ARTICLES

Æthelflaed and Other Rulers in English Histories, c.900–1150

Emily A Winkler

Pages 969–1002

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac178

Abstract: This article explains why Æthelflaed, ruler of Mercia, mattered to writers of history in twelfth-century England. It argues that these writers evaluated and compared rulers based not on sex or bloodline, but on the quality of a ruler’s achievements relative to the set and scale of challenges the ruler faced. They thought Æthelflaed remarkable because her triumphs for Mercia distinguished her from other rulers. The article shows that a new understanding of attitudes in twelfth-century England towards rulers, past and present, is required. It accounts for the absence of gendered comments about rulers, as well as the presence of non-binary concepts of gender, in medieval writing. It also challenges the enduring idea that Latin writers imposed a shared, Wessex-dominated national vision on the English past. They asserted Mercia’s independence under Æthelflaed’s sole rule, which shows that English regional interests persisted in the historical imagination long after the Norman Conquest.

‘Open’ or ‘Closed’? Participation in English Manorial Presentment Juries, c.1310–c.1600: A Quantitative Approach

Spike Gibbs

Pages 1003–1052

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac142

Abstract: Historians of both the medieval and early modern eras have characterised the governing structures of rural communities as being dominated by local elites. However, interpretations are hampered by a lack of clear criteria against which to evaluate whether a village-governance regime was ‘open,’ and characterised by wide participation, or ‘closed’, and characterised by the narrow restriction of office to an elite group, making it difficult to draw comparisons across time and space. This article uses a set of quantitative methodologies to solve this problem. It examines presentment juries in the manorial court, a governing institution which straddles the late medieval and early modern period, in three case-study communities for the period from 1310 to 1600. By applying four measures of participation, the article reveals that post-Black Death juries were characterised by a nuanced system of restriction. They were open in the sense that a large proportion of the male population, drawn from a wide range of families, acted as jurors and there was a continuous turnover in jury panels. However, they were also closed in that a small group of prominent individuals and families served a disproportionately frequent number of times. The results also question an established narrative of increasing monopolisation of village governance by a new ‘middling sort’ over the sixteenth century. Instead, change over time and space reveals a variable set of trends, with no universal linear pattern. The inflexibility of manorial institutions, combined with local demographic regimes and trends in landholding, led to significant differences in political participation between communities.

Making Good and Breaking Bad: Materiality and Community in Netherlandish Cities, 1380–1520

Janna Coomans

Pages 1053–1081

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac177

Abstract: This article discusses community formation at a neighbourhood level from a material-spatial perspective. It argues that a wholesome, safe, ‘good’ living environment required both social harmony and well-functioning material (infra-) structures. Neighbours’ conflicts, mined from the court records of five cities in the late medieval Low Countries, provide the evidence for two main themes. The first concerns making things, especially houses and their attendant facilities, and the second breaking things: acts of deliberate destruction within living environments, and by implication, breaking communal peace. Neighbours took on diverse roles, among which their more material commitments have remained especially underexplored by historians. Yet the shared use, construction and upkeep of facilities and infrastructure around domestic spaces, which were of high value, had considerable influence on power relations and social interactions. Groups of neighbours participated in legal validation processes and offered physical help to each other, but also policed local social order and bad behaviour. The latter often involved damaging material constructions. Such informal communities thus acted as links to more formalised urban structures and organisations, and as foundations from which the latter could develop. Their interactions with central urban governments were more multidirectional and contested than has often been assumed. Understanding the social-material dynamic at the neighbourhood level therefore reveals an important layer in pre-modern urban politics.

The Lambeth Articles (1595) and the Doctrinal Stance of the Church of England

Nicholas Tyacke

Pages 1082–1117

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac128

Abstract: The Lambeth Articles have always bulked large in debates about the Calvinist tenor of sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But in a recent article, Debora Shuger has raised the stakes dramatically. Not content to deny that the Lambeth Articles were ‘Calvinist’, she claims that they were the work of a group of ‘non-Calvinist divines’, specially commissioned by Archbishop Whitgift to produce a ‘consensus document’ designed to put an end to the predestinarian controversy which had broken out at Cambridge University. Paradoxically, Shuger combines this with the view that the Lambeth Articles were nevertheless suppressed, on the orders of Queen Elizabeth. It follows that the idea of a subsequent ‘rise of English Arminianism’ is fundamentally flawed. The present piece argues that the Lambeth Articles in their final form (a) emanated from a meeting of the Court of High Commission at Lambeth, presided over by Whitgift himself, Bishop Richard Fletcher of London, and Richard Vaughan, the bishop-elect of Bangor, all of them Calvinists; (b) are best understood as speaking the language of sublapsarian Calvinism; and (c) were not suppressed but continued to be regarded as interpretative guidelines until the 1620s. The 1620s, however, witnessed a dramatic renversement when, unlike the 1590s, Calvinism was indeed suppressed by royal command and at the hands of a new breed of anti-Calvinist divines. Nevertheless, via the Irish Articles of 1615, the Lambeth Articles were to attain an afterlife as part of the Westminster Confession of Faith promulgated in 1648.

Counting People in Early Modern England: Registers, Registrars, and Political Arithmetic

Paul Slack

Pages 1118–1143

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac154

Abstract: Although there was no complete census in England until 1801, there had been counts of people for various purposes in towns and villages since the sixteenth century, and by the end of the seventeenth century political arithmeticians were trying to calculate the total population and its demographic characteristics from a range of documents, old and new. There had even been projects to collect new data from parish registers which in some respects anticipated the civil registers of vital events finally established in 1837. The aim of this paper is to look again at the invention in the sixteenth century of the sources later used for demographic investigation, especially parish registers and bills of mortality; to demonstrate that their value for such purposes was appreciated by contemporaries earlier than has often been assumed; and to show why, when their utility declined in the eighteenth century, it proved impossible to reform them. Pressure from political arithmeticians and a growing sector of the medical profession to redesign the established machinery of registration had no effect because it had become a monopoly in the hands of an ecclesiastical establishment determined to defend it. In the 1530s England acquired a precocious system of national registration, potentially adaptable to multiple uses, but it scarcely changed at all for three hundred years because there was no agreement on how to adapt or replace it.

‘Your Marage Will Make a Change with Them All … When You Get Another Famely’: Illegitimate Children, Parenthood and Siblinghood in Ireland, c.1759–1832

leanne calvert

Pages 1144–1173

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac166

Abstract: William Tennent (1759–1832) was a successful businessman and banker, who made his mark in Belfast as one of the city’s richest men. He was also a father and, later, a husband. By the time of his marriage in March 1805, Tennent had fathered at least thirteen illegitimate children, with at least four women. The child he would have with his wife, a daughter named Letitia, would be his only legitimate heir. Through this series of illicit sexual relationships, William Tennent created a complex family unit that consisted of legitimate and illegitimate children, half-siblings, step-siblings and step-parents, all of whom were united through a network of unmarried mothers. The example of the Tennent family therefore offers historians the unique opportunity not only to extend knowledge about the making of the family in Ireland, but also to refine ideas about contemporary attitudes to illegitimacy. Using the Tennents as a case-study, this article furthers understanding of the family in Ireland by considering the horizontal relationships which characterised family life, drawing attention to how legitimacy, as well as gender, social rank and birth order, shaped ties between parents and children, and between siblings.

Landscape, National Identity and the Medieval Past in England, c.1840–1914

Paul Readman

Pages 1174–1208

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac168

Abstract: This article re-examines the place of the Middle Ages in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English culture. In doing so, it presents an argument about the interrelationship of landscape, history and English national identity. Emphasising the importance of the medieval past to mainstream constructions of Englishness, the article shows how this importance largely derived from the felt presence of the Middle Ages in the physical environment, in the landscape of England. Their history congealed in the fields, forests, hills, towns and villages of the present day, the Middle Ages were readily accessible through imaginative agency and possessed of vital contemporary meaning. Embodied experience of landscape offered Victorians and Edwardians compelling evidence of the long continuities of English national history, from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. In an increasingly democratic context, the medieval presence in the landscape was evidence of the continuity not only of the institutions of the realm, but of the English people themselves. Until at least the First World War, and perhaps beyond, the tangible heritage of the Middle Ages in the English landscape served as an important source of reassurance of the nation’s endurance and progress, amid the transformations of modernity.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Limits of Universal Rule: Eurasian Empires Compared, ed. Yuri Pines, Michal Biran and Jörg Rüpke

Selim Ferruh Adali

Pages 1209–1211

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac120

Extract

Dedicated to Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt for his work on imperial formations, the present volume is the first instalment in a series of planned research in comparative imperiology. The editors, Yuri Pines, Michal Biran and Jörg Rüpke, look to well-documented empires in five Eurasian macro-regions (Europe, the Near East, the Indian subcontinent, the steppe belt of Inner Asia, and continental East Asia), allowing for ‘meaningful reconstruction of their distinct trajectories’ (p. 9). The selected cases come from three waves of empires. The first-wave empires selected are the Achaemenids, Qin-Han China and the Roman Empire. The Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad-Abbasid Caliphates comprise the second wave. The Mongol Empire starts the next Eurasian wave, to be followed by the Ottomans, Safavids, Timurid-Mughals, Ming and Qing China, and Russia. The editors try to juxtapose ideological, religious, ecological, military, economic and political factors shaping the spatial expansion and contraction of empires. They raise questions about the acquisition, maintenance and conception of imperial space, emphasising how these factors can interplay in different historical contexts. The following ten chapters each try to explore these historical contexts in the case of different Eurasian empires.

