NB&P: Jennifer J. Davis - Bad Subjects

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Historian Jennifer J. Davis about her new book Bad Subjects: Libertine Lives in the French Atlantic 1619-1814 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). In this book that spans continents, Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. The libertine life was not merely a subject for fiction nor a topos against which to play out potential revolutions. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behaviors, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impossible for the accused to contest. The research in Bad Subjects provides a framework for analysis of libertinage as a set of anti-authoritarian practices and discourses that circulated among the peoples of France and the Atlantic World, ultimately providing a compelling blueprint for alternative social and economic order in the Revolutionary period.