Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power By Leah Redmond Chang. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023. Hardcover, 512 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. In the Anglophone world, there is one (and only one) Renaissance queen: Elizabeth Tudor....
Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company, 1550-1650 By David Howarth. Yale University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 480 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. One of the most popular phrases among Marxists during the long reign of Barack H. Obama was...
Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena By James Hankins. Harvard University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 448 pages, $55. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. We live in a Neo-Machiavellian age. Gone are the “End of History”...
Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500 By Peter H. Wilson. Belknap Press, 2023. Hardcover, 976 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be...
Rome and America: Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging By Dean Hammer. Cambridge University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 262 pages, $110.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. Since its inception, America has been many things, but, in a certain sense, it has always...
Catholic or Nothing
Adam Schwartz on "Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century" by Melanie McDonagh. @yalepress