Teach Yourself Palaeography

Claire Jarvis • £17.99
thehistorypress.co.uk

This claims to be the very first ‘teach yourself’ book on palaeography, covering all the skills that the genealogist needs to read any document that might be found at any date in English archives.

Using a series of graded exercises in transcription, Teach Yourself Palaeography works backwards in time in easy stages from the modern handwriting of the 19th century to the court hands of the medieval period, focusing on records that are of particular interest to family and local historians.

The book provides a unique, self-contained reference guide to palaeography, and to all the different letter forms, symbols and abbreviations that have ever been used in English records.

The Making of England From Rome to Reformation

Toby Purser • £22.99
amberley-books.com

The Making of England places the history of early England firmly within the European sphere of influence. It draws upon the latest multidisciplinary research and debates from science, archaeology, literature and documentary evidence, with an eye on contemporary concerns and perceptions of English history. Toby Purser demonstrates the impact of the continuous continental interaction across the period c. 410 to 1534 in the shaping of England, from the early pan-Germanic to the Scandinavian, Norman-French, Angevin and Gascon.

Crucially, there was no inevitability in the emergence of a single, unified state in the Anglo-Saxon period and after 1066 the English state was bound to continental possessions by trade or war. Baronial rebellion, not popular demand, led to the devolution of powers from the Crown via Magna Carta and parliament, but this was not part of a manifest destiny ‒ of ‘exceptional’ English freedom.

Literacy and learning was exclusively Christian, to the detriment of pagan cultures and achievements, and thus the first historians wrote only from a singular perspective, that of the Christian supremacy. English culture was subsumed into the new Norman hegemony, along with attempts to rewrite or obliterate Welsh, Scottish and Irish history. This book will make you think again about what it means to be English.

A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research

Dale DeBakcsy • £20
pen-and-sword.co.uk

In the 19th century, a small but dedicated group of European and American women rose to agitate for the inclusion of women in the medical profession. It is a historic tale that we have told and retold for decades, but it is far from where the story of women as physicians and healers begins. Stretching back into deepest antiquity, we possess accounts of women who were consulted by emperors and paupers alike for their medical expertise. They were surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, university lecturers, and medical researchers in correspondence with the most learned societies of their time. This is the story of the women who participated in that early Golden Age, and of a medical establishment closing ranks against them so effectively that, by the early Victorian era, they not only were barred from practicing medicine, but from so much as stepping into a classroom where medical topics were being discussed. Told through in-depth accounts of the lives of the pioneers and practitioners who built and rebuilt the women’s medical movement, this title dives into the lives of more than 140 such pioneers.