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Jonathan Spangler’s study of the Lorraine dynasty in France (and occasionally outside the kingdom) is an ambitious undertaking.
If one surveys post-1989 scholarship of the GDR, one puzzle cannot but catch the eye. Totalitarianism theory, nourished by the wider political climate, has been in rude health, and yet, study after study has exposed its inadequacies.
It has been a long time.
Professor Sir John Elliott is surely the most distinguished Anglophone historian of early modern Spain and its empire; and his mastery of that topic has enabled him to make an equally distinguished contribution to our understanding of Europe as a whole between the 15th and 18th centuries.
What is a ‘Companion’ for?
Another biography of Catherine the Great? Simon Dixon locates his new book somewhere between Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great by Isabel de Madariaga (1), which he terms ‘the most important (and appropriately weighty) study of Catherine’s reign in any language,’ and John T.
Imre Nagy is undoubtedly one of the towering figures in 20th-century Hungary, having had a significant impact on the current of history twice within his lifetime and again 31 years after his death.
The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe is a collection of papers which originated in a 2005 conference at the University of Miami. The women examined in the essays include queens regnant, consorts and various regents all of whom exercised power either in their own right or through their marital or familial ties.
It is a bold historian who, in the 21st century, still advertises, even as subtitle, a history of ‘Germanic Europe’ in the late Middle Ages. Evidently alarm bells were sounding in the author’s own ears, as he uses his first page (p. viii) to insist that ‘this book does not revive discredited racist notions based upon a supposedly pristine Germanic antiquity’. And nor does it.
The first decades of British rule in Cyprus have so far received by far too little academic interest. Ever since the fourth volume of George Hill’s epic A History of Cyprus was published in 1952, few books have added in depth analysis and new insights on this period.