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“... over-confident in a French sort of way, it is learned and readable, and beautifully translated by Lydia Cochrane. It covers the ground from the classics to now, but its focus is early modern, with the emphasis less on the Reformation than on the Renaissance which, he says, produced a crisis of conscience about suicide around 1600 (thus ...”

“... on female literacy, appeared too late to be included. The essays, almost impeccably translated by Lydia Cochrane, are concerned in the main with Florence, or at any rate Tuscany, from about 1300 to about 1530, and they deal with such topics as female celibacy, marriage, motherhood, wet-nursing, widowhood, the difference between the experience of ...”

“... Confusion between myth and historical reality has long plagued medieval scholarship, and nothing illustrates this better than the question of the so-called droit de cuissage, which is the subject of Alain Boureau’s book. Known to the Anglophone world in its 19th-century Latin form as the jus primae noctis (a prudish rewriting of the French), the droit de cuissage stipulated the seigniorial lord’s right to deflower newly married brides on his domain ...”

“... Giovanni Levi’s Inheriting Power bears a generic resemblance to those recent historical studies that illuminate the lives of European peasants by isolating and reconstructing a single resonant story. The best of these microhistories – Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre – succeed in making their stories what Kenneth Burke calls ‘representative anecdotes’, reflections of reality that are inevitably selections of reality ...”

“... As Saul Bellow once wrote, we have a problem talking about Mozart. It is the fear of having to contemplate transcendence and being embarrassed by something for which we have no vocabulary. To make matters worse, Mozart composed sublime music but, in contrast to Beethoven, had the wrong personality for sublimity, being prone to clowning and lavatory humour ...”