This is a really fascinating translation of a collection of thirteenth century Italian medical texts. Monica Green does an excellent job of demonstrating that what scholars long thought was one text was in fact an amalgamation of three different works on women's health—one of which, indeed, was likely written by a woman, the eponymous Trotta. The introduction is insightful and does a good job of explaining to the reader the medical theories which underlay the procedures which the Trotula texts describe. The texts themselves make for fascinating reading—though, with their descriptions of prolapsed wombs, vaginal pessaries, and the various medical usages of fox penis and hare uterus, I've rarely been so glad to enjoy the benefits of 21st century medical technology.

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In The Wealth of Wives, Hanawalt examines women in 14th and 15th century London in terms of their economic activities and opportunities. Hanawalt's argument is that women had an economic importance which has previously gone unrecognised—that they were "conduits of capital" because of the money and property that passed through their hands as participants of the consumer economy, as small traders, but most particularly as heirs, and as recipients of dowry and dower. The laws of dower and inheritance which developed in London were different to those of much of continental Europe, and so encouraged the development of "horizontal" rather than "vertical" inheritance of wealth, with property circulating among a particular social grouping rather than passing along patriarchal primogeniture lineages.

Hanawalt's study is based on careful examination of a wide swathe of records, largely legal, and she has a good eye for the illustrative example which is tempered by an awareness that an anecdote can only be extrapolated so far. There are a couple of moments where the editing has gone a little awry—one individual's dates of marriage and death are over a hundred years apart, which seems unlikely—and there are occasionally sentences which make one blink a little, like "The figures on age are few and come from cases in ecclesiastical courts, but they indicate that young women tended to be in their late teens or early twenties." (186) I get what she means here, but it's also unintentionally amusing.

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This is a useful survey of American involvement in Afghanistan since 2001, if one which didn't surprise me with any of its analyses. The main reasons for the insurgency in Afghanistan were the Bush administration largely ignoring it once the Iraq invasion began, the historically low troop levels, and the wariness of various NATO members to commit forces outside of urban areas like Kabul. The thing which Jones covered that was most interesting to me was his analysis of the wider regional politics and Pakistan's involvement in the insurgency. Obviously, this has become much better known since In the Graveyard of Empires was published, with Osama bin Laden's killing making the ISI's involvement self-evident, but the behind-the-scenes stuff was fascinating.

I do wish that Jones had brought a little more of his own personal experiences in Afghanistan to play in this book. He states that he sat down to write it because of his various trips there and because of the unique access that he had to key players, but there were few moments where I really got a sense of that. Most of the book felt like a synthesis that could have been written from anywhere in the US. More moments from Jones' personal perspective would have helped to ground his analysis and give it more immediacy for the reader. As is, there are times when this reads a little too much like a briefing packet.

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This book begins with an intriguing premise: an elderly mother of four grown-up children vanishes while on a trip to Seoul. As her children begin to look for her, they realise that they have no recent photos of her mother, that their seemingly mild-mannered mother may have done things they know nothing about, and that indeed they may not know their mother well at all. However, by the halfway point all of the suspense has vanished, replaced by maudlin sentimentality that's wielded with all the subtlety of a Hallmark movie. The epilogue in particular is cloyingly awful, and frankly I could do with never again reading a book that dwells lovingly on how awful single, childless daughters with a career are. Meh.

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This is a really fascinating collection of poetry written by Iberian Jews over a period of some five hundred years, many of them translated into English for the first time by Peter Cole. His translations are a nice balance of lively and (so far as I can tell) respect towards the original phrasing, and are supported by informative introductions about each poet and by copious notes. The Dream of the Poem is perhaps not a book to read straight through, cover to cover—some of the themes are quite repetitive and many of the poems don't appeal to my particular sensibilities. Every now and then, however, you get something which manages to retain its power even now:

Behold, blood is the name of your soul, and ink the name of your spirit [...]
For I knew my soul was dwelling in the redness as blood
and my spirit was dwelling in the blackness as ink
And there raged a war in my heart between
the blood and ink: the blood from the wind
and the ink from dust, and the black ink
over the blood was victorious...

