Book Reviews

Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, penned by the retired art historian Jonathan Max Bloom from Boston College, offers a comprehensive exploration of the prominence of paper in Islamic history and its...

Susan Elizabeth Ramírez’s In Praise of the Ancestors book underlines the fact that besides collective memories, the modern world’s sense of history is based primarily on written records stored in archives around the world. This book seeks...

Each chapter of the book examines key developments in time and space across Medieval Europe, starting and ending in Ravenna, Italy. It covers: the late Western Roman Empire the Byzantine Empire, the Goths, Anglo-Saxon Britain...

Gülhan Balsoy is a professor of history at Istanbul Bilgi University. The book is a revised and rewritten version of Balsoy’s PhD thesis. The book's five chapters respectively focus on the history and transformation of midwifery, abortion...

In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica 1750-86 is a detailed account of the life of Thomas Thistlewood, an Englishman who moved to Jamaica in the mid-18th century and became a plantation overseer and later a small-scale landowner...

Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years by Paula Fredriksen conveys precisely written ideas from the result of meticulously analyzing a great deal of historical data. Different branches of Christianity emerged simultaneously...

The Silk Road may have carried the world’s most luxurious fabrics for trade, but it was paved with horses’ hooves. From the Bronze Age to the 20th century, the empires of China, Persia, India, and Mongolia conquered astride the backs of horses...

The key purpose of Melissa Reynolds's first book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, is to explore how readers interacted with texts and manuscripts related to natural knowledge and how the readers...

Victorian literature often presents the two matching pieces of the same artefact – expressed and implied. Naturally, any work of literature written in this period carries traces of the obscure and intertwined. In Notework, Simon Reader draws...

The presence of women in positions of power has consistently captivated individuals, and the reign of Eleanor of Aquitaine is a prime example of this phenomenon. Born in 1122, she was a prominent medieval queen who held power in both France...