Brett Rushforth

@brettrushforth.bsky.social

4308 Followers 1426 Following

Early modern historian of the Atlantic world, Indigenous Americas, Western Africa, France. Editor, Huntington Library Quarterly. brettrushforth.com

Image of a time-weathered accoustic guitar.
Image of an antique map superimposed by the words: How not to write an introduction: cutting room floor, Beyond the Ocean, and frenchatlantic.substack.com
Poster announcing a conference at The Huntington titled "Disability and Care in Medieval and Early Modern France," to be held May 1-2, 2026. The poster features an image of early modern caregivers at a bedside.
On April 8–9, 2027, The Huntington will host a conference to explore the essential—yet often misunderstood—relationship between specialized academic scholarship and public-serving applied humanities work. Centered on the early modern period (ca. 1400 to 1800), the two-day event will highlight original research that has enabled, supported, or shaped specific public humanities or public interest projects. Like many cultural institutions, The Huntington is actively reflecting on its founding mission “to promote the public welfare,” including how to balance supporting deep, collections-based research with expanding access, engagement, and education for a broader public. This conference offers space to explore how such priorities work in concert. Beyond asserting that past events apply to our present moment, speakers will demonstrate how they have translated their own scholarship into active public engagement in the form of art, activism, media, site-specific encounters, digital projects, or other collaborative efforts. We anticipate submissions highlighting smaller-scale individual work as well as collaborations between scholars and performers, educators, activists, writers, artists, and public-serving institutions. Collaborative applications should be limited to two participants, due to funding restrictions. Proposals will be considered for inclusion in the conference, as well as for possible publication in the Huntington Library Quarterly’s new Early/Modern Connections section. For a successful recent example (but only one of many possible approaches), see Amanda Herbert and Kevin Dawson, “Black Aquatics: Early Modern Past, Present, and Future.”
Image of a museum sign with an artist's rendition of Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who escaped from George and Martha Washington in 1796. The words "I am free now" are visible beneath the image of a ship in Philadelphia's harbor.
Image of a book jacket for Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions by Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth.
An image with a red banner on top with the text, in white: HLQ | an early modern studies journal. Below is the text: 'The Mysteries of Apalache': Tall Tales and Lost Worlds in the Early American South. Owen Stanwood. ABSTRACT: In 1658, Charles de Rochefort published a description of Apalache, an Indigenous polity located in southeastern North America that had welcomed French and English refugees. Usually dismissed as a tall tale, Rochefort’s account has never been thoroughly analyzed. The story demonstrates how Europeans in the early period of colonization understood America as a place of wonder and inspiration. In addition, one can learn how information (and misinformation) traveled across the Atlantic. Rochefort probably patched his tale together from various oral sources, including some that came from Indigenous Americans. As a result, Rochefort revealed a lost world of stories and shows the myriad ways Europeans tried to make sense of America.
Cover of the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly. At the top in white letters against a crimson backdrop it reads HLQ | an early modern studies journal. Below is an image of the artwork BLACKout: Madonna and Child, by Ebony Iman Dallas.
Image of the cover and title page for a book titled Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions, by Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth. The cover features an 18th century watercolor of a harbor with three large ships and some smaller boats in the foreground and coastline with rising hills in the background.
A collection of eight historical images from nineteenth-century Britain illustrating a collection of essays titled "Paintings, Peepshows, and Porcupines: Exhibitions in London, 1763-1851"
Image of the cover of a book titled Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions, by Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth. The background image is an eighteenth-century ink and watercolor rendition of the harbor of Le Cap in modern Haiti, with three ships and one small boat foregrounded in the bay and a handful of buildings scattered on the shore in the background.
Cover image of the Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 87, number 2. "Paintings, Peepshows, and Porcupines: Exhibitions in London, 1763-1851." The journal's name and issue information are on an earth-colored banner above an artistic depiction of museum visitors.
Over an artistic depiction of museum visitors in nineteenth-century London is a white text box with the title of a journal article: "Special Issue Introduction: Exhibitions in London, 1763-1851," by Jordan Bear and Catherine Roach.
Cover image of the Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 87, number 2. "Paintings, Peepshows, and Porcupines: Exhibitions in London, 1763-1851." The journal's name and issue information are on an earth-colored banner above an artistic depiction of museum visitors.
Image from an early modern manuscript of a brown bear with a friendly face wearing an orang muzzle and standing on a green platform.
Image of a poster advertising a talk. Above an image of the Virgin of Le Puy the text reads "Brett Rushforth, Huntington Library Quarterly." Below the image is the title and talk abstract: "‘Diverse Progenies and Lineages’: Race before Race in Renaissance France. This talk discusses how French encounters with the people of West Africa and the Americas shaped French understandings of human nature and the meanings of human difference during the sixteenth century. It emphasizes the inconsistent, opportunistic, and contested nature of these ideas and reveals how non-Europeans themselves challenged claims of European superiority and sovereignty."
Image of a 17th century French board game with a circle divided into sixteen wedges, each representing a European sovereign.
Image of a 1503 manuscript superimposed by the title, author, and abstract of a Huntington Library Quarterly article: In 1973, Cambridge University Library purchased a scribal copy of a 1503 manuscript that intended to forge a lasting peace between the town of Cambridge and the University. This was not an original of the indenture (executed in counterpart) but a scribal copy prepared near the end of the century and presented as a new year’s gift to Roger, second Lord North (1535-1600). Beautifully written and bound with a fulsome dedication to the Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, the volume changed hands several times, beginning in 1941, when Bernard Halliday acquired it from the North family library. This essay traces the afterlife of the 1503 indenture and its later dedication to North, offering a fascinating glimpse into custodial preservation and sixteenth-century patronage.
