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 [...]