Disasters and History: The Vulnerability of Past Societies, by Bas van Bavel, Daniel R. Curtis, Jessica Dijkman, Matthew Hannaford, Maïka de Keyzer, Eline van Onacker and Tim Soens

Mark Bailey

Pages 1211–1212

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac121

Extract

This collaborative venture between seven economic and social historians and a geographer, all of whom were affiliated at various times to the Universities of Utrecht and Antwerp, is an ambitious, stimulating and successful attempt to provide an historical framework for understanding societal responses to natural hazards. The lead historians behind this venture—Bas van Bavel and Tim Soens—are among the most respected and impressive in their fields, while their fellow authors are mainly in the early phases of their academic careers. The sum is greater than the individual parts. The book brings together an astonishingly broad base of historical knowledge about shocks and biophysical hazards—such as extreme weather events, epidemic disease and earthquakes—from across the globe during the last millennium, and wears its considerable scholarship lightly. The research interests of the authors are mainly focused across medieval and early modern Europe.

The timing of the book is impeccable, given the outbreak of COVID-19, but it is timely in other ways, too. Its appearance coincides with a coalescence of new approaches to disasters in various academic disciplines: historians are now accepting that natural events could have a primary role in determining historical outcomes; social scientists have developed explanatory frameworks for disasters that explore societal resilience and adaptation; and statisticians, climatologists and biologists are generating a widening range of non-documentary source material to illuminate extreme weather and geological events in the past, which in turn is feeding expanding and increasingly sophisticated databases. The authors interlink these developments adroitly while adding a historical perspective to the mix, namely that the nature of social relations and structures helps to explain the varying degrees of vulnerability across different social groups to a given hazard, and its socially differentiated effects. Thus the book synthesises historical research into disasters, introduces the emerging field of disaster studies to history, and aims to show historians how the study of disasters can reveal aspects of the functioning of past societies that otherwise remain hidden: in other words, how abnormal behaviour in the face of disaster can reveal the bridge between ‘event’ and ‘structure’.

Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent, by Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg

Renée R Trilling

Pages 1213–1215

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceaa134

Extract

Can medievalism save the modern university? This is not precisely the question posed by Thomas Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg in their beautifully written and thought-provoking volume, but it is one of the many thoughts that they entertain by its conclusion. In an era when the discipline of medieval studies is at a crossroads, questioning the implications of its origins at the high point of Western imperialism and wondering about its future in an academy that seems doomed by the policies of neoliberalism, it feels both poignant and necessary to reflect on our relationship(s) to the Middle Ages. What place does the pre-modern have in a university whose mission is increasingly geared toward producing employable graduates? Is there even a future in the love of the past?

Trigg and Prendergast frame their exploration of these questions through the dual lenses of medieval studies and medievalism. They trace the history of these subdisciplines as initially one of conflict which has gradually developed into a more complex interplay of ideas, investments and commitments. Medieval studies has traditionally shown a certain amount of hostility toward medievalism: it is interested in the ‘real’, whereas medievalism focuses on the imagined; medieval studies grounds itself in the historical, while medievalism plays with nostalgia, presentism and futurism; it confines itself to demonstrable, verifiable ‘facts’, in contrast to medievalism’s embrace of possibility; and it claims to maintain scholarly objectivity against the affective onslaught of medievalism’s sheer enthusiasm. The real versus the imaginary; the professional versus the amateur; the expert versus the dilettante. Yet, as numerous scholars have pointed out, medievalism, in some ways, provides a closer connection to the idea of ‘the medieval’ than scholarly inquiry can generally achieve, due to its acceptance of affect and desire as legitimate prompts to inquiry. Take, for example, the medieval re-enactor, whose exhaustive research into period clothing or battle techniques produces a depth of expertise, motivated primarily by love of the subject, which parallels the scholar’s, but does not elicit equal recognition or authority. Such divisions work well to uphold the superiority and exclusive expertise of academic medievalists, but they obscure the very real, and potentially enriching, connections between medieval studies and medievalism. As Prendergast and Trigg argue, these two constituencies mutually co-create one another: not a ‘real’ Middle Ages uncovered by medieval studies, which medievalism then takes up for its own imaginative play, but rather differing ways of positioning oneself epistemologically in relation to the past.

Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles. Vol. 68: The Lyon Collection of Anglo-Saxon Coins, by Stewart Lyon

Richard Kelleher

Pages 1215–1216

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceaa073

Extract

Stewart Lyon’s book is the sixty-eighth volume in the British Academy’s Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles series (SCBI). The purpose of the series is to publish detailed and fully illustrated catalogues of coins of the British Isles in British and foreign collections. Lyon’s important private collection is a worthy addition to this numismatic canon. The collection, of more than 1,000 coins, was assembled over a period of more than sixty years and Lyon’s eye for quality specimens is clearly apparent in the plates. However, while one can appreciate the aesthetic merits of individual pieces, this was not the guiding motivation in assembling the collection; rather, it was formed with a scholarly agenda and developed in order to address a set of specific research questions. All volumes in the SCBI series consist of two parts. The first contains an introduction and supporting essays, chapters or information relevant to the collection. The second provides a fully illustrated catalogue of the collection. Lyon’s volume has an extensive ‘introduction’ composed of ten chapters. The length and detail of these reflects the relative size of the coin series illustrated later in the book. The emphasis therefore falls on extended discussions of two periods, the small base metal coins of the Kingdom of Northumbria, often called stycas, and the coinage of the period 973–1023/4. The other eight chapters address the periods in less detail.

The Rebel and the Imām in Early Islam: Explorations in Muslim Historiography, by Najam Haider

Mimi Hanaoka

Pages 1216–1218

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac122

Extract

Najam Haider’s book is a path-breaking work that explores ‘what it meant to write history in the early Islamic period’ (p. 25). Haider asks the seemingly straightforward (yet actually complex) questions of how history was written and for whom it was written during the early Islamic period. The result is meticulously researched scholarship that proposes a new model of understanding early Islamic historiography. Haider’s work will be influential and discussed for decades to come, especially given its broad applicability both in terms of genre (chronography, biography and prosopography) and the communal affiliations of the authors he discusses (Twelver Shi‘i, Zaydi Shi‘i, and non-Shi‘i/Sunni). While other scholars have zeroed in on specific texts or proposed more narrowly applicable models, Haider proposes a model for understanding early Islamic historiography that is the most comprehensive to date.

Haider argues that early Muslim historical writing demonstrates continuities with late antique models, which traversed linguistic and geographic boundaries and created trans-cultural norms and expectations. The audiences for these works expected authors to develop the core structure of an event or individual through narrative detail which gave meaning to an incident or individual within a particular interpretative framework. Haider proposes a three-phase construction of early Muslim historical writing: a skeletal myth is fleshed out with narrative detail, which is then understood in an interpretative framework, which in turn is framed within broader political, social and sectarian commitments. Importantly, the categories of Sunni and Shi‘i seem to be largely irrelevant in terms of techniques of historical writing for the early Muslim period, and it is this argument that makes Haider’s proposed model widely applicable to different types of sources that emerge from the different communities that Haider uses to build his argument. Haider bases his analysis on three illustrative examples (each of which draws on many sources), each with a detailed chapter devoted to it, that encapsulate the distinctive aspects of early Islamic historiography.

Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire, by Thomas Pickles

D M Palliser

Pages 1218–1220

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cez402

Eternal Light and Earthly Concerns: Belief and the Shaping of Medieval Society, by Paul Fouracre

Lauren Mancia

Pages 1220–1222

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac124

Writing the Military History of Pre-Crusade Europe: Studies in Sources and Source Criticism, by David S. Bachrach and Bernard S. Bachrach

Dušan Zupka

Pages 1222–1223

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac119

Extract

Anyone interested in medieval warfare will be very well acquainted with the works of Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach. This unique father-and-son team has published dozens of articles, book chapters and several influential monographs on medieval military history in past decades. The present volume brings together fourteen carefully selected contributions within the Routledge Variorum Collected Studies series. All the articles were revised and amended, and the authors have added bibliographic references reflecting recent publications. The chapters gathered in the present volume were written individually or together by both authors and are divided into two uneven sections. Part One, entitled ‘Narrative Works’ includes ten essays focused on the problems inherent in historical epistemology, with a particular emphasis on how scholars can understand and use source materials for the writing of military history. For this purpose, they examine works of selected influential and well-known historians from the period between the sixth and early twelfth centuries. These include the works of Gregory of Tours (6th cent.), Nithrad (9th cent.), Widukind of Corvey (10th cent.), Thietmar of Merseburg (11th cent.) and Ralph of Caen (12th cent.). The reader is also introduced to a discussion about the supposed ʻSaxon military revolutionʼ in the tenth century, and the problems connected with writing the military history of the Salian period. The period of the Salian rulers in Germany has attracted much less attention from scholars than other periods and places in pre-crusade Europe (Carolingian, Ottonian, Anglo-Saxon), despite the enormous volume of source materials available. Other chapters present the eleventh-century writers Ademar of Chabannes, Dudo of Saint Quentin and Bruno of Merseburg in the role of military historians.

The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition, by Lisa Reilly

Leonie Hicks

Pages 1223–1224

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac125

Extract

In this book, Lisa Reilly seeks answers to questions of how the Normans developed distinct visual cultures in Normandy, England and the kingdom of Sicily, what those cultures might share in terms of motifs and themes, and how the Normans appropriated and transformed earlier traditions from literature, architecture and art into new forms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. An introduction setting out the parameters of the study is followed by separate chapters on Normandy, England and Sicily. Reilly begins by foregrounding five major case-studies that, she argues, display political power and legitimacy in similar ways, which she explores in depth through the relevant chapters. These comprise the abbey church of Saint Etienne in Caen, Durham Cathedral, the Bayeux Embroidery, Roger II’s coronation mantle and the Capella Palatina in Palermo, works that were all commissioned by Norman rulers or those closely associated with them. This study is underpinned by Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity: visual culture is seen as a process through a postcolonial lens, allowing for discussion of the Normans’ borrowing of forms from outside the areas they settled (for example, Germany), as well as the real ambiguities present in artworks such as the Bayeux Embroidery.

The Briennes: The Rise and Fall of a Champenois Dynasty in the Age of the Crusades, c.950–1356, by Guy Perry

Jean Dunbabin

Pages 1225–1226

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab287

The Letters and Charters of Henry II, ed. Nicholas Vincent

David X Carpenter

Pages 1226–1228

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac123

Extract

Scholars of English royal government in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries are singularly privileged in their primary sources. Domesday Book, that detailed analysis of the economic resources of the kingdom compiled in 1086, unparalleled elsewhere, has been accessible since 1783, when Abraham Farley (c.1712–91) produced his edition, in pioneering record type. The unique series of Pipe Rolls, recording royal revenue and expenditure for the year to Michaelmas, has also long been in print. The oldest surviving roll covers the year 1129–30, and a continuous series begins in 1155. Less well known, but equally important, are the surviving written acts of the English kings. From the late eleventh century onwards their quantity far surpasses those of any Continental kingdom. Providing scholarly access to these acts is a challenging task for, unlike Domesday Book and the Pipe Rolls which are kept today in The National Archives in Kew, they must be sought out in the scattered remains of the archives of their beneficiaries, both in England and internationally. The acts of William I were printed more than two decades ago (D. Bates, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I, 1066–1087 [1998]), and a modern edition of the acts of King Stephen (1135–54) has been available for more than half a century (H.A. Cronne and R.C.H. Davis, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum [3 vols, 1968]). These essential resources are now joined by Nicholas Vincent’s magnificent edition of the acts of Henry II (1154–89).

Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199–1216, by Hugh M. Thomas

Colin Veach

Pages 1229–1230

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac134

Extract

Like the greatest inventions, the best topics of historical enquiry can seem obvious after they have been devised. Hugh Thomas’s latest book draws upon a wealth of governmental records and narrative sources to consider an as yet little-studied topic, the court culture of England’s King John. Whatever one thinks of him, John remains a popular topic of historical enquiry. The combination of Magna Carta and the great series of governmental enrolments begun during his reign has made him a central figure in the constitutional and administrative history of England. Despite all of this attention, and a recent tendency to blame John’s failures on his interpersonal skills, Thomas is the first historian to set out to analyse the way in which John interacted with those around him on a day-to-day basis at court.

The book has three related objectives, spread over nine chapters. The first objective is to reconstruct the social and cultural life of John’s court. Thomas’s close reliance upon royal records such as the Misae rolls, which record some of the day-to-day expenses of the king and his household, means that he tends to focus upon topics well represented in those records’ (patchy) survival: hunting, material culture, religious ceremonial, and food and feasting. Since his methodology involves trying to recreate the vagaries of court life and symbolism through lists of purchases and payments, Thomas supplements his analysis with moral treatises on court life by men such as Walter Map and John of Salisbury, near-contemporary histories such as The History of William Marshal, and (as such studies tend to do) vernacular romances and poetry. These help to provide context for the otherwise dry data, as John Baldwin did in his Aristocratic Life in Medieval France (2000; rev. ante, cxvi [2001], 934–5).

New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria: Proceedings of the Themed Day of the Fifth Conference of the School of Mamlūk Studies, ed. Jo van Steenbergen and Maya Termonia

Yehoshua Frenkel

Pages 1230–1233

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac135

Extract

With the emergence of the Fatimid Caliphate in the Nile Valley in the tenth century, Egypt witnessed a flourishing of sophisticated administration. This bureaucracy continued under successive dynasties and, following the Mamlūk victory over the Latins, spread out to Syria. A number of clerks who were employed by the ‘state government’ (qalamiyya) also indulged in stylish literary production, not limiting their writings to official epistles and ledgers, but rather ranging across many genres, from poetry to encyclopedias. The sultans also recruited a considerable number of scholars to staff the religious establishment. Several among them, like the bureaucrats, also wrote non-religious works. Narrating the past and reporting contemporaneous events (taʾrīkh) was a major focal point for their compilations. The Mamlūk ‘imperial’ historians moved from dawla/siyāsa-oriented historiography to a more ‘popular’ style. This can be seen in the use of vernacular phraseology (Middle Arabic), the insertion of poems, quotations from earlier writings and the interweaving of fictitious episodes (adab).

Courting Sanctity: Holy Women and the Capetians, by Sean L. Field

Elizabeth Cullinane

Pages 1233–1235

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac131

Extract

Sean L. Field’s book traces the changing reception of sacred women from the 1240s to the early fourteenth century, a period in which initial reverence for their charity, healing powers, ecstasies and prophecies gave way to disfavour, interrogations and death. Six women are profiled in the book: Isabelle of France, sister of Louis IX and foundress of Longchamp convent, the author Marguerite Porete, the stigmatic mystic Elizabeth of Spalbeek, the clairvoyant Margueronne of Bellevillette, and two beguines: the prophet Douceline of Digne and the peacemaker Paupertas of Metz. Of these six, three have been subjects of Field’s earlier work. The unique and compelling aspect of this book is that Field examines the histories of these women in the context of dynastic and papal ambitions across a period of three reigns (Louis IX, Philippe III and Philippe IV), thus laying the groundwork for the downward trajectory of holy women that forms the book’s thesis.

The Templar Estates in Lincolnshire, 1185–1565: Agriculture and Economy, by J. Michael Jefferson

David Stone

Pages 1235–1237

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac132

Extract

By the time the English members of the Knights Templar were arrested on 10 January 1308, in advance of the suppression of the order in 1312, the amount of land and property held by the Templars in England was vast. Historical evidence for the way in which the Templars managed this estate up to the early fourteenth century, and its fate thereafter, is idiosyncratic: an inquest into the extent and nature of their property in 1185; a series of accounts compiled after the seizure of their land, extending from 1308 to 1313; a report of 1338 detailing the holdings of the Knights Hospitallers, to whom at least some of the former Templar land had been granted; entries relating to former Templar property in the Valor ecclesiasticus of 1535; and a letter issued by Mary I in 1557, seeking to re-endow the Hospitallers with their estates. Over the last twenty-five years, historical interest in the Templars in England (using the first three of these sources in particular) has grown, not least through the work of Evelyn Lord, Helen Nicholson, and Philip Slavin. J. Michael Jefferson’s book adds a fresh slant: his is the first detailed study of the Templar estate at a county level. Lincolnshire is an excellent choice, for the Templars had property in 167 communities in the county in 1185, covering 17,531 acres, together with twenty mills and the income from eighteen churches. This is also the first study to trace the fate of former Templar holdings (using the last three sources) from the early fourteenth century through to the middle of the sixteenth century.

