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.
Milk / eds. Honor Beddard, Marianne Templeton
Review Date: 30 September 2023
The very first displays in Milk, a major Wellcome Collection exhibition, convey the strangeness of a food we all know well. Entitled 'the story of milk', the opening room sparks reflection on the oddness of the narratives and images imprinted on a deceptively simple part of our diet.
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’.
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).
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.
The Circulation of Penicillin in Spain: Health, Wealth and Authority / María Jesús Santesmases
Review Date: 28 November 2019
In the summer of 1948 Alexander Fleming, known around the world as the discoverer of penicillin, visited Spain. Fleming had published his famous paper on the antimicrobial effect of the Penicillium notatum mould in 1929. During the 1930s researchers worked on methods to extract therapeutic agents from the mould, and by 1942 drug companies in the US had developed efficient methods of mass production.
The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine and Fertility in the Age of Abolition / Katherine Paugh
Review Date: 05 April 2018
The greatest indictment of the hard-driving slave system in the 18th-century British Caribbean was that the enslaved population never achieved natural population increase (except briefly in Barbados but only by 1810). Abolitionists seized on the failure of slave populations to thrive as a sign that slavery was immoral.
The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 / Sara Pennell
Review Date: 19 October 2017
In contemporary understanding, a kitchen is a space which houses a heat source and appropriate utensils for preparing meals. How and why this kind of kitchen emerged in England between the 17th and mid-19th century is the story that Pennell set out to uncover.
Femininity, Mathematics and Science, 1880-1914 / Claire Taylor Jones
Review Date: 31 May 2010
In the two decades since Margaret Rossiter’s first volume on Women Scientists in America (1), there has been a steady series of books which have investigated the place of women in science, seeking to discover if and where they existed, the nature of their of their contribution and the reasons why for so often and so long there has been a perceived disjuncture between women and…
The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe / eds. Kenneth Borris, George Rousseau
Review Date: 01 December 2008
In Thomas Cannon’s 1749 pamphlet Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d, the author recounts a chance meeting with a ‘too polish’d Pederast’ who, ‘attack’d upon the Head, that his Desire was unnatural, thus wrestled in Argument; Unnatural Desire is a Contradiction in Terms; downright Nonsense.