Enfilade

From Penn Press:

Nicholas Wood, Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1512828320, $45.

Tenacious activism by Quakers, African Americans, and antislavery evangelicals made antislavery central to the American Revolution.

In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view that slavery was a sinful form of oppression that would provoke God’s wrath against slaveholding societies. These principles were first advanced by a handful of Quakers and Puritans as early as the 1600s, but they did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century. Quakers embraced antislavery theology during the French and Indian War, which they interpreted as divine chastisement for the sin of colonial slavery. Citing the prophet Isaiah, they pledged to please the Lord by letting the oppressed go free.

Antislavery theology became even more prominent during the American Revolution. When Parliament provoked an imperial crisis in the 1760s, abolitionists argued it was further evidence of God’s anger over slavery. The outbreak of war in 1775 made these arguments increasingly persuasive. Let the Oppressed Go Free demonstrates that antislavery activism during the Revolution by Quakers, African Americans, and evangelical patriots was more sophisticated and influential than historians have recognized. The northern states that began abolishing slavery during the Revolution did so in response to tenacious agitation and generally described their actions as designed to earn God’s blessing.

Let the Oppressed Go Free challenges many common assumptions about abolitionism and the American Revolution. Wood demonstrates that religion remained central to abolitionism rather than being displaced by ‘secular’ arguments about natural rights. And whereas some have argued that the Revolutionary War hindered antislavery progress and fueled racism, Wood shows that the war accelerated reform.

Nicholas P. Wood is Associate Professor of History at Spring Hill College.

From Penn Press:

John Craig Hammond, The Centrality of Slavery: Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1512828429, $45. Early American Studies Series.

How French and American colonizers created systems of enslavement in the Middle Mississippi Valley.

The Centrality of Slavery examines how French and American colonizers used the powers of various imperial regimes to create slave societies in present-day Missouri and Illinois from the 1720s through the 1820s. The first book-length study of slavery and empire in both Illinois and Missouri, it begins with the origins of Native American and African American enslavement in the region. It then traces how successive French, Spanish, British, and American regimes shaped the development of slavery over the course of a century, examines the significance of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery in Illinois, and then analyzes the diverging histories of slavery in Illinois and Missouri in the early 1800s. The book concludes with an analysis of the Missouri Crisis and the compromise of 1820, along with the Middle Mississippi Valley’s significance in the road towards disunion and civil war in the late 1850s. More broadly, The Centrality of Slavery argues that the Middle Mississippi Valley sat astride the crossroads of imperial North America. The practices of empire and enslavement forged and fought over there exerted an outsized influence on the history of slavery in North America and the United States. Rather than treating the region’s eighteenth-century past as a prologue to the rise of the United States, John Craig Hammond analyzes the colonial history of the region on its own terms, through the European colonizers, American settlers, and enslaved people of Indigenous and African descent who shaped the development of slavery in the Middle Mississippi Valley.

John Craig Hammond is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University, New Kensington.

From Penn Press:

John Blanton, The Household War: Property, Personhood, and the Domestication of Anglo-American Slavery, 1547–1729 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1512828306, $55.

A bold reinterpretation of perennial debates over the origins and development of slavery in colonial English North America.

The Household War offers a bold reinterpretation of perennial debates over the origins and development of slavery in colonial English North America. John N. Blanton argues that the law and practice of slavery in the empire’s earliest American colonies were shaped by a tension between two competing definitions of the institution. One strand of thought, war-slavery ideology, claimed that the power of life and death transformed war captives into chattel slaves. The power to kill defined both war and slavery. But bringing war captives into enslavers’ private households was a dangerous proposition, and so a parallel ‘domestication’ ideology emerged calling for limitations on the power of enslavers and the recognition of the enslaved as persons held to labor in a variant of English servitude.

The Household War examines how the tensions between war-slavery and domestication ideologies, along with crucial political, economic, and cultural differences, shaped the development of slavery in Virginia and Massachusetts from their founding through 1729, creating distinct systems of bondage in England’s flagship mainland colonies. In Massachusetts, where a diversified and dynamic commercial economy afforded opportunities for mobility and access to material resources, the dominance of domestication ideology enabled enslaved people to negotiate their bondage, attain free status, and build free Black households and communities. Virginia, however, committed itself to war-slavery early in its development, with enslaved people defined as articles of property subject to enslavers’ power of life and death while the extreme inequality of plantation society made free Black household formation nearly impossible. Long before American independence highlighted their differences, then, Massachusetts and Virginia were already on distinct trajectories, laying the foundation for a future house divided on the question of slavery.

