Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 4 of 4 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Lost in Leipzig

Alexander Bevilacqua: Forgotten Thinkers, 29 June 2023

Knowledge Lost: A New View of Early Modern Intellectual History 
by Martin Mulsow, translated by H.C. Erik Midelfort.
Princeton, 434 pp., £35, January, 978 0 691 20865 7
Show More
Show More
... To devote our life to authorship,’ Isaac D’Israeli wrote, ‘is not the true means of improving our happiness or our fortune.’ In Calamities of Authors (1812), he chronicled the lives of writers he considered at once ‘the most honoured, and the least remunerated’. Some of these men of letters were ‘driven to madness by indigence and insult’; others ‘died of overstudy’, suffered from melancholy or were exposed to public ridicule ...

Not a Prophet

Alexander Bevilacqua: Black Jewish Messiah?, 18 July 2024

Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The 16th-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East and Europe 
by Alan Verskin.
Stanford, 189 pp., £23.99, January 2023, 978 1 5036 3443 5
Show More
Show More
... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next. In the wake of Martin Luther’s censure of the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire was deeply divided ...

Friend or Food?

Alexander Bevilacqua, 14 December 2023

The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 
by Marcy Norton.
Harvard, 419 pp., £33.95, January, 978 0 674 73752 5
Show More
The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding and Race in the Renaissance 
by Mackenzie Cooley.
Chicago, 353 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 226 82228 0
Show More
Show More
... Under​ what circumstances would you eat your pet? For Jean de Léry, a 16th-century French missionary, this wasn’t a hypothetical question. During a treacherous Atlantic crossing from Brazil to Europe, with supplies running low, some of his fellow passengers killed and ate their monkeys and parrots when hunger struck. Others waited until they had almost starved before putting their pets ‘into the cabinet of their memory ...

Misrepresentations

Dmitri Levitin: The Islamic Enlightenment, 22 November 2018

The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment 
by Alexander Bevilacqua.
Harvard, 340 pp., £25.95, February 2018, 978 0 674 97592 7
Show More
The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle between Faith and Reason 
by Christopher de Bellaigue.
Vintage, 404 pp., £10.99, February 2018, 978 0 09 957870 3
Show More
Show More
... was short, widely available and accessible to any European man or woman who could read Latin. As Alexander Bevilacqua shows in his erudite and eloquent book The Republic of Arabic Letters, Reiske was just one of a number of European scholars in the hundred years or so after 1650 who devoted a good deal of their time to learning Arabic and other Near ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences