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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
8 Jun 2023

It is hard to review this book without lapsing into the language of academic letters of recommendation: it is brilliant, illuminating. The genre is the Anglo-American 'book of the thesis’. This genre contrasts with that of first books from young German and French scholars in that the author has taken years to revise his 2015 Harvard thesis thoroughly.

Review Date: 
26 Mar 2021

Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies breaks ground on very important, yet controversial, territory. As its title indicates, this volume primarily explores what we might call the principles of the mind or brain in European medieval society, in unique ways.

Review Date: 
19 Jun 2020

A lack of institutional documentation has rendered it difficult for scholars of early modernity to reconstruct the significance of apostasy from Judaism before the Council of Trent (1545-1563). As such, the reasons behind the conversion of Jews to Catholicism, especially in Renaissance Italy, remain understudied to this day.

Review Date: 
22 May 2020

Hannah Barker’s book is a thorough and engaging evaluation of late medieval slave trading practices in the Mediterranean. The tile is taken from the 15th-century recollection and denunciation of an Alexandrian slave market by Felix Fabri, a German friar (p. 209).

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: 
20 Mar 2020

The Birth of Modern Belief is seriously good. It is erudite, insightful, and cogent; but, above all, it enables us to think hard about the relationship between our past and our present.

Review Date: 
17 Jan 2019

This volume – a collection of essays on the pontificate of Eugenius III (1145–53) – received a grant from the Thornley Bequest to help with the costs of production.

Review Date: 
9 Aug 2018

Both Mulder-Bakker’s study and, especially, the edition and translation of the Life of Gertrude Rickeldey, promise to be valuable resources for those studying the lives of lay religious women in the later Middle Ages. The text itself engages with intersecting questions of the legal and social identities of such women, and of their roles in urban communities.

Review Date: 
28 Jun 2018

History has not been kind to the reputation of Pope Honorius III (1216–27).

Review Date: 
31 May 2018

Brian Fitzgerald begins this timely, useful and extremely interesting book by stating what should be pretty obvious to scholars of medieval prophetic texts; that prophecy in the Middle Ages took a wide variety of forms, right across Europe and beyond.

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