John N. Blanton is Assistant Professor of History at City College of New York.

From Routledge:

Michael Hill and Jennifer Milam, eds., Death, Disease. and Mystical Experience in Early Modern Art (New York: Roultedge, 2025), 452 pages, ISBN: 978-9463729185 (hardback), $180 / ISBN: 978-1003693741 (ebook), $57.

Fear of death and disease preoccupied the European consciousness throughout the early modern era, becoming most acute at times of plague and epidemics. In these times of heightened anxieties, images of saints and protectors served to reassure the faithful of their religious protection against infection. Modes of visual engagement and devotional subject matter were coupled in new ways to reinforce the emotive impact of art works and to reaffirm the perceived reality of the afterlife. In this context, a visual language of mystical devotion, which overcame the limits of the body and even eroticised its suffering, could serve the needs of the desolate and the pained. In this series of essays focused on spiritual sensibilities in Renaissance art and its legacies, authors present original ideas about the themes of death, disease, and mystical experience, based primarily on the study of objects and their documented historical contexts. Methodologically wide-ranging in approach, the resulting volume provides novel insights into the interplay between suffering and art making in the Western world.

Michael Hill is Head of Art History and Theory at the National Art School in Sydney. His research focuses on the art and architecture of the Italian Baroque, Australian sculpture, and art historiography. Michael has also written with Peter Kohane a number of articles of the idea of decorum in architectural theory. Jennifer Milam is Professor of Art History and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) at the University of Newcastle in Waikato. Her research focuses on art, architecture, and garden design during the eighteenth century. Her publications include A Cultural History of Plants in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2022), Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press, 2022), Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (Brill, 2018), Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art (Scarecrow Press, 2011), Fragonard’s Playful Paintings. Visual Games in Rococo Art (University of Manchester Press, 2007), and Women, Art and The Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ashgate Press, 2003).

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Manipulating the Sacred — Jennifer Milam and Michael Hill
1  Mary as Model for Trecento Mourning — Judith Steinhoff
2  Pacem meam do vobis: Earthly Suffering and Celestial Redemption in the Trecento Fresco Program by Vitale da Bologna at Pomposa Abbey — Catherine Blake
3  Dying to be Born Again: Death in the Florentine Sacre Rappresentazioni — Nerida Newbigin
4  The Visual Transformations of St Anthony the Abbot: From Protector of the Sick to Victor over Sexual Desire — Charles Zika
5  Giovanni Cariani’s Woman Reclining in a Landscape: The Erotic Subverted — Carolyn Smyth
6  Touching Visions: Female Mystics Interacting with the Christ Child and with Mary — Patricia Simons
7  Queering Mysticism and the Lactating Virgin: The Madonna delle Grazie with Souls in Purgatory and its Audience of Nuns — Christina Neilson
8  Securing Heavenly Protection in Apocalyptic Times: A Series of Fresco Votives in the Oratory of San Giovanni Battista in Urbino — Di Haskell
9  The Long Goodbye: Resurrecting Rome’s Apostolic Past in The Final Embrace of Saints Peter and Paul — Barbara Wisch
10  The Beautiful Death of the Count of Orgaz: Andrés Núñez, El Greco, and the Making of a Counter Reformation Saint — Karen McCluskey
11  A Vessel to be Filled: Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul in Santa Maria del Popolo — Michael Hill
12  Lo Strascino’s Lamento and the Visual Culture of the French Pox around 1500 — John Gagne
13  Whiz King: Urination as Divination in Prints for Louis XIV — Mark de Vitis
14  David’s Saint Roch: Plague Painting in the Age of Enlightenment — Jennifer Milam
15  Blake’s Petworth House Last Judgment and Female Anatomy — Anthony Apesos
16  Cocteau’s London Elegy: Re-purposed Renaissance Imagery in a Twentieth-Century Crucifixion — Stephen Holford
Index