More interesting book reviews from Speculum
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Mick Aston and Chris Gerrard, Interpreting the English Village: Landscape and Community at Shapwick, Somerset. Oxford: Windgather Press, 2013. Paper. Pp. xiii, 456; 233 black-and-white and color figures and maps. £25. ISBN: 978-1-90511-945-5.
Terry Barry
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1083 - 1084
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415002146 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance. (Jewish Culture and Contexts.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 334; 17 black-and-white figures and 4 tables. $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4640-7.
Renée Levine Melammed
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1085 - 1086
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415002432 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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Carlo Beltrame, Sauro Gelichi, and Igor Miholjek, eds., Sveti Pavao Shipwreck: A 16th Century Venetian Merchantman from Mljet, Croatia. With Italian and Croatian Abstracts. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2014. Paper. Pp. vii, 180; many black-and-white and color figures and 2 charts. $60. ISBN: 978-1-78297-706-3.
Kiril Petkov
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1086 - 1087
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415001992 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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Patricia Blessing, Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240-1330. (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies.) Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. xxiii, 240; 73 black-and-white and 10 color figures and 3 maps. $109.95. ISBN: 978-1-4724-2406-8.
Colin Imber
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1089 - 1090
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415002419 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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"I read this book as someone with no expertise as an architectural historian and only the haziest knowledge of the history of Anatolia before or after the Mongol victory over the Seljuk sultan at Kösedağ in 1243. My only qualification as a reviewer was a longstanding admiration for the monuments of central and eastern Anatolia surviving from the Seljuk and post-Seljuk periods. What I was seeking, therefore, was a historical outline sufficient to provide a context for the buildings, some details of patronage and patrons, an account of building types and building materials, and a description of each building that would increase both my technical understanding and aesthetic appreciation.
The book is a success on all these counts. "
Philip Butterworth, Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 272; 9 black-and-white figures and 1 frontispiece. $99. ISBN: 978-1-107-01548-7.
Tom Bishop
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1092 - 1093
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415001724 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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Joan Cadden, Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe. (The Middle Ages Series.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. 327; 8 black-and-white figures. $85. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4537-0.
Wolfgang P. Mueller
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1093 - 1095
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415002286 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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"From his exposition of Problemata 4.26, the central figure of the book, Pietro d’Abano emerges as a strong proponent of the idea that male homosexuality rests on physiological causes (chapter 1, 35-72), consciously opposing (see chapter 2, 73-105) the medical authority of Avicenna (d. 1098) who taught in his Canon that nurture, or habit, and not nature was responsible for the development of homoerotic leanings. All the more, Pietro had reason to furnish a bluntly physiological description of the condition, faithfully in line with the paradigms of humoral pathology professors like him imparted in lectures at the faculties of medicine, and to deny any possibility of treatment. Simultaneously, he was indebted to broader cultural influences when he associated homosexuals reflexively and in a pejorative sense with women, female passivity and physical deformity, and a voracious sexual appetite (chapter 3, 106-38), and by wondering whether his plea in favor of homosexuality as brought on by natural causes might excuse the affected males from moral condemnation, if not by theologians, so at least within the philosophical context of Aristotelian ethics (chapter 4, 139-75)."
Carleton W. Carroll and Lois Hawley Wilson, eds. and trans., The Medieval Shepherd: Jean de Brie's “Le Bon Berger” (1379). (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 424.) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. Pp. ix, 226. $50. ISBN: 978-0-86698-472-0.
Christine M. Rose
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1098 - 1099
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415002031 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
[ abstract ]
"Le bon berger is a late fourteenth-century Middle-French manual on sheep husbandry, one of the most important economic activities of the Middle Ages. The editors note that Le bon berger represents the sole written testimonial to the practical aspects of sheep raising from the period. This how-to guide, alleged to have been dictated by shepherd Jean de Brie, underscores the economic significance of sheep, first of all for their wool, but, increasingly, for the hides necessary for parchment making. Carroll and Wilson present a critical edition with a facing-page English translation of Jean's informative and charming treatise."
Sean Gilsdorf, The Favor of Friends: Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe. (Early Middle Ages 23.) Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. Pp. xv, 210; 6 black-and-white figures and 1 table. $135. ISBN: 978-90-04-26458-8.
David S. Bachrach
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1116 - 1118
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415002122 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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Azélina Jaboulet-Vercherre, The Physician, the Drinker, and the Drunk: Wine's Uses and Abuses in Late Medieval Natural Philosophy. (Bibliothèque d’Histoire Culturelle du Moyen Âge 14.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Paper. Pp. 277. €80. ISBN: 978-2-503-55279-8.
Steven P. Marrone
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1121 - 1122
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415002262 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner, and Anne E. Lester, eds., Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. Pp. xxvi, 304; 8 black-and-white figures and 2 maps. $156. ISBN: 978-90-04-24359-0.
Geoffrey Koziol
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1123 - 1124
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415001931 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
[ abstract ]
Of particular interest due to its treatments of Jewish-Christian relations
Catherine M. Jones, An Introduction to the Chansons de Geste. (New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions.) Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. Pp. xvi, 218. $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-8130-4989-2.
Michel-André Bossy
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1124 - 1125
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415001736 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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William Chester Jordan, From England to France: Felony and Exile in the High Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. x, 223. $39.50. ISBN: 978-0-691-16495-3.
Sean L. Field
Speculum , Volume 90 , Issue 04 , October 2015, pp 1127 - 1129
doi: 10.1017/S0038713415001803 (About doi) Published Online on 13th October 2015
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