Book Reviews

George Hardin Brown, the noted Stanford University medievalist and expert on Bede the Venerable, died at the age of 90 in 2021.  He had spent his entire adult life studying [...]

  For more than eighteen centuries, paper was made with rags — such as old clothes, sails and ropes — the same way it had first been fashioned in China.  [...]

In The Bible and Poetry, published last year, Michael Edwards warned against the temptation to paraphrase the Bible. An English-born French poet and scholar, Edwards noted that much of the [...]

Florence at the end of the fifteenth century could be a dangerous place to have religious opinions. Girolamo Savonarola, an ascetic Dominican friar, won great praise and power by preaching [...]

It is noteworthy that readers of What Maisie Knew by Henry James don’t get a look at Maisie for most of the 1897 novel. All of the action is seen [...]

Near the end of his 2015 book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University, notes: One of the odd facts about the [...]

  I read Humphrey Carpenter’s 1980 biography of Jesus with a great deal of admiration at his earnestness and chutzpah. In his preface, Carpenter notes that the modest book (95 [...]

The hardcover edition of Mike Dash’s 2002 Batavia’s Graveyard has no subtitle.  But, to attract potential buyers, these words are at the top of the dustjacket: THE TRUE STORY OF [...]

If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning [...]

As someone who writes books, I felt a pang of empathy for Scott W. Berg when I heard that he’d published in September a new book about the Great Chicago [...]