 Hey there, my name is Adam McCallan and I am an associate professor of English at Tulane And I am trying to make a video today to talk about my new book Fortification and its disc intense from Shakespeare to Milton now I've tried to make this video about 17 times and each time it comes out so boring that I can barely even listen to it myself So I decided I would just do it out here in my makeshift outdoor teaching area, which is my sort of medieval camp and just talk about Why I wrote it. So the first question I was asked to address was how I got this idea Well, I got this idea because I love the Renaissance I love the 14 15 16th and 17th centuries and everything about them until I've got my My fire and blood Targaryen shirt on even and I didn't even plan it that way I love going to old cities in Europe and the Americas and just looking at them and I became fascinated with these new Fortifications that were being built in the age of fire weapons at the time when The medieval city walls were supposedly being torn down to make way for modern cities They started indeed building bigger more monstrous more expensive walls than ever before And I thought wow these things were changing everything about the Renaissance How did they affect the literature? I bet if I looked hard enough I will find out how and fortification and its discontents From Shakespeare to Milton is the result The next question is what were the challenges the challenges as in everything else in life The hardest thing is also the thing that makes it possible. No one else is working in this field There aren't any literary scholars who can talk much about fortifications of the Renaissance or really military culture is beyond the basics there's me and a handful of other folks are doing it and So I was writing this largely without being able to consult with other smart people preferably smarter people you know So it's it's exciting to be out there at the forefront of knowledge, but it's also lonely and that was a challenge Next question is What influence do you think it will have? Well? Now that is a good question Literary scholarship tends to make a splash over the long haul the first book I wrote on soldier poets in the age of Shakespeare Elizabethan soldier poets. So the real title is English Mercury's if you want to see if it's available at your local bookstore The it first it made absolutely no impression on anyone except for a few reviewers One of whom thought it would be cool to make fun of my picture So it was actually not very influential In fact, it was the opposite of that in the first couple years within 10 years, however Two other scholars wrote books on soldier poets in Renaissance France and Renaissance Spain. So and they directly cited my book as its influence So that book started a conversation about soldier poets and there had been no conversation about soldier poets before So I would say that that book was extremely influential even though at first it didn't seem so fortifications and it's discontents From Shakespeare to Milton is going to be more influential I suspect because the fact is if you like the Renaissance and you like visiting cities That were built in the 16th and 17th centuries You're going to notice these extraordinarily elaborate fortification systems that they had to tear down suburbs to build that took all the resources of kings to build You're going to ask yourself. What are these things? Why did they build them? How did this affect people's lives? If you ask questions like that and go to the library, you'll find this book Which does not answer all those questions, but it begins to frame the questions that will help you Ask even smarter questions and that's how knowledge gets built. So I suspect this book will be extremely influential over the long haul I was what is next for me after this one? Well, every book you write builds on the one before so this book is Built on what was left over from English Mercury's I left a lot out of this book Because I I wanted to get it out there and I also don't like reading particularly long books so in this book I decided to Not talk about the effort to rebuild Hadrian's wall, which is the wall between England and Scotland in 1587 which is a wacky idea, but they thought it was a good idea And the reason why I decided to leave it out, which I just is that it seemed to me more appropriate as the beginning of a larger book on waning sovereignty in early modern England the claim of which is essentially that Smart people like Shakespeare and Spencer recognized that the world they lived in was getting too big and too complicated For kings to manage and they could not think of an alternative and so they were a little scared I'll let you know how it goes Maybe you'll be out in ten years And the last question is if I could sum up fortification in this discontents in one sentence. What would that sentence be? Hmm, that's always a tricky question, but I will do my best shooting from the hip It is about a time when People in Europe and the Americas The mayor European colonies in the Americas were being asked to sacrifice Just about everything in the interests of building safer cities Cities that could resist high-powered armies carrying high-powered fire weapons They were asked to sacrifice everything and change everything and smart people like Shakespeare and Spencer and Winthrop Champlain were asking themselves Is this really necessary? What do we lose in the process? Though the book examines the literature the period to try to answer those questions now, hopefully I've been able to talk about Fortification and its discontents from Shakespeare to Milton in a way that makes you want to rush out to the bookstore and buy the remaining 20 copies available if you're lucky. No, I'm joking. You can get it at Amazon. No doubt But anyway, I hope you enjoy the book. It was fun writing it. It is fun creating knowledge It is lonely creating knowledge and so it is always a great time to be able to talk about your work with interested people Like you. Thank you very much