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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
2 Sep 2022

In this informative book, Ute Frevert examines shame and shaming during the early modern and modern periods, mostly in Germany and Britain, but in other European countries as well. It is based upon her German book, Die Politik der Demütigung: Schauplätze von Macht und Ohnmacht, published in 2017.

Review Date: 
23 Apr 2021

Attention to the law and its development across the medieval and early modern centuries has never been out of fashion and scholars continue to take a keen interest in the topic.

Review Date: 
4 Sep 2020

In 1974, David Hey published his book on Myddle in Shropshire, a study based upon his doctoral research at Leicester University. One might wonder how a proud South Yorkshireman had even heard of an insignificant North Shropshire parish, let alone decided to carry out research on it. Fortunately, his supervisor, Professor W. G.

Review Date: 
15 May 2020

This volume arrives with high praise. The book ‘[d]eserves to become another classic’, opines Peter Burke at the top of the front cover. It ‘[c]ompletely overhauls our view’, observes Ronald Hutton somewhat further down. The work itself is not shy of ambition either. Both the title—The Decline of Magic—and the subtitle—Britain in the Enlightenment—promise sweeping panoramas.

Review Date: 
7 Feb 2020

Although England was just about early modern Europe’s least violent place to live it has, paradoxically, produced far and away the most research on the problem of homicide. The trend shows no sign of abating, as recent works by Lockwood and Sharpe demonstrate.

Review Date: 
9 Jan 2020

There is no more exemplary figurehead for the history of legal culture than the late Christopher W. Brooks. As the editors of this volume observe, by the time of his death in 2014 Brooks ‘had established a firm reputation as the most important and influential historian of law and society in early modern England’ (p. 1).

Review Date: 
21 Nov 2019

The history of religious toleration during the early modern period has been revitalised over the past decade. Scholars such as Alexandra Walsham and Benjamin Kaplan have shown that early modern society did not view toleration as the social virtue that was later espoused by enlightenment thinkers.

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.

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