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The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment / Ethan H. Shagan
Review Date: 20 March 2020
The Birth of Modern Belief is seriously good. It is erudite, insightful, and cogent; but, above all, it enables us to think hard about the relationship between our past and our present. This is no mean feat in an age when ‘consensual knowledge of the past dwindles in inverse proportion to how much is known in toto’.
Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World / ed. Paula Findlen
Review Date: 28 November 2019
Francis Bacon’s unfinished utopian novel The New Atlantis is often invoked in scholarship about early modern scientific projects. With its ‘Merchants of Light’ who gather information and bring it back to the House of Solomon, The New Atlantis seems to capture perfectly the aspirations of a group of European scholars who saw themselves as reassessing the bases of knowledge by revaluing personal experience.
Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History / eds. Sally Holloway, Stephanie Downes, Sarah Randles
Review Date: 02 October 2019
Historians are good at putting objects in their place. Details about context, manufacture, use, abuse, meaning, significance, decay, and so on are layered so that an object itself becomes a carrier of its moment in history. Putting material back into the fabric of history itself enriches that history.