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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
4 Jun 2021

In recent decades historians, postcolonial theorists and feminist scholars have demonstrated how, in a variety of geographical settings, gendered stereotypes supported the conquest and domination of overseas territories by European colonial regimes.

Review Date: 
29 Jan 2021

Historians of the British Empire have long recognized the hunger strike—famously embraced by suffragettes in Britain, and by nationalists in Ireland and India—as a transnational tactic of democratic, anti-colonial resistance.

Review Date: 
17 Jul 2020

The case of Mary Toft—the woman who gave birth to rabbits in 1726—has an enduring appeal. I remember the first time I encountered her as a final year undergraduate, both fascinated and appalled by the details of the case.

Review Date: 
26 Jun 2020

Scholarly historians as a group are often criticized for writing books that speak only to other academics and that are not accessible to a general audience. This criticism is unfair, as many professional historians who have made significant interventions in our understanding of history have also written books that bring history alive for the average reader. W.

Review Date: 
17 Apr 2020

Married Life in the Middle Ages offers a refreshing approach to medieval marriage. Elisabeth van Houts focuses on the social and emotional sides of marriage rather than viewing marriage through a legal or institutional lens. Two aspects of van Houts’ book set it apart from others.

Review Date: 
7 Nov 2019

Gary De Krey is a leading historian of mid-to-late 17th-century London. His two monographs on the City: London and the Restoration and A Fractured Society capture the complexity, dynamics and interiority of London politics in ways that have often stumped the best of historians.

Review Date: 
7 Nov 2019

Pauline Gregg’s Freeborn John was previously the most recent full biographical work on John Lilburne. Published in 1961, Gregg’s work was extremely close to H. N. Brailsford’s seminal The Levellers and the English Revolution; the two works standing for decades as the cornerstones to Leveller historiography.

Review Date: 
19 Oct 2017

Martin Ingram’s 1987 book Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 is celebrated for many reasons.(1) Not least, it is recognised for its importance in rescuing ecclesiastical courts from previous unfavourable assessments that branded them corrupt and inefficient.

Review Date: 
23 Apr 2015

This well-crafted volume of ten essays is an important contribution to the growing body of research on women and law in England the pre-modern period. Each essay examines a different aspect of women’s interactions with the law (broadly defined and encompassing both secular and ecclesiastical courts) and, as suggested in the title, foregrounds their agency.

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