Back working from home this week, as the elongated summer occupation of my flat by relatives and their children has been temporarily lifted. There’s nothing like the prospect of returning to a house full of sugar-fuelled nine-year olds to make the IHR suddenly seem more attractive. Sadly the respite is brief, even now my phone buzzes with news of this afternoon’s arrivals. Perhaps moving to the seaside may have been an error…
Right, enough moaning about people being nice enough to visit, and on with this week’s offerings. We start with Steven Jones’ The Emergence of the Digital Humanities – James Baker and the author discuss a volume which has plenty to offer every historian (no. 1634, with response here).
Next up is Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Intimate Intellectual and Public Lives, edited by Katie Barclay and Deborah Simonton. Catriona Macleod reckons this to be a rich and engaging work with some excellent contributions that will reward all with an interest in gender history in Scotland and beyond (no. 1633).
Then we turn to John Appleby’s Women and English Piracy, 1540-1720: Partners and Victims of Crime, which Daniel Lange judges to be a well written, insightful, and long-overdue study of the various roles women played as supporters and accessories of pirates (no. 1632).
Finally we have The Favor of Friends: Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe by Sean Gilsdorf. Levi Roach finds this to be an example of charter scholarship at its finest, combining diplomatic precision and rigour with a strong sense of the broader socio-political significance of the practices examined (no. 1631).