Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials

"Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials is by Marion Gibson, Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter. This is a very easy way into a tough topic and the book is very informative and nicely done. Sadly, it also remains highly relevant: I’ve recently got involved in local politics, and though only a few women run as candidates where I live in West Oxfordshire, two have already been called witches on social media. Of global history books out this spring, there’s The World of Sugar by Dutch historian Ulbe Bosma . It covers the history of the sweet stuff, first produced in granulated form in the 6th century BC, but not a huge commodity until more than two millennia later. This is not a quirky book about a single commodity in the style of Mark Kurlansky , but very much a reckoning with sugar. As he points out early on, two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic went to sugar plantations. He writes, “The ubiquity of sugar tells us about progress but also reveals a darker story of human exploitation, racism, obesity, and environmental destruction. Since sugar is a relatively recent phenomenon, we have not yet learned how to control it and bring it back to what it once was: a sweet luxury.” For a lighter read there’s A Little History of Music , in one of my favourite series, the Yale University Press Littles Histories series . In principle, the series is aimed at young adults, and this book opens with the basic question: “What is music?” Also out now is Revolutionary Spring, a new book by Christopher Clark , author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 , a book that made waves with its analysis of the outbreak of World War I. In Revolutionary Spring, Clarke takes on the revolutions that spread across Europe in 1848. These are the revolutions from which ‘the Arab Spring’ would take its name, and, like its namesake, things did not go well for the revolutionaries. This is a doorstopper of a book, so not one to take on for a quick read, though well worth pursuing if you like long history books. Also in European history, there is a new book on the Franco-Prussian war, Bismarck’s War by Rachel Chrastil, a professor of history at Xavier University. If a grisly story of adventure on the high seas is what you’re after, David Grann, writer of wonderful tales of narrative nonfiction, had a new book out in May: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder about an 18th-century British man-of-war which was shipwrecked off Patagonia. For a new coffee table book , there’s Ancient Rome: The Definitive Visual History . Two University of Oxford academics, Andrew James Sillett and Matthew Nicholls, consulted on the book. Nicholls specializes in 3D digital reconstruction of ancient Rome. The book starts in 753 BCE and goes through to the death of the last emperor in the West, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 CE. There is also some coverage of the Byzantine Empire, including Justinian’s legal code."