The Complete History of the Black Death, by Ole J. Benedictow

Mark Bailey

Pages 1237–1239

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac129

Extract

In 2004, Ole Benedictow published a well-received history of the spread and mortality of the Black Death between 1346 and 1353 throughout the Near East, North Africa and Europe. Since then, scholarship on the pandemic to trump all other known pandemics has burgeoned, which justifies this greatly expanded and extensively rewritten second edition. The latest version begins with relevant background information on the Black Death, such as the epidemiology and clinical features of plague; the history of research into plague; the current state of knowledge about the Justinian plague of the sixth century; and the historical evidence for the presence of rats in human communities. It then provides an exceptionally detailed survey and reconstruction of the chronology and geography of the spread of the disease after 1346 from the Golden Horn to every part of Europe, and finishes with a reassessment of the evidence for the death rates, concluding that 60 per cent of the population perished (most textbooks suggest a figure closer to 40 per cent).

The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture, by Alfred Thomas

Hannah Skoda

Pages 1239–1241

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac153

Extract

This richly illustrated and beautifully produced volume explores the role of Bohemian culture in late fourteenth-century England. John Gower wrote of the ‘newe guise of Beawme’ in his Confessio Amantis, and Alfred Thomas convincingly explores the wider implications of these influences.

Richard II married Anne of Bohemia in 1382, and she died in 1394. Anne was the daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, who had been brought up at the French royal court and who transformed the court at Prague into a centre of art and architecture; her siblings were Elisabeth of Bohemia and Wenceslas IV of Bohemia (also of Germany and Luxembourg). Her grandfather was the cosmopolitan John, count of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia and patron of the poet Guillaume Machaut, and her aunt was Bonne of Luxembourg, who married the man who would become King John II of France; her uncle was the duke of Brabant and, famously, the patron of the poet and chronicler Jean Froissart. One could continue listing these cosmopolitan cultural connections for many lines. As presented here, Anne embodied a truly European culture, stretching from Bohemia to Germany to Italy and France. Thomas is principally interested here in the influence of the flourishing and cosmopolitan Bohemian court, the model of French courtly life, and the imperial connections. He argues that Anne embodied a set of cultural influences which were intertwined with Richard III’s wider political goals: he was interested in imperial claims, worked on the presentation of a form of sacral kingship, and was more interested in culture than war. These observations about Richard’s reign are insightful, though perhaps a little too starkly drawn: the claim that a king might be interested in culture rather than war (repeated for Charles V of France on p. 24) is unnecessarily reductive; Richard’s interest in sacral kingship also has a longer, distinctively English history. Reminding the reader that these were not zero-sum games would not in any way weaken the argument.

Bastard Feudalism, English Society and the Law: The Statutes of Livery, 1390–1520, by Gordon McKelvie

Matthew Ward

Pages 1241–1243

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac133

Extract

One of the concerns for the authorities in the later Middle Ages, particularly in the fifteenth century, was control over retaining and the distribution of livery. A series of statutes is testament to the anxiety caused. This impressive work focuses on the livery legislation of the period, looking at its implementation and effectiveness and examining the wider social and political contexts in the process. In an important contribution to scholarship, Gordon McKelvie has mined the records of King’s Bench for cases of illegal distribution of livery and retaining; his thorough analysis of the litigation is one of the book’s assets. The first part of the book includes a detailed discussion of the livery and retaining system, the livery legislation from the late fourteenth century to the early sixteenth century, and the implementation of the laws in the localities. The second section focuses on wider issues, including the social status of those indicted for illegal livery and retaining (we are reminded that clerics and widows were able to retain and distribute livery) and the geographical distribution of the cases, and a final chapter takes as its topic the urban context. The relationship between law-making at the centre and its effects across the realm is a key issue in the book.

Conciliarism, Humanism and Law: Justifications of Authority and Power, c.1400–c.1520, by Joseph Canning

Thomas M Izbicki

Pages 1243–1244

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac130

Extract

This book is a sequel to Joseph Canning’s Ideas of Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1296–1417 (2011; rev. ante, cxxvii [2012], pp. 1,488–9). The focus here is on questions of the legitimacy of power and authority. The most creative approaches to these questions in the fifteenth century are found in conciliarism and its papalist response, humanism, and law, especially Roman law as found in the systematising work of the Commentators and the more historical humanist jurists.

These questions were addressed using different approaches, often in combination. Fifteenth-century writers knew that power could be abused and that an authority could err; but legitimacy remained a key idea. The question of authority is especially tricky, because it can refer to nature, learned persons or prestigious texts. None of these, not even the Bible, was without complications, including the possibility that an authoritative person, even the pope, might err in their interpretation. Canning also gives due attention to the reception of laws and decrees by a larger populace, the members of the church or of a political community.

La Bibliothèque capitulaire de Reims du XVe au XVIIIe siècle. L’inventaire de 1456–1462 et ses récolements (1470, 1479). L’inventaire de la fin du XVIIe siècle, by Guy Lanoë

Nigel Ramsay

Pages 1245–1246

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac150

Extract

As long ago as 1989, the late Colette Jeudy was at work on an edition of the mid-fifteenth-century inventory of the books of Reims Cathedral: this has now been completed by Guy Lanoë and published by the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes.

The inventory was commenced on 15 April 1456 and completed in 1462, with additions made in 1470 and 1479; the latter brought the total number of entries to 520. The text of this listing forms the kernel of the book (pp. 101–46), far more space naturally being needed to provide identifications of the texts and descriptions of extant books. Almost three-quarters of the inventoried books are today in the public library of Reims, having been removed into the city’s possession in about 1790, and descriptions of these, as well as of survivors that have been located elsewhere, are accompanied by bibliographic notes.

A very summary inventory that was drawn up in 1684 offers a check on losses (and a very few gains): this is printed with a facing-page set of identifications and other notes. Another check is offered in the form of a list of 48 liturgical manuscripts which are in the Reims public library today but which do not feature in the 1456 inventory. These, and yet other lists, are rendered more intelligible by three concordance tables.

The Press and the People: Cheap Print and Society in Scotland, 1500–1785, by Adam Fox

Elizabeth Ewan

Pages 1246–1247

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac149

Extract

Early modern Scotland has long been viewed as an unusually literate society by European standards. While historians have debated the accuracy of this characterisation, until recently less attention has been paid to the types of publications to which ordinary people had access. In the last two decades there has been a growing interest in popular literature, but what has been missing is a full-length study of cheap print in this period. Adam Fox’s excellent book will provide the crucial framework for all future discussions of the topic, both by historians and by scholars of literature and popular culture. He has produced an exhaustively researched study of the Scottish press and its production of cheap print, from the arrival of the printing press in Scotland in the first decade of the sixteenth century to the height of the Scottish Enlightenment. Moreover, as the book’s title indicates, the study goes beyond the press to the people, shedding new light on the prospective audience for these works, and demonstrating how accessible and influential they were for a very large part of Scottish society.

Disability and the Tudors: All the King’s Fools, by Phillipa Vincent-Connolly

Théo Rivière

Pages 1248–1249

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac152

Extract

Disability history is a small but active field. Scholars including Irina Metzler, Elizabeth Bearden and David Turner have contributed greatly to it by addressing topics such as disability in medieval, early modern and industrial England, facial difference, and the notion of otherness. Phillipa Vincent-Connolly inscribes herself within this field with this book, which is an introduction to disability during the first half of the early modern period. Addressed to a more popular audience, Vincent-Connolly’s book debunks common myths about the treatment and perception of physically and mentally impaired early modern people. She steers away from common mainstream history tropes, such as giving more attention to so-called ‘great men’ to the detriment of women and other minorities, and focuses both on the elite and the masses.

