About

Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS) is an open access peer-reviewed international journal that promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion on issues concerning all aspects of early modern European culture. It provides a platform for international scholarly debate through the publication of outstanding work over a wide disciplinary spectrum: literature, language, art, history, politics, sociology, religion and cultural studies. JEMS is open to a range of research perspectives and methodological orientations and encourages studies that develop understanding of the major problematic areas relating to the European Renaissance.

ISSN 2279-7149 (online)

   

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NEW CALL FOR PAPERS: VOL. 14 - 2025

The Politics of Book History: Then and Now

Edited by Zachary Lesser and Georgina Wilson

Volume 14 of the Journal of Early Modern Studies intervenes at a crucial moment when book historians are increasingly alert to the political structures which have shaped the emergence of our field. As with any field of study, the initial focuses of book history reflected the priorities of scholars at a given moment, and generated intellectual models with specific assumptions and hierarchies built into their scope. Recent work from feminist, critical race, postcolonial, and queer perspectives has critiqued the history of the discipline for its emphasis on canonical authors, its Anglo- or Euro-centric geography, and its implied beliefs about the book trade, readership, and literacy, among other things....  Read More  PDF

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CALL FOR PAPERS: VOL. 13 - 2024

Subaltern Writing and Popular Memory in the Early Modern World

Edited by Antonio Castillo Gómez and Miguel Martínez

Volume 13 of the Journal of Early Modern Studies seeks to interrogate how common men and women used different modes of writing to keep, shape, and contest social memory in the early modern world. Studies on popular senses of the past, such as Andy Wood’s, have brought to light the complex interrelation between custom, collective memory, and social struggle. A usable past was key in conflicts over economic and political resources in the present. As the systematic regulation of access to reading and writing (Guillory), literacy was the basis for persistent forms of exclusion—particularly when gender and racial regimes of inequality intersected with class. But literacy was also a site of contestation....  Read More  PDF

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