Browse all Reviews
This well-documented book is the result of intensive archival research in masonic sources at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Grand Orient’s recently available ‘Russian Archives’, as well as numerous municipal and departmental repositories.
In a letter of March 1693, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz confessed to the ineffectiveness of his note-taking, sketching out a situation perhaps too familiar to many modern academics:
The study of fashion is acknowledged to require a composite methodology. Daniel Roche, in his influential The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘ancien régime’ (1) put forward five headings under which dress could be interrogated: the artefact, textiles, pictorial representation, social and economic sources, and philological sources.
As this book begins (p. 1), the author marvels how the art of the Wycliffite Bible, one of the most popular books in late medieval England, has not been studied systematically. The answer lies in the historiography of the Wycliffite Bible. Kennedy suggests that the ‘Shadow of the Reformation’ has created a binary view of Wycliffite Bibles, linking them to heresy and illegality.
Jisc’s Historical Texts brings together for the first time three important collections of historical texts, spanning five centuries: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and the British Library 19th-century collection.
Jan Machielsen’s book is ostensibly the first modern biography of the Jesuit scholar Martin Delrio (1551–1608), a man best known today as the author of the treatise on witchcraft Disquisitiones magicae (‘Investigations into magic’). However, to call this important book a biography does it an injustice, since it is so much more than this.
In 1977 – fifteen years after his death – a spat about the merits of the work of R. H. Tawney broke out in the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement. The catalyst was a feature called ‘Reputations revisited’, in which contributors were asked to nominate their most overrated and underrated books and/or authors of the past 75 years.
Ephemeral City. Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice is surely one of the most significant and impressive works on early modern European print culture to have been published in recent years. Its author, Rosa Salzberg, is an Assistant Professor of Italian Renaissance History at the University of Warwick.
This is a useful contribution to the growing body of research on 19th-century Irish print media (it begins with a survey of academic literature on the subject).
In the latest of our occasional Reviews in History podcast series, Dr Jordan Landes talks to Professor Jan Plamper about his new work on the history of emotions, a subject which he has memorably described as a 'rocket taking off'.
Jan Plamper is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.