This book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter One deals with early modern disability as a concept, and especially the traditions and norms surrounding it. The voices and experiences of early modern disabled people are often elusive: one reason being that early modern contemporaries did not necessarily conceive of disability in the same way we do now. One was not ‘disabled’ but ‘lame’ or a ‘cripple’. Equally, the state of medical knowledge at the time led to diagnoses that few doctors would recognise today. Therefore, we must often read between the lines or rely on unconventional materials. Vincent-Connolly uses paintings, receipts and payment books, letters and armour, as well as legal documents such as wills, proclamations and laws, to draw conclusions as to the lived experiences of early modern disabled people. She also emphasises the power of art in creating and then spreading myths and stereotypes about disability.

Learning Languages in Early Modern England, by John Gallagher

Nicholas Orme

Pages 1249–1251

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab242

The Science and Myth of Galileo between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Europe, ed. Massimo Bucciantini

Anna-Luna Post

Pages 1251–1253

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac147

Extract

This volume, the tenth in the series Galilæana: Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Science, contains the proceedings of a conference held in Florence in January 2020. It brings together thirty contributions in three different languages: about half the contributions are in English, two are in French and the rest are in Italian. Together, the contributions cover a period of four centuries, starting just after Galileo’s death and ending in the twentieth century (the volume thus goes beyond the scope set out in the title). They appear in roughly chronological order, thus presenting an overview of the long-term development of Galileo’s reception in Europe and beyond. Geographically speaking, most of the contributions concentrate on Italy, but there are several contributions on Galileo’s reception in other national contexts as well. Besides France and England, which have been studied in some detail before, Belgium, Spain and China are also covered in this volume. The volume achieves an admirable balance in terms of the temporal scope as well: while the nineteenth century is featured most prominently, readers whose interest lies with the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries will not be disappointed.

The Dutch Republic and the Birth of Modern Advertising, by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree

Christina Brauner

Pages 1253–1255

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac148

Extract

It is a promising and alluring topic: in their study, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the ‘birth of advertising’ in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. They introduce their readers to a fascinating world of information, people and things—a world that proves to be a microcosm of contemporary Dutch society. The authors explain that in some regards, the book itself has grown out of the allure of the topic and material: its first draft was not written with a fully-fledged monograph in mind but was intended to serve as an introduction to the edition of advertisements that the authors have published in the same series (Brill’s Library of the Written Word). The volume at hand sufficiently demonstrates that the topic deserves a book-length treatment and indeed calls for further research, not least in comparative perspective.

The study is based, at its core, on the analysis of advertisements published in Dutch newspapers between 1621 and c.1700, with some chapters moving on well into the eighteenth century. While the few previous studies of early modern advertising are often framed within to the paradigm of the ‘consumer revolution’, Pettegree and Weduwen discuss their subject more specifically within the context of the development of newspapers and the history of the printing world. They not only point out the intimate connections between the book trade and the onset of newspaper advertising but also (even if implicitly) help to challenge the well-worn modernising projections which the ‘consumer revolution’ narrative entails. Advertisements are not only directed to customers and buyers but also address—and probably more often than not in the early days—potential competitors, serving as announcements of business ventures and privileges. Furthermore, unlike the dominant image today, the buyers and customers addressed were not consumers and private individuals but, rather, other merchants or manufacturers. Indeed, retail trade only made a relatively late appearance in the printed world of advertisements (with some exceptions with regard to services and the book trade)—and appeared later in Dutch than in English newspapers.

The Daughters of the First Earl of Cork: Writing Family, Faith, Politics and Place, by Ann-Maria Walsh

Valerie McGowan-Doyle

Pages 1255–1257

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac164

Extract

Women’s writing in early modern Ireland continues to be a richly expanding field, advanced further by Ann-Maria Walsh’s new study of the daughters of the first earl of Cork. Richard Boyle, the first earl, younger son of a landed family in Kent, arrived in Ireland in the late Elizabethan period as part of the New English administrative and military incursion and quickly grew in position, power and wealth, ultimately leading the richest and ‘perhaps the most important family in seventeenth-century Ireland’, becoming perhaps ‘one of the most dominant and highest-achieving families in the three kingdoms’ (pp. 13, 104). Given this rapid rise and prominence, it is unsurprising that Richard, the ‘upstart’ earl, and two of his sons have received considerable attention: Roger as a soldier and playwright and Robert as a scientist. Walsh turns attention to the extensive writings left by generations of Boyle women, including the first earl’s wife, daughters, daughters-in-law and granddaughters, over this period of transition and warfare, highlighting and assessing ‘the contribution those aristocratic Protestant women made to society, politics, religion, medicine, culture [and] history, but also to Ireland’s rich and diverse literary heritage’ (p. 26). Their writing reveals a keen awareness of the family’s power, influence and elite status and, importantly, the women’s active roles in upholding and expanding that position as ‘rich marriageable heiresses, devoted wives, careful mothers, resourceful landowners, faithful servants of the crown and as diligent overseers of a dual landed heritage’ (p. 30). Fundamentally, much of the Boyle women’s writing is also deeply personal and individualised, providing detailed insight into their private lives as well as a highly-developed sensitivity to identity and selfhood in both their formation and representation.

Quakers in the British Atlantic World, c.1660–1800, by Esther Sahle

Carla G Pestana

Pages 1257–1259

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac156

Extract

This work by Esther Sahle does not offer an overview of the Quakers in the British Atlantic, as its title seems to suggest. Rather, its declared purpose is to pursue the question of whether the Society of Friends enjoyed a stellar reputation for honest business dealings that bolstered members’ commercial success. Along the way, it explores the mid-century Quaker Reformation, including areas of reform only tangentially related to its main query.

Max Weber believed that the Quakers stood as an exemplary case of Protestantism’s effect on larger historical changes. When considering northern European development in contrast to southern European stagnation, he underscored Protestantism’s role in creating an ethic of hard work and austerity. Weber famously cited Friends to illustrate this phenomenon. He postulated that an aesthetic of plain living and a commitment to upholding the light of truth through honest dealing aided their business success, causing them to eschew needless consumption and making them attractive trading partners. Others have built on Weber’s theme, explaining Friends’ success with references to the existence of far-flung Quaker networks that facilitated business dealings and to the fact that their Dissenter status limited their career options. Blocked from other pursuits that required university education or the freedom to engage in national governance, they dedicated their energies to commerce instead.

Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England: Essays in Memory of Christopher W. Brooks, ed. Michael Lobban, Joanne Begiato and Adrian Green

Martin Ingram

Pages 1259–1261

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab042

Extract

When Chris Brooks died suddenly in 2014, he was in the midst of preparations to write the volume of the Oxford History of the Laws of England covering the eventful period 1625–1689. He was in a good position to do so. His influential first book, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth (1986; rev. ante, ciii [1988], 122–4), based on herculean labours in the voluminous records of King’s Bench and Common Pleas and in numerous local archives, had established that late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England was characterised by a huge increase in numbers of lawsuits, that much of this litigation was initiated by middling people below the ranks of the gentry, and that it was made possible by a great expansion in the numbers and social role of the ‘lower branch’ of the legal profession, the attorneys. His last major work, Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England (2008), had explored with great erudition the complex of interrelated themes suggested by the title. Another book, co-authored with Peter G. Stein and Richard Helmholz, had addressed the important subject of notaries public in England, while a number of edited volumes and numerous articles had engaged with a variety of issues relating to law, politics, government and society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sadly we shall never know how this impressive, thought-provoking volume of work would have been integrated into his mature vision of the development of English law in the sixty-odd years before 1689. The collection of essays that is the subject of this review does, however, contain some pointers, since the editors have—with some qualms—included two (slightly overlapping) essays by Brooks that were not, as such, designed for publication but rather intended as aids towards working out his major themes. The first muses on what a history of English law might look like viewed in relation to the revolutionary developments of 1640–60 and 1688–90. Identifying numerous changes and developments too diverse to summarise here, Brooks highlighted the fact that the partisan politics of the Restoration period were corrosive of the influence of the judiciary at a time when, for other reasons, the legal culture associated with the Inns of Court was in decline. But since, in his view, so many far-reaching changes had occurred before 1640, the civil wars can hardly be seen as a watershed. The second essay, which Brooks saw as the blueprint for yet another book, addresses the relationship between religion and law. The main theme is relations between the spiritual and temporal powers as they unfolded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular reference to the complexities of the Restoration period. More generally, Brooks was struck by how little theology or divinity featured in everyday professional legal thought, however pious or religiously committed individual lawyers might be.

