Review of Romain Fathi, The Red Cross’s Public Health Turn. The Cannes Medical Conference of 1919 and the Origins of the League of Red Cross Societies (London: Anthem, 2025), reviewed by Benan Grams
Review of Guido Abbattista, Ethnic Expositions in Italy, 1880 to 1940. Humans on Exhibition (London: Routledge, 2024), reviewed by Hélène Blais
Review of Cesare Santus, Jean-Pascal Gay, Laurent Tatarenko, eds, The Inquisition and the Christian East (1350–1850), Woodbridge and Rochester: Durham University IMEMS Press, 2025, reviewed by Bernard Heyberger
Review of Şen, A. Tunç, Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600, Standford: Standford University Press, 2025, reviewed by Jakub Ochocinski
Review of Guy de Brès, Le Baston de la Foy chrestienne, ed. Wilhelmus H. Th. Moehn, Geneva: Droz, 2024, reviewed by Paul-Alexis Mellet
Mercedes García-Arenal has been a leading force in rethinking the role of religious minorities in early modern Iberia and Europe, showing how conversion, polemics, messianism, and practices of reading shaped Jewish, Christian, and Muslim identities across the Mediterranean and beyond. Based at the CSIC of Madrid, she has devoted much of her research to Morisco history, inquisitorial documentation, and the fabrication of sacred origins. Her work is marked by a sustained reflection on method: the weighing of sources, the competing perspectives embedded in them, and the need to read documents through the eyes of both inquisitors and their victims, Muslims and Christians, power and devotion. Among her most influential books are A Man of Three Worlds (1999, with Gerard Wiegers) and The Orient in Spain (2013, with Fernando Rodríguez Mediano). She has led two ERC projects on religious conversions and on the place of the Qur’an in European history.
Review of Joan-Pau Rubiés and Neil Safier, eds, Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, reviewed by Laszlo Kontler
Review of Benedetta Chizzolini, Between Cure and Control: Doctors, Convicts, and Slaves in Tuscan and Papal Galleys (16th–18th Centuries) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025), reviewed by Giovanni Tarantino
The following article examines the reception of news from the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War within the Italian periodical press. It aims to demonstrate not only that, despite the formal neutrality of the Italian states, there was significant interest in unfolding events, but above all that the American scenario was of great interest. It was understood as an integral part of the conflict, whose outcomes also influenced events in Europe, rather than merely as a peripheral appendage. This reflects a deeper and more nuanced contemporary understanding of the war's dynamics.
Review of Sandra H. Dudley, Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond: Loss, Liminality and Hopeful Encounters, London: Routledge, 2021, reviewed by Beatrice Falcucci
The author proposes an approach to the symbolic and emotional meanings invested in paper through time, by briefly focusing on two dimensions of paper mobility: a larger dimension related to international paper trade, documenting the circulation of imported paper in Portugal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a smaller scale one, focusing on the vital importance of paper circulation in a relatively small group of people formed of family members, relatives, clients and protectors. These aspects are contextualised by providing a brief overview of the history of paper production, trade and consumption in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Review of Elisa Frei, Early Modern Litterae Indipetae for the East Indies, Leiden: Brill, 2023, by Ines G. Županov
Montesquieu's drafts and letters constitute a conspicuous archive among French Enlightment's written heritage. Studying their material features requires an appropriate methodology, to identify which papers were used and how the philosopher handled them to write some of his major works. An inventory of the different paper types was carried out following the CNRS platform 'MUSE' codicological protocol. Comparing different papers used in Paris and Bordeaux allows understanding the interactions of numerous amanuenses with the writer, who lived and worked in both places, and sheds light on the complex writing process of L'Esprit des Lois. This study enhances the validity of applying an adapted codicological protocol to modern drafts.
Review of Hugo Martins, The Portuguese Jews of Hamburg: The History of a Merchant Community in the Seventeenth Century, Leiden: Brill, 2024, reviewed by Matt Goldish
Review of Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Ilaria Berti, and Omar Svriz-Wucherer, eds, American Globalization, 1492–1850. Trans-Cultural Consumption in Spanish Latin America, New York: Routledge, 2022, reviewed by Luis Alfredo De La Peña Jiménez
Escaping poverty through education, work, and moral and religious instruction – this was the goal of the Normal Schools for spinsters, founded in Florence by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo in 1778. The Leopoldine Schools introduced a new approach to welfare for women: secular, state-run, and aimed at preventing poverty – instead of remedying it through charity or confinement – through the training of useful citizens who contributed to the state’s welfare. The institution aimed to enable their cultural and professional development of poor girls, thereby granting them an active role in society and a new sense of personal and social worth. While their education conformed to a specific ideal of womanhood and was shaped by a vision imposed from above, the Leopoldine Schools represented an innovation in eighteenth-century Italy, given their secular nature and their focus on improving the condition of women and the poor within a civic and eudemonistic perspective.
Review of Mónica Bolufer, Laura Guinot-Ferri, Carolina Blutrach, eds, Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth CenturyWomen Across Borders, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, reviewed by Rocío Quispe Agnoli
Analysing six-plus printed Jesuit narratives describing the conversion of Muslim (‘Turkish’ and ‘Moorish’) slaves in early modern Naples, this article considers the Jesuit use of publicity and diverse forms of accommodation, including the use of dreams, attention to the sick and dying, spectacularity, featuring Christianity as a surrogate family, and distributing religious tokens, toward the ends of conversion. Jesuits also developed methods to recall converts who threatened to return to their home country and original faith, including drafting a rather unorthodox document which, testifying to a Christian status, was meant to protect converts from the incursions of the Inquisition when they returned from the Dar-al-Islam to Christian lands.
Alastair Hamilton has transformed the study of how early modern Europe came to know—and misread—the Christian East and Islam. After influential work on the Radical Reformation, he turned to European Arabic learning and to the Christian communities of the Arabic-speaking world, tracing the traffic of ideas between Europe and the Middle East through translation, confessional polemic, and collecting. His books, including The Copts and the West, 1439–1822 (2006) and Arabs and Arabists (2021), reconstruct the worlds of Arabists and Eastern Christians where scholarship, devotion, and rivalry were entangled. Across these studies he examines how sources are weighed, apocrypha and forgeries sifted, and enduring illusions produced. Hamilton has taught at Urbino, Leiden, Amsterdam, London and Cairo, spent many years at the Warburg Institute, and edits Brill’s series ‘The History of Oriental Studies’. He is currently completing a book on Western Christians and mosques.
Review of Stefano Villani, Making Italy Anglican. Why the Book of Common Prayer Was Translated into Italian, New York: Oxford University Press, 2022, reviewed by Marco Fratini
