Browse all reviews
A Little Gay History of Wales / Daryl Leeworthy
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
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.
Catholic Nuns and Sisters in a Secular Age, Britain 1945-90 / Carmen M. Mangion
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
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.
The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution / Michael Braddick
Review Date: 07 November 2019
Pauline Gregg’s Freeborn John was previously the most recent full biographical work on John Lilburne. Published in 1961, Gregg’s work was extremely close to H. N. Brailsford’s seminal The Levellers and the English Revolution; the two works standing for decades as the cornerstones to Leveller historiography.
Infidel Feminism: Secularism, religion and women’s emancipation, England 1830-1914 / Laura Schwartz
Review Date: 05 September 2013
This important work is long overdue. It identifies two gaps in the existing historiography.
Chocolate, Women and Empire: a Social and Cultural History / Emma Robertson
Review Date: 01 June 2011
Chocolate, writes Emma Robertson in the introduction to her monograph, ‘has been invested with specific cultural meanings which are in part connected to … conditions of production’ (p. 3).