My only, very slight, complaint about Jane Austen’s England is its somewhat misleading title. Roy and Lesley Adkins mention Austen regularly throughout the book, using her letters and novels as sources for sketching the social life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 1549 letter to Calvin, Bucer sketched his hierarchy of loyalties. It’s one of the great statements of Protestant Catholicity: His aim, he said, was “most fullyto consent, first, with the Lord himself and the Holy Spirit, then also with thetrue and orthodox Church of primitive . . . . Continue Reading »
In a chapter of her Eating Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality , Alice Julier compares Emily Post’s instructions for “formal dinners” and Martha Stewart’s concept of “entertaining.” Much has changed in between. For starters, Post insists that “formal . . . . Continue Reading »
Bucer’s teaching on justification is sometimes characterized as a doctrine of “double justification.” Brian Lugioyo thinks this is a misidentification ( Martin Bucer’s Doctrine of Justification: Reformation Theology and Early Modern Irenicism ): Double justification posits . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter Brown gives thumbs up to Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity : “Not only does it measure the exact nature of the tension between the familiar and the deeply unfamiliar that lies behind our image of the sexual morality . . . . Continue Reading »
Tom Lodge’s Mandela: A Critical Life does a good job of explaining the mythical, iconic attraction that Mandela attained, and finds its roots in Mandela’s upbringing, his legal training, and the deliberate effort to present him as the face of a new Africa. Lodge writes, “Mandelas . . . . Continue Reading »
Sharing a meal seems like an egalitarian, democratic sacrament. Alice Julier thinks not, and argues in her Eating Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality that food practices have built-in hierarchies. In her TLS review of the book, Fran Bigman points out that “Although affluent hosts talk . . . . Continue Reading »
Virginia Postrel is the insightful author of a number of works of cultural analysis, including The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness and The FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress . . . . . Continue Reading »
Caroline Webber reviews Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof in the NYTBR . You thought it was just a musical? Think again. Solomon’s book “explores not only the making of the musical, but also the way the show reflects evolving Jewish . . . . Continue Reading »
Michel Delon’s recently translated The Libertine: The Art of Love in Eighteenth-Century France examines one of the main cultural values of eighteenth-century France. It documents, in the words of the NYTBR reviewer, “the dazzling breadth and depth of the 18th-century obsession with . . . . Continue Reading »
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