Browse all reviews
What’s the point of history? / Daniel Woolf
Review Date: 06 November 2020
The sub-branch of history that is known by the ambiguous (and frightening to undergraduates, cats, and many mainstream academics) name “historiography” seems to be undergoing a Renaissance at the moment.
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.
Barbarism and Religion: Volume 6, Barbarism: Triumph in the West / J. G. A. Pocock
Review Date: 26 November 2015
Triumph in the West is the triumphant conclusion of J. G. A. Pocock’s series on Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). Earlier installments sought to situate Gibbon and his text in a series of contexts: European Enlightenment(s), narratives of civil society, the conceptual history of ‘Decline and Fall’, theories concerning ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’, ecclesiastical historiography.
Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World / David Carr
Review Date: 18 December 2014
Phenomenology and its application to the writing of history have complex intellectual origins. Readers may already be familiar with the phenomenographical research method, popularized by researchers in Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s.
Revisionist Histories / Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Review Date: 13 February 2014
History is never the final word; we are too empirically sensitive these days to think otherwise. It would be fair to say that since the days of Karl Popper historians have been acutely aware that what they write or utter is never the final statement concerning the historical record. Their assertions are provisional, liable to a degree of tinkering.
The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences / David Cannadine
Review Date: 20 June 2013
David Cannadine’s title, with its reference to ‘the undivided past’, may seem to suggest some Platonic idea of a Rankean straw man who aspires to a consensual and ‘definitive’ history of a unitary past; but what we have here is something very different – something that might indeed be construed as a quite revolutionary gesture.
History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck / Niklas Olsen
Review Date: 28 June 2012
In some ways it is a scandal that it has taken until now for an English-language book on the thought of Reinhard Koselleck to appear. Then again, as Olsen writes in the introduction to this work, Koselleck has always been somewhat of an outsider vis-a-vis the historical profession.
Making History: The Historian and the Uses of the Past / Jorma Kalela
Review Date: 21 June 2012
According to the blurb on the back of this book:‘Everyone has a personal connection to the past, independent of historical inquiry. So, what is the role of the historian? Making History argues that historians have damagingly dissociated the discipline of history from the everyday nature of history, defining their work only in scholarly terms.