Books Received

Aschenbrenner, Nathanael and Jake Ransohoff, eds. The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2021. xviii, 457p., ill., index. Thirteen essays on the uses by post-1453 Western scholars of Byzantium as a foil of cultural decadence, early Christian practices, anti-Ottoman ethnography, and despotism.

Benes, Tuska. The Rebirth of Revelation: German Theology in an Age of Reason and History, 1750–1850. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2022. 354p., bibl., ill., index, $75. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish from Lessing, Benedikt Sattler, and Moses Mendelssohn to Feuerbach, Joseph Kleutgen, and Abraham Geiger.

Berger, Stefan. History and Identity: How Historical Theory Shapes Historical Practice. New York: Cambridge UP, 2022. xii, 493p., bibl., ill., index. The new historiographies, cultural, gender, memory, material, transnational.

Byrd, Brandon, Leslie M. Alexander, and Russell Rickford, eds. Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2022. xix, 295p., ill. Seventeen essays on slavery and exploitation, abolitionism, internationalism, protest and power, and poetics in the digital age.

Cermatori, Joseph. Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2021. xxii, 298p., bibl., ill., index. Avant-gardists, 1875–1935, theorize and restage seventeenth-century spectacles of ostentation.

Coates, John. Kipling the Trickster: Knowingness, Practical Jokes and the Use of Superior Knowledge in Kipling's Short Stories. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021. ix, 281p., bibl., index. The moral values implicit in Kipling's characters.

Davis, John. Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2022. x, 588p., bibl., ill., index, $39.95. Sixteen episodes on youth culture, fashion exports, labor, markets, and tourism.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. Leo Africanus Discovers Comedy: Theatre and Poetry Across the Mediterranean. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2021. 225p., bibl., ill., index, $39.95. Early sixteenth-century Moroccan diplomat deploys Averroes's commentary on Aristotle's Poetics to interpret Italian drama.

Gauchet, Marcel. Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most. Trans. Malcolm DeBevoise. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2022. xxii, 199p., index, $35. An inability to reconcile political human rights with the political need to construct a world together.

Guldi, Jo. The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2022. 577p., ill., index, $40. A global narrative of land redistribution and small-scale agriculture for justice and alleviation of poverty in the post-colonial era.

Huff, Peter A. Atheism and Agnosticism: Exploring the Issues. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2021. xxxiii, 245p., bibl., index, $40. Sixty three-page topical entries, mostly people, some historical ("Darwin").

Macekura, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2020. 317p., bibl., ill., index, $27.50. Mid-twentieth-century dissent against Gross Domestic Product.

Masroori, Cyrus, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen, eds. Persia and the Enlightenment. Liverpool: Liverpool UP and Voltaire Foundation (Oxford), 2021. 273p., bibl., index. Nine essays on eighteenth-century perspectives and uses of Persia, mostly French.

Nash, Penelope. The Spirituality of Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Quaderni di Matildica, 1. Bologna: Pàtron, 2021. 109p., bibl., index, €16. Personal piety and papal strategy during the Investiture Controversy, 1073–1115.

Owensby, Brian P. New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2022. xv, 378p., bibl., ill., index. Seventeenth-century Europeans introduce the pursuit of individual material self-interest to an indigenous South American society based on reciprocal gift-giving.

Parry, Jonathan. Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2022. xxi, 453p., bibl., index, $45. The British secure overland access to India through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War.

Porter, James I. Homer: The Very Idea. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2021. xiv, 277p., bibl., ill., index, $27.50. As concept or historical personage in ancient literature and eighteenth and nineteenth-century scholarship.

Saller, Richard P. Pliny's Roman Economy: Natural History, Innovation, and Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2022. viii, 198p., bibl., index, $35. Neoliberalism in antiquity.

Saussy, Haun. The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2022. 181p., index, $35. The pre-1850 translation of a few literary works into Chinese at the ignoring of many others as evidence of pluralism in Chinese cultural and literary history.

Shortall, Sarah. Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2021. 338p., ill., index. Dissenting Jesuit and Dominican nouveaux théologiens deploy bland doctrinal statements as coded resistance against both fascism and communism.

Specter, Matthew. The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought between Germany and the United States. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2022. xiii, 321p., bibl., index. Empire and power in Carl Schmitt, Wilhelm Grewe, and Hans Morgenthau during the world wars and the Cold War.

Verburgt, Lukas M. John Venn: A Life in Logic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2022. xxiii, 411p., bibl., ill., index. The biography behind the diagrams.

Vedal, Nathan. The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge. New York: Columbia UP, 2022. 321p., bibl., ill., index, $35. "Philology" as involving practices of mental training, speaking, and singing in a quest for a universal language, 1368–1644.

Wolcott, Victoria W. Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2022. ix, 262p., ill., index. Labor, communitarianism, interracialism, and pacifism in the twentieth-century Christian Left.