Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa By Anthony Grafton. Belknap Press, 2023. Hardcover, 304 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. “Dame Frances Yates” is a name that usually does not cross the lips of the educated public. However, in the field of...
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...
"The first question, and perhaps the most pressing one when reviewing a book by @McCormickProf, is this: Even in the comparatively small world of intellectual conservatism, is there anything George isn’t doing?" - R. McKay Stangler in @ubookman
"Nonetheless, admittedly indirect evidence has been put forth, evidence which at least suggests that Hoover might have been inadvertently onto something when he successfully proposed replacing the notion of a relatively quick “panic” with something more drawn out, maybe even