Image of a seventeenth-century news letter superimposed by the title, author, and abstract of a Huntington Library Quarterly article: This article identifies John Flower of Whitwell, Rutlandshire, as the likely author of the series of newsletters sent to John, Viscount Scudamore, from 1629 to 1634. More significantly, it demonstrates that Flower’s main source of information was Emmanuel Giffard, a client of the Earl of Arundel, messenger for Sir Henry Vane (the elder), and from 1632 a gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber. Giffard, of Catholic background, was notorious for his outspoken skepticism about King Gustavus Adolphus’s leadership of the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War.
Image of John Donne superimposed by the title, author, and abstract of a Huntington Library Quarterly article: This article builds on the work of scholars such as Arthur Marotti and Ernest Sullivan, using manuscript contexts to inform readings of John Donne’s poetry. I present a study of what I call the “light sequence” of John Donne’s poems, an arrangement of three poems—“Breake of Day,” “The Sunne Rising,” and “A Lecture upon the Shadow”—that appears in seven manuscripts compiled during Donne’s lifetime, two of which have a tangential connection to Donne. These manuscripts contextualize interpretations for their contemporary readers that critics have yet to consider partly because the poems never appear in this arrangement in print editions. In particular, this light sequence supports a reading where Donne’s poems innovate on and surpass his classical model, Ovid’s Amores 1.13. More broadly, this case study demonstrates one way scholars might employ manuscript studies to bridge a gap between modern editorial practices and early modern readership.
Image of Mary, Jesus, and the Tree of Jesse superimposed by the title, author, and abstract of a Huntington Library Quarterly article: This article examines the paratexts of Christian Prayers and Meditations (1569), published by John Day. The study explores the sources of the book’s biblical border illustrations, identifying Thielman Kerver’s early books of hours as a primary influence. Under the patronage of Archbishop Matthew Parker, John Day and the engraver borrowed Catholic images from these and other sources, strategically drawing on Marian iconography to harness the cultural power of these images, not to revive Catholicism but to strengthen Protestant devotion. The juxtaposition of the Tree of Jesse and Elizabeth I’s portrait on the title page underscores this intent, positioning the queen as a new object of reverence. This analysis highlights the persistence and versatility of traditional images in shaping public devotion and consolidating the English church’s authority during the Reformation.
Image of lyrics to a seventeenth-century ballad superimposed by the title, author, and abstract of a Huntington Library Quarterly Article: This article studies colonial promotion in broadside ballads written in support of colonial endeavors or commissioned by joint-stock companies. Notably, these ballads target popular audiences, seeking investment from all members of society. The three case studies of ballads presented here (focusing on the Virginia colony, the Western Design, and the Darien scheme) demonstrate that colonial endeavors were pitched toward the common population, highlighting the importance placed on small-scale investments. Examining rhetoric and nontextual elements, such as musical tunes, this article analyzes the discourse of national and religious sympathies and the ballads’ emphasis on material wealth, which provided motivation for investment.
Image of Queen Mary II superimposed by the title, author, and abstract of a Huntington Library Quarterly Article: This article argues that in the immediate aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, the English public used existing historical narratives of English queenship to make sense of the possible positions that Mary II could occupy on the throne. A variety of comparisons in historical narratives from the 1680s connected Mary II and four women who either had either ruled or had strong claims to the English throne. While none of these women was a stable parallel for Mary II and her political situation, they provided the English public a variety of ways to imagine the possibility of female rule, which ultimately strengthened Mary’s sole claim to the throne and the claims of the regime as a whole.
Image of the cover of the Huntington Library Quarterly, volume 87, issue 1, featuring a cropped image of a crown.
HLQ publishes four types of essays: Research Articles (standard monographic essays based on original research and interpretation, usually 8,000–12,000 words, including notes) Sources (short critical editions of previously unpublished textual or visual sources, translated into English when applicable, with a full critical apparatus and interpretive intervention) Review Essays (state-of-the-field and methodological essays, usually 3,000–5,000 words, commissioned or submitted) Early/Modern Connections (interventions that explicitly link original early modern research to public humanities and the public interest)
Photo of a call for submissions. Text is as follows: The Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ) is a peer-reviewed journal featuring original research and new perspectives on the early modern period, broadly defined (c. 1400–1800). Its content reflects an early modern world that was connected and cosmopolitan, with diverse communities and cultures increasingly linked by the circulation of people, ideas, social practices, and material objects in ways that transcend disciplinary and geographic boundaries. We invite submissions that draw on the sources, methods, and theoretical frameworks of literature, art, history, science, medicine, material culture, music, performance, and critical cultural studies, with a preference for scholarship that is broadly legible across disciplines. HLQ’s historical focus on Britain and its American colonies has been dramatically expanded to embrace broader and more diverse fields of inquiry, including scholarship rooted in continental Europe, the African Diaspora, and the Indigenous Americas, as well as their intersections with Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds. HLQ invites article submissions for two featured issues that will mark the journal’s new direction. Submissions received before 15 January 2025 will be evaluated for the first of these issues, to be published in September 2025. Submissions received before 15 March 2025 will be evaluated for the second of these issues, to be published in December 2025. https://www.pennpress.org/journals/journal/huntington-library-quarterly/