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A view prevails amongst military historians that the soldiers raised and trained on behalf of the monarchs of old-regime Europe compare unfavourably with those who fought for the French Republic.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/the-holocaust.jpg?itok=BNf6_-6H)
In Thinking the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder proposes to his friend Tony Judt that the historian’s task is ‘like making paths’ through a forest by leaving signs. Judt qualifies this. ‘The first thing’, he argues, ‘is to teach people about trees. Then you teach them that lots of trees together constitute a forest.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/fishman.jpg?itok=VXwojK3c)
‘Horrible, horrible, it’s horrible.’
‘Oh my! This is gorgeous.’
…
‘You are gonna catch a cold.’
…
‘Well if I stood next to her I would be the happiest man on earth.’
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This is an extremely ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging and inspiring book.
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Empires throughout world history have more often than not seen themselves as part of some cosmic grand narrative, set on earth to enact the will of the god or gods, spiritual or secular, they claim to serve. The Carolingian Empire was no exception.
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In an excellent monograph, Robert Stein investigates the background and the unification of one of Later Medieval Europe’s greatest polities, The Burgundian Netherlands. This book, published in the Oxford Studies in Medieval European History is a revised translation of its Dutch version De hertog en zijn Staten in 2014.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Hannik.jpg?itok=yY6HH0C5)
At the height of the Greek financial crisis, reports from colleagues based in Athens painted a sorry picture of respectable citizens who had fallen upon hard times desperately rummaging in dustbins to supplement their dwindling larders. The statistics told an even grimmer story – between 2010 and 2011, suicide rates in Greece rose by 40 per cent.(1)
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Kumhera.jpg?itok=zhfVVQd_)
Peace. A small, but powerful word. Even today, defining it is a quandary, as it can be applied in many different ways according to a variety of contexts. Kumhera’s comprehensive book tackles the act of making peace in late medieval Italy. He highlights and analyses its diverse meanings and implications, and the impact of these various realisations of ‘pax’ for medieval society.
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I.
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In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, the phrase ‘ignotum per ignocius’ is used in connection with the so-called ‘sliding science’ at which the would-be alchemists of the tale labour so diligently.(1) The phrase means to explain the unknown by the more unknown.