Blood, Land, and Power: The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility and Lineages in the Early Modern Period, by Manuel Perez-Garcia

Grace E Coolidge

Pages 1261–1263

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac151

Extract

Manuel Perez-Garcia’s book presents a microhistory that uses the study of an elite oligarchy in Murcia to reveal the social, political, economic and cultural structures of noble families and Murcian society. By tracing two families’ ascent to power and influence over the course of the entire early modern period and into the nineteenth century, Perez-Garcia is able to reveal the strategies used by the Riquelme and Fontes y Paz lineages to gain and keep power. Starting with the importance of the reconquest for establishing lineage and collecting glory and honour in the late Middle Ages, Perez-Garcia moves on to analyse how these families navigated difficult partisan politics and issues of honour and purity of blood to establish themselves securely as part of Murcia’s oligarchy. Once established, these families used political and social ties (especially the arranged marriage) to consolidate their elite position and strategically practised entail (mayorazgo) to advance their economic prospects. These strategies were so successful that their lineages remained wealthy and powerful even after the use of entail was outlawed in 1844.

La grandezza delle capitali nel dibattito dei riformatori illuministi: Napoli, Parigi, Londra, by Giorgio Simoncini

John Robertson

Pages 1263–1264

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac162

Extract

The debate over the size of Europe’s rapidly growing capital cities was one of the most interesting of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two capitals which had grown most rapidly were Paris and London: both are estimated to have had more than 500,000 inhabitants by 1700, though London had surged ahead by 1800. In third place came Naples, Europe’s largest city in the sixteenth century, which remained strikingly populous despite being ravaged by plague in 1656; by the 1730s, when it became the capital of an independent kingdom, its population was once again close to 300,000. (If anything, as Jan de Vries showed in European Urbanization 1500–1800 [1984], Naples was an exception to all patterns across this period, a genuine historical puzzle.) Debate prompted by such growth was increasingly grounded in political economy, and intersected with other issues high on the intellectual agenda in the eighteenth century, notably the luxury question. Contributors included economic writers, philosophers, social commentators, government officials, urban designers and architects, many of them associated with the Enlightenment. The classic treatment of the debate, focused on Naples but covering contributions from Paris, London and elsewhere, remains Franco Venturi’s 1971 essay, ‘Napoli capitale nel pensiero dei riformatori illuministi’, in Volume VIII of the Storia di Napoli.

Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain, by Ross Carroll

Kate Davison

Pages 1264–1266

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac136

Extract

Historians have long been interested in the laughter of the past: the subjects that people saw fit to laugh at can provide a window into historical cultures like no other. In recent years, however, there has been growing attention to the act of laughing itself, how it has been understood in the past, and what its effects might have been. Ross Carroll’s book follows this line of inquiry, exploring debates in eighteenth-century Britain about the practice of ridicule, that is, the uses and abuses of laughing at something or someone. The focus is at the level of intellectual and philosophical debate, as Carroll mines the writings—published and unpublished—of some of the period’s leading thinkers, beginning with the third earl of Shaftesbury and concluding with Mary Wollstonecraft. This is particularly fertile ground: as Carroll argues, the eighteenth century ‘saw philosophical scrutiny of the subject rise to a pitch and intensity rarely matched before or since’ (p. 2). Time and again, ridicule was celebrated as a tool of critique and inquiry, though it never entirely shook its latent potential to foster contempt and fractiousness. None of those who advocated the use of ridicule did so without reservation and ambivalence is a theme throughout. As the introductory chapter makes clear, Carroll is writing for political theorists: he casts the book as ‘an exercise in historical recovery’ (p. 19), which is intended to shed light on present-day concerns about civility (or lack of) in public debate and the effects of reaching for ridicule in this context. Yet, there is plenty here, too, for those whose primary concern is historical, and especially those whose interests lie in eighteenth-century Britain. Carroll makes a convincing case that this ‘Age of Reason’ was also an ‘Age of Ridicule’ in which laughter was a prominent part of enlightenment intellectual culture.

Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the Eighteenth-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order, by John Shovlin

Gregory Mole

Pages 1266–1268

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac163

Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire, by Sujit Sivasundaram

P J Marshall

Pages 1268–1270

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac160

Extract

This book declares its ambitions in unequivocal terms on its first page. It will bring together for the turbulent and transformative years between the later eighteenth century and the 1840s the histories of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, ‘often forgotten in the histories that are told in the West’, and it will ‘cast’ them as ‘the makers of world history and the modern condition’.

So mammoth an undertaking requires studies of a great variety of peoples who lived by or travelled across these two vast masses of water in a huge geographical ark from the Cape of Good Hope and the Persian Gulf in the west to the islands of the south Pacific in the east. Sujit Sivasundaram rises to the challenge, writing with authority about the Arabs of the Gulf, the Khoikhoi and Khoisan of the Cape, seafaring Indian people, such as Parsi shipowners and lascar seamen, Burmese who lived by the great rivers of Myanmar, the Bugis Malays of south-east Asia, the Aboriginals of Australia and the island peoples of New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga and Hawai’i. His great theme is about how such people shaped their own histories, albeit with increasing difficulty as they came under mounting pressure from Europeans, who traded, ‘explored’, fought one another and ultimately established colonies of settlement and political dominion around the oceans. The telling of so many different histories required massive reading and the fruitful quarrying of archives in Africa, Asia and Australasia, as well as in Europe.

To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII, by Ambrogio A. Caiani

Sean Heath

Pages 1270–1272

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac138

Extract

As Napoleon raises the crown in Jacques-Louis David’s iconic painting of the 1804 coronation, Pope Pius VII lifts his right hand in a sign of benediction. Ambrogio Caiani’s superb book provides both a new assessment of the relations between these two men, rarely as harmonious as the painting would suggest, and a deeper examination of church–state struggles in the revolutionary era.

After a chapter detailing the religious upheavals of the 1790s in France, Caiani provides a chronological narrative of the relationship between pope and emperor. There are chapters on the papal election of 1799–1800, the 1801 Concordat, the imperial coronation, the French annexation of Rome and various disputes that marked the period of Pius’s imprisonment down to the reversal of fortune in 1814–15, when Napoleon was deposed and Pius restored. At the book’s heart are questions that occupied both men. How could religious stability be re-established in France? And what should the Catholic Church’s role be in the post-revolutionary era?

Debauched, Desperate, Deranged: Women Who Killed, London, 1674–1913, by Carolyn A. Conley

Anna Cusack

Pages 1272–1273

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac141

Extract

‘Once in every seven years the British people go mad from a sudden excess of virtue. A great criminal system is suddenly discovered … and then a victim is demanded. The scapegoat is sent howling into the wilderness as offering for the sins of the people who have not been found out, and then the virtuous people of England go to sleep again for another seven years’. This pattern was pointed out by the South London Chronicle of 8 October 1870 and is quoted by Carolyn A. Conley in her book, which examines the motivations, actions and victims of female perpetrators of murder over a period of about 240 years. Using the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Conley traces the stories of 1,408 women who were charged with homicide. In the introduction, she points out that, throughout the period, ‘the weapons were usually whatever was readily to hand and women most often killed accidentally or impulsively’. This may have been a commonality in these homicides, but there were also clear, changing patterns in who was killed, when and why, and the resulting punishment, along with whether this punishment was carried to fruition, transmuted or abandoned.

Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories, ed. Boyd Cothran, Joan Judge and Adrian Shubert

Marian Füssel

Pages 1274–1275

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac143

Extract

Since antiquity, women with weapons as combatants in armed conflicts have posed particular challenges to male-dominated gender hierarchies. A common method of taming these challenges is to style the woman warrior as an ‘exception’, which makes clear how things should actually be ‘normally’ and at the same time opens up potential for the exaggeration and political instrumentalisation of these individual cases. The political exploitation of women warriors in the age of nation-building was particularly dynamic on a global scale, as this volume, edited by Boyd Cothran, Joan Judge and Adrian Shubert, impressively demonstrates. In a very sensible introduction, the editors set an ambitious agenda for the global history of martial heroines. Two aspects seem to me to be of particular significance. One is its view of global circulations, which includes transfers from the Western world to the non-Western world; from the colonial world to the West; and exchanges both within the West and between non-Western locations. Thus the contributors consistently practise global history as ‘entangled history’, not merely as a cumulative stringing together of case-studies. The second is its reference to the specific dynamics of circulation of different media, which takes into account phenomena of cross-mediality and intermediality.

