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Book Review
Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera
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...

Book Review
Embattled Nation: Canada's Wartime Election of 1917
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...

Book Review
Women Religious Crossing between Cloister and the World: Nunneries in Europe and the Americas, ca. 1200–1700
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...

Book Review
Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750: From the Priorate of the Guilds to the End of the Medici Grand Duchy
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...

Book Review
Humsafar: The World of Urdu Poetry
“Humsafar” is an Urdu word which means "companion." True to its name, this book acts as a friend to guide the audience through the complex world of Urdu poetry. Hitesh Gupta Aadil is an Urdu language and literature enthusiast and translator...

Book Review
The Lost Queen: The Surprising Life of Catherine of Braganza―the Forgotten Queen Who Bridged Two Worlds
British author, Sophie Shorland, a former Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, takes a very friendly approach to describe the difficult life of King Charles II's Queen Consort, the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza. Shorland's audience...

Book Review
Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions
From the outbreak of war in the 13 British North American colonies in 1775 to the conflicts that erupted throughout the Spanish New World colonies in the 1810s, revolutions convulsed the Atlantic World for half a century. The power and consequences...

Book Review
The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century
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...

Book Review
The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, Virginia Postrel expertly demonstrates how the history of textiles is the story of human progress. Although textiles have shaped society in many ways, their central role in the development...

Book Review
Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome an Empire of Wine
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...