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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
14 Nov 2013

Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800 includes 11 rigorously documented essays addressing a genre that began to attract attention following Susan Leonardi’s 1989 article, ‘Recipes for reading: Summer pasta, lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie’.(1) The editors, Michelle DiMeo and Sarah Pennell, seek to demonstrate how far the study of medical/culinar

Review Date: 
10 Oct 2013

These are the first two volumes of a new series, Histoire de la France contemporaine. They replace the previous Seuil series, published in the 1970s. As a reflection of the attitudes of current French academic specialists, they are interesting on two levels. Each is a careful synthesis of recent research on the two periods.

Review Date: 
26 Sep 2013

Ronald Witt’s new book serves as a prequel to his highly-praised volume,  In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni.(1) If the Footsteps volume located the genesis of humanism in the epistolary and literary compositions of late 13th-century Padua (whereby as a consequence the traditional ‘father of humanism,’ Petra

Review Date: 
5 Sep 2013

For much of the late 20th century, the political leaders of the French Revolution were discussed by major historiographical schools as more or less puppets – either, in the Marxian formulation, of class interests, or, in the Furetian, of unchained political discourses.(1) Fortunately for them and us, other historiographical strands have continued to develop in other wa

Review Date: 
29 Aug 2013

Jonathan Sperber has so far been mainly known as a historian of 19th-century Germany, and of the Rhineland in particular.

Review Date: 
29 Aug 2013

Sasha and Emma is the story of one life-long relationship and the product of another. When the historian of Russian and American anarchism Paul Avrich died in 2006, he left behind a rich body of scholarly work (1) and an unfinished manuscript exploring ‘the passionate half-century friendship between legendary activist Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman’ (p.

Review Date: 
15 Aug 2013

The work of Mary Carruthers is well known to students of medieval culture. Her Book of Memory charted discussions of memory from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, treading in the footsteps of Frances Yates in arguing that memory was not just another concept in the minds of medieval writers, but a conceptual motor for the organisation and motivation of thought.

Review Date: 
8 Aug 2013

The period of medieval intellectual history covered by this book, primarily the 12th and 13th centuries, is one that has received considerable attention for well over a century. The main question, then, is what does Ian Wei bring to this subject that has not been done before, or how has he reshaped it? The answer is he has done much in both respects.

Review Date: 
18 Apr 2013

The early 14th-century writer John Quidort of Paris once argued that legal norms should not be deduced from unique events that took place in specific circumstances.(1) Nevertheless, it might be suggested that anecdotes may occasionally prove instructive.

Review Date: 
18 Apr 2013

In his introduction, Matthew Lundin declares that it ‘would perhaps only be slightly hyperbolic to proclaim Hermann Weinsberg the Samuel Pepys of sixteenth-century Germany’ (p. 3). This proclamation does not do full justice to the scope of Lundin’s work.

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