Politics & Culture in Early Modern Europe
I went to Cambridge to do history of political thought. And my dissertation fit right into that category. But while I was there I got increasingly interested in the way ideas that might have been rigorously presented by philosophers got re-presented, sometimes systematically, sometimes not, by artists, writers and composers. Both, the self-consciously and the unself-consciously crafted tell us something about time and place. I started with Monteverdi’s Venice—Venice was the location of one of a number of failed dissertation topics from my first year in Cambridge, but I remembered some of the things I read when sat down one night in my student digs to listen to Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. I was auditing Iain Fenlon’s lectures on Monteverdi at the Music Faculty that term and eventually we wrote a short book about some of the philosophical and political ideas bandied about in the circle of Monteverdi’s librettist. This book got me deeper into Venetian history, as I explored a weird story about friendship that was contemporary with Monteverdi’s operatic work but also speaking deeply to political themes. And then I also thought more about the ongoing relationship between opera and politics in another of Italy’s surviving seventeenth-century republics, that of Lucca. I had an idea to do a third article on an exactly contemporary crisis of aristocratic representation in the other republic, Genova, but I never got around to it. I thought of expanding from Venice to write about stoicism in cultural production across Europe and set out some general ideas in two review articles, one more focused on statecraft and the other on culture. Two articles later from this particular vision one on Hercules at the Crossroads for Marc Fumaroli’s Festschrift and another on the type of “the Man of Learning.” It had, by then, found in Peiresc its hero.
***
The Song of the Soul: Understanding "Poppea". Royal Musical Association (with Iain Fenlon), 1992
Political Writings: Joseph Priestley. Cambridge University Press, 1993
Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press (1994).
“Calderón, Opera, and Baroque Aesthetics,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 6 (1994), 175-79
“Statecraft and Culture in Early Modern Europe,” Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 161-73
“Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 57 (1996), 725-42
“The ‘Man of Learning’ Defended: Seventeenth-Century Biographies of Scholars and an Early Modern Ideal of Excellence,” Representations of the Self from Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. P. Coleman, J. Kowalik, J. Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 39-62
“Stoics Who Sing: Lessons in Citizenship from Early Modern Lucca,” The Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 313-39
“Friendship and Conversation in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), 1-31
“Hercules at the Crossroads in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Neo-Stoicism between Aristocratic and Commercial Society,” République des Lettres, Republique des Arts, ed. Colette Nativel (Geneva: Drosz, 2008), 167-92