Teaching Britain: Elementary Teachers and the State of the Everyday, 1846–1906, by Christopher Bischof

Stephen Heathorn

Pages 1275–1277,

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab021

Extract

In a series of eight, brisk chapters studded with telling examples, Christopher Bischof takes the reader through the process of becoming an elementary schoolteacher in Victorian England and Scotland, from their experiences as pupil teachers, though training college, onto the job market and into assistant teaching positions, and towards the dream of landing an elusive head teacher placement. The book examines teachers’ ‘everyday’ school experience, their self-fashioning of professional and social status in often financially straitened circumstances, their holiday travel, the gulf between rural and urban teaching situations, and their interventions into political debates about education. The view presented is a much more generous and optimistic view of elementary teachers than scholars of Victorian culture are typically used to; it is very much a view of teachers of which they themselves would have approved. Bischof’s teachers thumb their noses at their superiors and flout the rules in training college; they scrimp and save so that they can travel around the country (and occasionally around the world) to observe and improve their own knowledge; they satirise the absurdities of the educational code in their everyday log-book entries; they view themselves as on the frontlines of social improvement when teaching in schools in slum areas; they saved lives by speaking out during the ‘overpressure’ controversy of the 1880s.

Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: A Global Perspective, ed. Ronald Kroeze, Pol Dalmau and Frédéric Monier

Ian Cawood

Pages 1277–1279

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac159

Extract

The study of corruption in modern societies in European historiography has only recently managed to escape from the confines of national frameworks. This welcome new direction was led by a special edition of the Journal of Modern European History in 2013 which successfully identified that the central hypothesis under debate should be whether there was ‘a shift in debates on and perceptions of corruption … somewhere during the “long nineteenth century” as a result of modernisation processes’ (P. Wagenaar, T. Kerkhoff and R. Kroeze, ‘Conclusion’, Corruption and the Rise of Modern Politics, special issue of the Journal of Modern European History, xi [2013], p. 132). Ronald Kroeze then joined the five-year European Union research project ‘Anticorruption Policies Revisited: Global Trends and European Responses to the Rise of Corruption (ANTICORRP)’, which resulted in the publication of Anti-Corruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (2018; rev. ante, cxxxiv [2019], pp. 1,373–4). This collection itself is probably the best comparative account of the historical problem of corruption published to date, but it largely overlooked one crucial factor in the studies of modern western states—the significance of imperialism as a force promoting or repressing corrupt behaviour among public officials.

Parnell and his Times, ed. Joep Leerssen

Conor Morrissey

Pages 1279–1280

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac158

Extract

Few individuals have had such an outsized influence on Irish history as Charles Stewart Parnell, who dominated Home Rule politics in Ireland from the creation of the Land League in 1879 until his death in 1891. Parnell’s austere, complex personality has consistently excited the interest of biographers. The true impact of his death has consistently intrigued biographers and the party split which preceded it—for William Butler Yeats, famously, the impetus behind the cultural turn in Irish nationalism, leading to rebellion in 1916 and all that followed—continues to provoke debate. Joep Leerssen’s absorbing volume provides a wide variety of perspectives on Parnell, his era and his legacy. Indeed, the focus is at least as much on Parnell’s ‘times’ as it is on the man itself; the contributors—historians and literary scholars of Ireland—have all previously held the Parnell Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Those who focus on the broader Parnellite era and the decades thereafter include Raymond Gillespie, who surveys the religious groups active in Ireland in 1891, and highlights the presence of minor, neglected groups, including Mormons, Brethren and Christian Israelites. Angela Bourke, in discussing the Galway storyteller Éamon a Búrc and the period around the end of the Land War, shows how folklore sources can enhance our understanding of the rural Irish past. Nicholas Canny argues that scholars of the literary revival have paid insufficient attention to the genre of history-writing: his chapter focuses on histories of Irish counties produced during the Parnell era. The content of these works may surprise: some authors, Canny finds, were concerned not to heighten tensions, but to reduce them: they sought to ‘escape from the harsh realities of their own time by writing histories of their respective counties which they hoped would … foster communal harmony’ (p. 172). Claire Connolly discusses sea crossings in Irish culture; Terence Brown writes evocatively about modernism and early twentieth-century Belfast. In a memorable contribution, the late David Fitzpatrick takes aim at commemoration culture. ‘As public interest fades’, he argues, ‘conscientious scholars may revert to their proper function as cautiously revisionist critics and blushing subverters of accepted wisdom, for which their reward will be academic acclaim, public indifference, and a sense of selfless virtue’ (p. 286).

Vienna’s ‘Respectable’ Antisemites: A Study of the Christian Social Movement, by Michael Carter-Sinclair

Tim Kirk

Pages 1280–1282

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac139

Extract

Austria’s Christian Social Movement has been in many ways the most successful political machine of the country’s modern history. It emerged in the late nineteenth century alongside other examples of political Catholicism in Italy, Germany and elsewhere and, as in other parts of Catholic Europe, it has mutated, since the first end of the Second World War, into the country’s ‘mainstream’ centre-right conservative party: the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP). Michael Carter-Sinclair’s meticulously researched and very readable monograph is a political history of the Christian Social Party (CSP) and its relationship with the Church from its origins as a new kind of political machine in late nineteenth-century Vienna to its mutation into the Fatherland Front in the 1930s, set within the broader framework of Austria’s political history from the fin de siècle to fascism. Its argument, broadly, is that the extent and impact of the party’s antisemitism has been understated, both in accounts of the party’s emergence and rise to political power in Vienna before the First World War, and during the inter-war years, when the party only grudgingly accepted political democracy, and then only until its slender parliamentary majority was threatened by shifting political allegiances. The perspective is very much from below, particularly for the movement’s early years, and is based on a wide range of archival sources ranging from police files and diocesan records to parish chronicles, and contemporary publications, above all press reports.

Enemies in the Empire: Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War, by Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi

Brian K Feltman

Pages 1282–1284

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac157

Extract

After the First World War began in the summer of 1914, hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austro-Hungarians living throughout the British Empire found themselves increasingly persecuted, marginalised and, ultimately, interned as ‘enemy aliens’. Although First World War civilian internment in England has received considerable attention in recent years, this book is the first to approach internment from an imperial perspective. Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi employ a methodology that privileges ego-documents and considers how internment affected both those women held alongside their husbands and those forced to fend for themselves outside the camps. The authors convincingly argue that the British Empire took the lead in establishing civilian internment as one of the defining features of twentieth-century warfare. In doing so, they demonstrate how policies emanating from London influenced the handling of enemy civilians throughout the empire.

German-speaking migrants were widely spread throughout the British Empire, with only the Irish constituting a larger percentage of the immigrant population. Manz and Panayi stress that the British Empire’s German populations were far from apolitical. They were visible, nationalist and sought recognition for the contributions they believed they had made to their new homelands. Germanophobia was consequently present before 1914 and with the onset of war, especially following the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, it reached new heights. Anti-German sentiment culminated in internment policies that began in London and spread throughout the empire. Focusing on transportation hubs and the movement of internees, Manz and Panayi reveal that, while internment began as a ‘schizophrenic’ (p. 162) policy in Britain, the camps that were set up in various national locations became part of a network that effectively isolated German-speakers and neutralised their perceived threats to the Empire’s security.

On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World, by Kathryn Ciancia

Tatiana Zhurzhenko

Pages 1284–1286

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac140

Extract

Throughout the last century, Volhynia was an ultimate Eastern European borderland: a site of competing nationalising projects, a territory with ‘fluid’ borders redrawn through military conflicts and major diplomatic deals, and a victim-intense place which due to the mass atrocities of the Second World War eventually lost its multicultural character. A province of the Russian Empire since the partitions of Poland, in the inter-war period it became part of the Polish state, was later annexed by the Soviet Union and finally found itself in the independent Ukrainian state in 1991. Compared to neighbouring Galicia, a former province of the Habsburg Empire with an otherwise similar historical fate, Volhynia has received little attention from academic historians. This book by Kathryn Ciancia partly fills this gap by addressing the inter-war period in the region’s history. It offers a convincing and nuanced account of the Polish state’s efforts to integrate and modernise the former Russian imperial province with its ethnically heterogeneous population. Much more than a study of regional history, the book provides a bottom-up perspective on nation-building and modernisation projects in the multi-ethnic periphery of a newly established state seeking to secure its place in the highly unstable inter-war European order.

