what if a currently enslaved person proved that the womb from which they entered the world belonged to a free person? Millward shows how Black women and their descendants paved their own pathways to freedom.

Despite the vast literature on the transatlantic slave trade, the role of sailors aboard slave ships has remained unexplored. This book fills that gap by examining every aspect of their working lives, from their reasons for signing on a slaving vessel to their experiences in the Caribbean and the American South after their human cargoes had been sold. It explores how they interacted with men and women of African origin at their ports of call, from the Africans they traded with, to the slaves and ex-slaves they mingled within the port cities of the Americas. Most importantly, it questions their interactions with the captive Africans they were transporting during the dread middle passage, arguing that their work encompassed the commoditisation of these people ready for sale.