Book Reviews

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...

Hendrik Hartog's Nobody’s Boy and His Pals is about one of the little-known social reformers of the United States, Jack Robbins. This book provides an engaging account of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic and its legacy. Boys’ Brotherhood Republic...

Sarah Kay is a prolific writer on medieval European literature and the arts. The concept of song as logos and phone (text plus music) is most apparent in medieval song, where not only the performance of the song but its presentation in the...

Patrice Dutil and David MacKenzie provide a detailed and well-researched account of Canada's political and social landscape during World War I, focusing on the 1917 election and the issue of conscription. The book is commendable for its extensive...

Women Religious Crossing Between Cloister and the World: Nunneries in Europe and the Americas, ca. 1200-1700 is the result of a collaborative research project focused on the relationships between women and the “religious.” Edited by art historian...

As the title indicates, this book presents the music composed and performed in Florence during its most prolific and productive time: from the Middle Ages to the end of the Baroque. This 500-year time capsule saw Florence as a politically...

To Nicholas Dames, the "chapter" has become a silent, invisible metronome of our lives. Beginning as an index for Latin encyclopedias and Greek legal codes, this simple tool for dividing text has spread far beyond its basic indexical function...

Caroline Cheung, an assistant professor of Classics at Princeton University, seeks to fill a rather large gap in the scholarship of the ancient Roman wine trade by centering the storage vessels themselves, the dolia (sing. dolium). Historically...

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer is a sweeping and well-researched work that endeavours to present a coherent narrative of ancient history from its earliest beginnings to...

Written in engaging language, Smoke and Ashes is a scholarly follow-up to the author’s famous Ibis trilogy, a collection of fiction that uses the opium trade as its backdrop. In Smoke and Ashes, the author draws on his years-long research...