100 books like Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism

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.

I think everyone should read at least one slave narrative, and Jacobs’s is a gem of both exquisite storytelling and powerful testimony.

Jacobs tells her own story but also the story of a whole town and a whole society, and she paints a devastating portrait of the rot at the heart of the Old South, the sham that slave power made of all human relations that came into contact with it.

James Hynes’ novel focuses on Jacob, nicknamed “Sparrow”, who’s a slave in a brothel in New Carthage at the end of the Roman Empire. Yum!

Although the book itself is too brutal for my taste, as it goes through development, perhaps they could add a thread of lightness, especially in the lives and friendships Sparrow develops with many of the “Wolves” (prostitutes).
As a series, this could be a Gladiator-meets-Harlots, with a darkness and depth that would give us insight into the lowest rung of the Roman Empire, with the possibility of a dozen sub-stories to fill out as we trod through this dark time.

This book really helped me to look beyond slave trading merchants’ papers to think about the lived realities of the slave trade for those merchants’ victims.

Smallwood follows enslaved people from their initial sale on the African coast, aboard the slave ships, and then through their sale and seasoning in the English Americas—a model that brilliantly exposes the multi-staged way that captive Africans were commodified within the slave trade.

Saltwater Slavery also details the experiences of enslaved people within the trade, especially the mental and physical trauma that they suffered aboard the slave ships. 

I couldn’t put down the story of Isabel, a fictional Black teenager who lived through the American Revolution in New York City.

The book covers everything from the assassination plot against George Washington to the fire that burned much of the city in September 1776, along with the everyday injustices of eighteenth-century slavery. The book gives the reader a true feel for the Black experience in Revolutionary New York.

Each chapter starts with an excerpt from a real Revolutionary document. It’s geared at young adult readers, but this is not your grandmother’s Johnny Tremain. I loved this book and the remainder of the trilogy that followed it.

In researching my graphic novel, I read many comics on slavery.

This atmospheric account of enslaved Virginians in 1831 is a hard read, but it made a great impression on me.

Powerfully, Baker uses the verbatim testimony from the confession of Nat Turner as he awaited execution in jail. The narrative does not pull its punches; in one scene, Turner recounts the murder of a plantation owner's baby. It is shocking, but Baker skillfully puts this in the context of the brutality of the lived experience of the enslaved, their own children being routinely abducted and sold by their masters.

The comic is a powerful slave narrative in this sparse and mostly wordless retelling of America’s most famous slave revolt.