Browse all reviews
A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home / Leonie Hannan
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Review Date: 01 March 2024
The study of the early modern home has drawn mounting interest from academic historians over the past decade. From Sara Pennell’s The Birth of the English Kitchen (2016), to Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson’s beautifully illustrated A Day at Home in Early Modern England (2017), to Elaine Leong’s Recipes and Everyday Knowledge (2018), a focus on the ‘everyday’ has been established as an important area for new research.
Milk / eds. Honor Beddard, Marianne Templeton
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Review Date: 30 September 2023
The very first displays in Milk, a major Wellcome Collection exhibition, convey the strangeness of a food we all know well. Entitled 'the story of milk', the opening room sparks reflection on the oddness of the narratives and images imprinted on a deceptively simple part of our diet.
The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality / Catherine Carstairs
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Review Date: 21 April 2023
Catherine Carstairs’s new history, The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality, explores the changes in oral healthcare in Canada from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including patient voices, Carstairs considers oral health history from a number of angles.
Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700 / eds. Bonnie Lander Johnson, Eleanor Decamp
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Review Date: 23 May 2022
This interdisciplinary collection of essays, emerging from a conference held at Oxford University and edited by scholars with interests in literature and medicine in early modern England, seeks to establish how the inhabitants of late medieval and early modern Western Europe defined blood, and to uncover how references to blood were deployed in descriptions of the human condition across various literary forms.
Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour / Sarah Goldsmith
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Review Date: 21 May 2021
Englishmen have always travelled. According to French Abbé Le Blanc, they travelled more than other people of Europe because `they look upon their isle as a sort of prison; and the first use they make of their liberty is to get out of it'.(1) For young elite males who travelled to France and Italy for up to five years, the Grand Tour was, most historians agree, ‘intended to provide the final education and polish’.
Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948 / Kevin Grant
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Review Date: 29 January 2021
Historians of the British Empire have long recognized the hunger strike—famously embraced by suffragettes in Britain, and by nationalists in Ireland and India—as a transnational tactic of democratic, anti-colonial resistance. Kevin Grant’s thoroughly researched and conceptually sophisticated study confirms that ‘British transimperial network[s]’ were ‘critically important in the spread of hunger in protest around the world’ (p. 3).
Empire and epidemic / Amina Marzouk Chouchene
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Review Date: 24 July 2020
Covid-19 has fuelled widespread panic across the world. Every day there are new cases of infected people and deaths. We became accustomed to seeing crowds of people emptying stores from all necessary provisions. In most discussions, there are constant references to various forms of panic surrounding Covid-19. Headlines such as “Do not panic,” “Remain calm,” “Be smart but don’t panic” became ubiquitous.