Lawyers for the Poor: Legal Advice, Voluntary Action and Citizenship in England, 1890–1990, by Kate Bradley

Pat Thane

Pages 1286–1288

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab107

Making Officers out of Gentlemen: Military Institution-Building in India, c.1900–1960, by Vipul Dutta

Steven Wilkinson

Pages 1288–1290

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac144

Reluctant Cold Warriors: Economists and National Security, by Vladimir Kontorovich

Martin Daunton

Pages 1290–1292

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab020

Extract

Vladimir Kontorovich’s book sets a puzzle: why did Sovietology—here defined narrowly as the study of the Soviet economy—ignore the Soviet Union’s capacity to produce advanced weapon systems and military capacity? At first sight, his puzzle does not seem credible. Sovietology was part of the American response to the Cold War, which clearly involved an arms race and the response of the American ‘military industrial complex’. Could economists specialising in the Soviet economy miss something that was so glaringly obvious to anyone with even the most superficial grasp of geopolitics?

Kontorovich proves, with meticulous bibliometric analysis of their writings, that the Sovietologists indeed paid scant attention to the military sector. He points out that the sector formed a separate economy which was unusually large and successful, amounting to a war economy in times of peace. Instead, they substituted a ‘contrived civilian’ interpretation that ‘civilianised’ sectors with military significance. They failed to grasp the fundamental character of the Soviet economy. Hence textbooks on the Soviet economy had 136 chapters on the civilian sector and only eight on the military; research volumes had no chapters on the military sector; only one of more than 200 articles on the Soviet economy in general economics journals dealt with the military sector, and not one of 126 articles in area-studies journals. It is a damning indictment of the work of American Sovietology.

Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956–91: A Different History, by Rustam Alexander

Dan Healey

Pages 1292–1294

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac137

Extract

How did the Soviet authorities approach the problem of homosexuality after Stalin’s death? In this rich and insightful investigation, Rustam Alexander looks at the ways in which Soviet experts and officials confronted the issue of same-sex relations in a range of social settings. The post-1953 Soviet social landscape was in flux: Stalin’s forced-labour camps (the ‘Gulag’) were being scaled down and reformed, while leaders opened a range of legal, social and economic questions to fresh inquiry that stimulated new voices. As Alexander demonstrates, homosexuality was one of the questions that de-Stalinisers under Khrushchev and neo-Stalinists under Brezhnev contended with, if mostly behind closed doors: it was not the totally taboo subject of common perception, but one that troubled penal officials, pedagogues, medical, juridical and police experts.

This well-written monograph is divided into five chapters that illuminate specific Soviet debates about male and female homosexuality, based on official archives, published and unpublished studies, and private professional archives. Alexander’s resourcefulness in assembling these materials from Russian state, institutional and private collections is extraordinary, and the novelty of these sources makes the book essential reading. Alexander applies four major lenses to his analysis of these materials to make significant interventions in the history of sexuality and in Soviet histories.

Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in Divided Germany, by Marcel Thomas

Jan Palmowski

Pages 1294–1295

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac161

Extract

How can we explain why, despite living on opposite sides of the iron curtain for forty years, Germans never seriously questioned unification once it became possible in 1990, and since? What was it that connected Germans during the forty years of division, across the systemic differences that evolved in two very different ideological systems? While we now have a rich understanding of everyday German lives in communities on both sides of the inner German border, Marcel Thomas examines two localities far from this inner German border, and from each other. Neukirch in Saxony (GDR) and Ebersbach in Baden-Württemberg (FRG) were large industrial villages in 1945, with no apparent connection. This enables Thomas to ask more generally how villagers experienced the transformations of the subsequent decades, during and after the division of Germany.

While many of the events Thomas observes were specific to the societies and political systems in which these villages were embedded, the experiences themselves, and the meanings ascribed to them, bore remarkable similarities. For instance, Thomas shows persuasively how villages became an important forum for citizens to engage in the transformation of their social and economic contexts. In Neukirch, locals used the language of fostering self-sufficiency and a commitment to Heimat (homeland) against the functionaries’ plans to drive a new street through allotment plots. Similarly, they successfully achieved the construction of a leisure resort around a local lake, the Valtentalsee. In Ebersbach, too, locals took matters into their own hands to protest against local functionaries’ inaction in quietening local traffic—forcing politicians to act. And here, Thomas also unearths a bottom-up initiative to construct a youth centre, again forcing initially reluctant politicians to act. In both political systems, local contexts became important spaces for individuals to maximise their opportunities for agency within their respective political systems.

The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany, by Craig Griffiths

Josh Armstrong

Pages 1296–1297

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac146

Extract

It is complicated. Or rather: it is ambivalent. In this outstanding book, Craig Griffiths tells the story of 1970s West German gay liberation in all its messy, kaleidoscopic complexity, arguing convincingly that ambivalence is the essential characteristic of gay liberation and its actors in the West German 1970s. Yet, while his focus is on the intricacy of his object of enquiry, Griffiths’ book is clear, precise, persuasive and deeply researched, offering a comprehensive overview of the multifaceted history of gay liberation: the watershed moment of legal reform in 1969 (and again in 1973); the emergence of gay liberation and Rosa von Praunheim’s seminal 1971 film Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt; gay liberation and the alternative left; the significance of the pink triangle for contemporary activists; and debates around masculinities and homosexuality as well as the affective elements of liberation. The book both enriches the specific field of queer German history and directly situates the lives of gay men within the broader history of the Bundesrepublik, arguing implicitly that a history of one is incomplete without the other. This is one major accomplishment of Griffiths’s book; another is according historical gay men the dignity of reading and presenting their histories in the nuanced complexity that characterises them, thereby giving voice to important narratives that have generally been omitted from mainstream historiographies.

Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985, by Rob Waters

A S Francis

Pages 1297–1299

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab016

Extract

Focusing on a period of intense global movements for revolutionary change, Rob Waters’s book traces the frontline role played by Black people in the reconfiguration of British politics and culture between the 1960s and the 1980s. During these decades, what we today call ‘Black British’ culture was forged by young radical people of African and Caribbean descent. Its many elements not only inspired the directions of Britain’s tapestry of various youth and countercultures of the late twentieth century, but also changed the climate of British popular culture in a way that has been sustained into the present. The many mediums in which Black British culture were expressed were defined by an awareness of historical struggles against colonialism, and by anti-racist and socialist vigour. Waters argues that, for young Black activists of the time, Blackness permeated every aspect of their day-to-day activities to become a lifestyle, as ‘the worlds of pleasure, politics and reading were never separate’ (p. 85). Yet, every so often throughout the text, and particularly in the book’s first and second chapters, Black Britons become peripheral and secondary characters in their own history. This can be seen in Waters’s use of the visits of Black American thinkers and activists such as Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin and Dick Gregory, as opening scenes. Waters uses their visits to London during the mid- to late 1960s as a backdrop to describing the emergence of this new era of Black radicalism in Britain. Although Waters himself argues that Britain’s Black activists ‘did not suddenly come into activism after American activists visited British shores’ (p. 36), the book’s structure implies that the only way to understand this history is through an Americanised introduction. Despite leaning into this common tendency, Waters does also highlight the significant work undertaken by young British-based Black activists in developing ‘Blackness’ as an identity relevant to their specific realities. It was not simply imported from the US, but forged by a generation of young activists who, unlike many Black political organisers who had preceded them, were heavily entrenched in Britain’s developing ‘multicultural’ makeup.

Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, ed. Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews

Erika Denise Edwards

Pages 1300–1302

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceaa290

Extract

This is a long overdue anthology which confirms that the field of Afro-Latin American Studies has emerged and is here to stay. In general, these essays focus on geographical areas that have a large and visible black population, which makes Brazil and Cuba the main concentration of the book. This is largely reflective of the field of study thus far, and each essay provides a literature review of the various themes that encompass Afro-Latin American studies, which editors Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews define as ‘the study of people of African ancestry in Latin America’ and ‘the study of the larger societies in which those people live’. Through the course of fifteen chapters, organised chronologically, the editors provide a multi-disciplinary assessment of the field that will leave readers astounded with the depth and concentration of work on Afro-Latin America.

Divided into four themes, ‘Inequalities’, ‘Politics’, ‘Culture’ and ‘Transnational Spaces’, this anthology makes two major inventions that are addressed throughout. First, it puts the colonial period into conversation with the present day. In other words, colonial legacies such as racial categories and, most importantly, slavery are crucial to our understanding of post-emancipation Afro-Latin America. Each chapter traces the development of their particular subject-matter which provides some context for non-experts. Second, each essay provides a ‘take away’ that allows the reader to know where the particular theme, as it relates to Afro-Latin America, is headed. This should be commended, as it encourages the reader to see that the field is constantly growing, despite gaps in the literature. These gaps have forced the contributors to this anthology to rethink source material, to draw comparisons between black and Indian advocacy and activism, and to recognise that it is no longer possible to ignore black women’s efforts in the formation of Afro-Latin America.