Original Reviews

          It is hard to reconcile the importance that nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and other spices played in history with those dusty bottles that occupy our spice racks. But Paul Freedman’s book attests to the fondness of the European privileged classes for spices in the medieval and early modern periods.
          Used to give a pronounced taste [...]

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          Thirty years ago an ancient codex was discovered by an Egyptian villager in a cave south of Cairo. The manuscript contained several early Christian texts, including the Gospel of Judas. Carbon dating of the manuscript suggested that it was produced around 280 A.D. We know that the Gospel of Judas was at least a [...]

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          In 1688 William of Orange handed on the southern coast of England with and marched on London with 15,000 troups. He was occupying the ‘vacant’ crown of England after James II had ‘abdicated.’ William’s claim to the English crown was through both his wife Mary, James’ daughter by his first marriage, and William’s mother, [...]

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          Phillip Dwyer carries the career of Napoleon Bonaparte up to the coup d’état in 1799 that brought him to power as first consul. Dwyer is critical of Napoleon, even his generalship. He is dismantling a reputation that, to a great extent, Napoleon himself constructed. Napoleon was a self-promoter, par excellence.
          He was also good [...]

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          Marvelous Possessions is a meditation on the ways that sixteenth-century Europeans thought about the inhabitants of the new world. The initial response of marvel and admiration was transmuted, Stephen Greenblatt contends, to a need to possess, to appropriate. To explain that transmutation, he does a close reading of late medieval and Renaissance travel accounts, [...]

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