Browse all reviews
A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home / Leonie Hannan
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.
The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality / Catherine Carstairs
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
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
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’.
Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction / eds. Juliana Dresvina, Victoria Blud
Review Date: 26 March 2021
Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies breaks ground on very important, yet controversial, territory. As its title indicates, this volume primarily explores what we might call the principles of the mind or brain in European medieval society, in unique ways. The editorial introduction defines cognitive sciences as ‘an interdisciplinary field for the study and understanding of the mind’ (p.
Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 / eds. Sara Ritchey, Sharon Strocchia
Review Date: 05 March 2021
Centring on the period from the 11th to the early 16th centuries, this collection of eleven essays and a foreword by both well-established and younger scholars addresses a range of still-unexplored aspects of medieval women’s involvement in medical treatment and health care, as well as their role in the consumption, transmission, and production of medical knowledge.
Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948 / Kevin Grant
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).
Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England / Susan North
Review Date: 25 September 2020
Students of history are not always aware when they live through major historiographic change; shifts are sometimes only recognizable in hindsight, with accumulated divergences sharply evident against the backdrop of the field. This volume by Susan North marks a historiographic advance from several perspectives, bringing questions of training, habit, labour, and lifestyle in early modern England into close conversation with health, fashion, morality, and materiality.
Wem & Myddle, then and again / Peter Edwards
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.
The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England / Karen Harvey
Review Date: 17 July 2020
The case of Mary Toft—the woman who gave birth to rabbits in 1726—has an enduring appeal. I remember the first time I encountered her as a final year undergraduate, both fascinated and appalled by the details of the case.