Are you looking for a new Boydell & Brewer book this month? Check out some of the highlights published this month. Don’t forget, you can purchase any of these titles with a 35% discount, find out more below!
Jennifer Lofkrantz
Covering a broad temporal and geographic area from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, including present-day Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Morocco, this study explores questions such as who was and wasn’t a Muslim? How could and should Islamic law be implemented? What rights and protections were recognized for freeborn Muslims? What role did governments play in ensuring those rights, especially during a time when slavery was legal?
Based on research conducted mostly in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and France and on Arabic-, French-, and English-language archival sources, treatises, personal correspondence, oral sources and testimony, biographical data, travel reports, and early colonial documents.
Cultures of Remembrance in a Paper Armory
Chassica Kirchhoff
The Thun-Hohenstein album is a bound collection of drawings by professional book painters, depicting some of the most artistically and technologically innovative armours of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it is one of our most important sources for knowledge of armour and fighting technique from the period. This lavishly-illustrated book examines its history, and analyses its drawings, bringing out the light they shed on such matters as tournaments, fighting practice, and martial culture; it also aims to show the complex visual language of the armour.
A Study of Influence
Rebecca Schmid
Focusing on works that represent different phases of Kurt Weill’s career, Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence explores how the composer’s innovations in music theatre laid the groundwork for operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein. Comparative analysis reveals how Weill’s opera reform catalyzed a movement toward sophisticated music theatre in America, coinciding with a renaissance of his German-period works. Rebecca Schmid’s study focuses on works by Weill that demonstrate Weill’s mission to renew opera, evolving from Die Dreigroschenoper to Lady in the Dark and Street Scene.
Edited and translated by Juliet Perkins and Philip Krummrich
Translated by Clive Willis, Iona McCleery, Francisco Fernandes and Shirley Clarke
Until now, the chronicles of Fernão Lopes (c.1380-c.1460) have only been available in critical editions or partial translations; these volumes represent the first complete English translation of these major chronicles of medieval Europe. Comparable to the works of Froissart in France or López de Ayala in Spain, the chronicles provide a wealth of detail on late fourteenth-century politics, diplomacy, warfare, economic matters, courtly society, queenship and noble women, as well as concerns about food, health and a fluctuating currency. The chronicles provide an invaluable source for the history of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages. The first four volumes are accompanied by introductions and bibliographies setting the translations in context, and the fifth volume contains a general bibliography and a comprehensive general index of the chronicles.
Brian Yothers
The poetry of transatlantic abolitionism represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today.
7 Books to Read on Maritime History