Browse all reviews
No Return / Rowan Dorin
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Review Date: 08 June 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.
The Press and the People: Cheap Print and Society in Scotland, 1500-1785 / Adam Fox
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Review Date: 25 March 2022
Early modern Scotland was awash with cheap print. Adam Fox, in the first dedicated study of the phenomenon in Scotland, gives readers some startling figures. Andro Hart, one of Edinburgh’s leading booksellers, died in 1622. In his possession, according to his inventory, were 42,300 unbound copies of English books printed on his own presses.
Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland, c.1560-1707 / Karin Bowie
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Review Date: 25 March 2022
This is Karin Bowie’s second book about the history of public opinion in Scotland. Her first, in 2007, examined the period 1699-1707 in depth, covering the debate leading up to the Union of Parliaments.(1) The present book deals with a longer period, and has no single focus like the Union.
Memory and the English Reformation / eds. Alexandra Walsham, Bronwyn Wallace, Ceri Law, Brian Cummings
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Review Date: 26 March 2021
‘The English Reformation has not ended’, concludes Memory and the English Reformation’s introduction. ‘Continually refought in memory and the imagination, the battles it began will never be over’ (p.45). Through memory studies, this volume nudges the very worn question of England’s long Reformation(s) in a revitalising direction. Noting that scholars have rarely focused on how the English Reformation ‘became crystalised in the historical imagination’ (p.
A Little Gay History of Wales / Daryl Leeworthy
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Review Date: 23 October 2020
In January 1988, hundreds of people gathered in Cardiff for a rally organised by ‘Wales Against Clause 28’. Held aloft ‘were signs identifying the places the mainly lesbian and gay marchers had lived and where they were from to disprove the popular notion that “there were no gays in Wales”.’ (p.
Women before the court: Law and patriarchy in the Anglo-American world, 1600–1800 / Lindsay R. Moore
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Review Date: 25 September 2020
Lindsay R. Moore’s Women Before the Court is an important contribution to the growing body of research on premodern women’s access to justice that has been published over the past decade.(1) Recent debates have sought to complicate the limitations of the English common law doctrine of coverture which, at least in theory, prevented married women’s independent access to justice.
Wem & Myddle, then and again / Peter Edwards
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Review Date: 04 September 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.
Catholic Nuns and Sisters in a Secular Age, Britain 1945-90 / Carmen M. Mangion
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Review Date: 31 July 2020
In the preface of Catholic Nuns and Sisters in a Secular Age, Carmen M. Mangion admits ‘this was not a book I wanted to write. This was a book I thought should be written’ (p.xi). In recent decades there has been a ‘religious turn’ in gender and cultural history, epitomised by the publication of the 2011 Feminist Review special issue dedicated to religion and spirituality.
Married Life in the Middle Ages 900-1300 / Elisabeth van Houts
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Review Date: 17 April 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. First, she uses a variety of sources, including charters, letters, narrative sources like saints’ lives and fiction, and material culture.
Medieval Londoners: essays to mark the eightieth birthday of Caroline M. Barron / eds. Elizabeth A. New, Christian Steer
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Review Date: 09 January 2020
The Festschrift, usually a gathering of articles composed to honour a scholar on his or her retirement, or to mark a significant anniversary, originated around the beginning of the 20th century, and has become an acknowledged feature of the academic landscape, albeit one rather irregular in its occurrence. Continental Festschriften have sometimes run to several volumes.