Can cognitive science help us to understand medieval society and the medieval mind better? Merel Veldhuizen reviews this ‘persuasive’ and ‘impressive’ collection, which ‘aims to inspire medievalists and other scholars within the humanities to engage with… methodologies deriving from cognitive sciences’.
Review Archives
Memory and the English Reformation
Sarah Johanesen reviews this edited collection, which explores ‘how the Reformation embedded itself in the early modern cultural imagination’, and suggests that its ‘continuation through social memory means it never really ended’.
Michael Young, Social Science & The British Left, 1945-70
Colm Murphy reviews ‘a rich perspective on social scientific and left-wing policy debates in post-war Britain’, via the ‘technicolour prism’ of social scientist and policy maker Michael Young.
Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550
Sandra Cavallo reviews this edited collection, which ‘advances our awareness of the variety, persistence, and pervasiveness of women’s contributions to the maintenance and restoration of health’ in medieval Europe.
Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Nancy Siegel reviews an ‘enormously enjoyable’ look at how ‘the consumption of food and drink propelled political discourse and global awareness’ in Britain during the long 18th century.
A Promised Land
Daniel Snowman reviews a ‘highly absorbing’ account of the former US President’s personal and political life, up to the death of Osama bin Laden.
Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe
Sarah Rees Jones reviews a ‘provocative’ book that asks ‘timely and important questions’ about the fluidity of urban life in medieval Europe.
Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948
Aidan Forth reviews Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948, by Kevin Grant, a ‘thoroughly researched, and conceptually sophisticated study’ of how British transimperial networks helped the international spread of hunger strikes as a form of protest.
Knowledge under attack
John R. Hodgson reads two books addressing the unique risks faced by libraries and archives through history and into the present, and why we should all be concerned.
Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s
Stefan Collini explores what flourished and fell away from the establishment of some 200 new university campuses worldwide between 1961 and 1970, and what models and dreams inspired their creation.