As something to dip into over a period of time, however, this collection is pretty ideal, and of course is definitely worth looking into if you have a particular interest in the period.

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Another solid installment in the series. It's not great literature, but that's not the point with the Phryne Fisher series, really. The plot was decently twisty in this one (albeit with one huge coincidence of the eye-roll-inducing variety), but there was one moment which really gave me pause. I can buy that Phryne's reactions to events are atypical—the woman was a nurse in the Great War, so her idea of a great and traumatic event isn't everyone's—but I did blink at seeing that she (and the whole household!) slept soundly while one particular thing is unfolding here. There's pragmatism and then there's "I can't buy this from anyone."

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This is a really interesting look at how people in the early medieval West (concentrating on regions largely lying within modern France) understood and expressed emotions. Rosenwein argues against the usual dismissal of emotive words in early hagiographical or theological texts are mere topoi—stock language which was used by rote whether or not it was "genuine"—and claims instead that use of emotive language varies greatly according to a whole host of factors: political, religious, literary, etc. Since she's dealing with 6th-8th century Francia, the range of sources she has to draw on is not large, and Rosenwein is explicit about the caveats which much attach to her work. Indeed, some of her examples—for instance, looking at funerary epitaphs from three cities in central and eastern Francia—do not entirely convince. However, overall this is an extremely interesting book which opens up the potential for new ways of thinking about hagiographies in particular, and which also introduced me to some fascinating theorists I'd not heard of before who work with the history of emotions.

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This is a pretty solid, though brief, overview of the history of Jews in medieval England. Mundill's strongest when he's dealing with the legal and financial interactions of English Jews and Christians, particularly as he has quite a solid body of evidence to deal with. I'm not sure I quite understand all the various forms of financial interaction that were possible, but I think that's due less to Mundill's writing and more to my lack of a mathematical brain.

However, The King's Jews is much weaker when it comes to social/cultural history, both because of a much smaller amount of evidence and because it seems outside of Mundill's comfort zone. His methodology when using narrative sources is suspect (hagiographical texts cannot be used unquestioningly as historical sources!) and some of the conclusions he draws seemingly at odds with the evidence. For instance, after quoting from a bitingly anti-semitic letter by Robert Grosseteste, Mundill says "Grosseteste had a firm but enlightened attitude towards the Jews." Bwuh? There are also several typesetting errors, and something goes badly wrong with numbering the footnotes in one of the chapters.

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R.W. Southern was a doyen of medieval history, and as such his Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages remains a good introduction to the development of ecclesiastical institutions in Western Europe. Southern writes well, never talks down to the reader, and he had a great knack for summing up a movement or an order in a deceptively simple yet revealing sentence or two. A vast reading in chronicles and cartularies is displayed in the wide range of (sometimes obscure) anecdotes which he used to illustrate his work. Of course, this is still a book conceived and largely written in the 1960s, and its ages shows in a number of aspects—women are shunted off to a small section near the end, there is talk of the end of the early medieval golden age for women religious, etc. Many of his statements about women's religion, and indeed how Southern approaches the church-as-institution have been challenged, if not overturned, by more recent scholarship. Recommended, but with reservations.

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This is a really magisterial overview of the US Civil War, especially when one considers the sheer amount of material that McPherson compresses down into less than a thousand pages. I was left longing for coverage of other aspects of the war—what women were doing; the social impact; more things from an African-American perspective—but McPherson clearly set out to write the political and military history of the war, and in that he succeeds triumphantly. It's clearly a work of synthesis—my impression was that the majority even of his quotes from primary sources came from other secondary sources—but McPherson seems to have weighed them all well, and he gives arguments, ideologies and actions from both North and South their due. As a non-American, I started this book with only a sketchy knowledge of the war's events, but finished it both with a much better understanding of how it has shaped modern America (and indeed modern Americans' conceptions of their country) and firmly convinced that the cause of the war was slavery, not states' rights. Highly recommended.

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