Who am I?
I teach history at The Ohio State University. This project began when I listened in 1976 to a radio broadcast in which Jack Eddy, a solar physicist, speculated that a notable absence of sunspots in the period 1645-1715 contributed to the “Little Ice Age”: the longest and most severe episode of global cooling recorded in the last 12,000 years. The Little Ice Age coincided with a wave of wars and revolution around the Northern Hemisphere, from the overthrow of the Ming dynasty in China to the beheading of Charles I in England. I spent the next 35 years exploring how the connections between natural and human events created a fatal synergy that produced human mortality on a scale seldom seen before – and never since.
Geoffrey's book list on the 17th Century
Discover why each book is one of Geoffrey's favorite books.
Why did Geoffrey love this book?
We know more about “ordinary people” from the 17th century than any previous period. Some wrote their autobiographies; others left life histories written by friends or family; others still appeared in multiple sources that historians can link to reconstitute their existence. Most of the surviving evidence concerns males, but Jonathan Spence’s book about a region in northwest China examines the impact of floods, plagues, famines, banditry, and heavy taxation on women as well as men. One of those women was an unhappy wife – we don’t even know her name – who ran away from her husband with her lover but reluctantly returned when abandoned by the lover. Her husband then murdered her. Woman Wang thus epitomized the verdict of her English contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, that life in the 17th century was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The Death of Woman Wang
Why should I read it?
1 author picked The Death of Woman Wang as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
What is this book about?
"Spence shows himself at once historian, detective, and artist. . . . He makes history howl." (The New Republic)
Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T'an-ch'eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at…