glancy2Just back from the other side – no, not a near death experience, but a quick visit to the almost finished new look IHR! There’s a smell of fresh paint, the books are in place, and the librarians have the thousand-yard stares that come with weeks of twelve-hour days spent calculating shelf yardage. For more on the move see David’s blog post here: http://blog.history.ac.uk/2014/08/library-move-under-way/ – and we’re due to reopen on Monday…

Anyway, life continues all the same for us on the mezzanine floor, and we start our reviews this week with Mark Glancy’s Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present. Jonathan Stubbs and the author discuss a book which is likely to be enjoyed and admired by a wide readership (no. 1646, with response here).

We then have a nice cluster of early modern reviews for you to enjoy, starting with The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, edited by Allyson M. Poska, Jane Couchman and Katherine A. McIver. Alice Ferron finds this book provides a truly inter-disciplinary review of historiography pertaining to the study of early modern women in Western Europe (no. 1645).

Next we turn to David Loewenstein’s Treacherous Faith: The Spector of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. David Manning believes this book highlights some of the perils of both cultural history and interdisciplinary scholarship between literary and historical studies (no. 1644).

Finally Sara Wolfson reviews Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England by Kevin Sharpe, a volume which is an essential read for scholars working on the history of political culture, and a fitting representation of a distinguished career (no. 1643).