This Week's Acquisitions

(Actually, this last two weeks' acquisitions.)

• Emma Leslie, The Martyr's Victory: A Tale of Danish England (RTS, n.d.).  Monks in the ninth century.
• The Boy Martyr; Or, Manfresti's Page.  A Story of 1567 (Shaw, n.d.).  Short novel about the Inquisition.
• Catherine Sinclair, Modern Society; Or the March of Intellect.  The Conclusion of Modern Accomplishments, 2nd ed. (William Whyte and Co., 1837).  Social satire. More on Sinclair (1800-64) here and here (with photographs of her monument); there's also a digitized version of her classic children's novel, Holiday House.

• Catherine Maria Sedgwick, The Linwoods; Or, "Sixty Years Since" in America, ed. Maria Karafilis (New England, 2002). Reprint of Sedgwick's historical novel about the American Revolution, which is an obvious nod to Sir Walter Scott. The Sedgwick Society includes biographical and bibliographical information, as well as a few e-texts.

• Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner (Knopf, 2002).  Piano tuner voyages in Victorian Burma.
• Clyde Binfield, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1780-1920 (Dent, 1977).  Classic collection of essays on major Dissenting figures and themes.
• Linda Woodhead, An Introduction to Christianity (Cambridge, 2004).  General survey.
• J. C. Ryle, The Upper Room: Being a Few Truths for the Times (Banner of Truth, 1970).  Reprint of Ryle's sermon collection from 1888. More information on Ryle, with some e-texts.
• Christopher Wordsworth, Wordsworth's Occasional Sermons, 3rd Series (Rivington, 1852).  Mainly devoted to topics in education. Wordsworth's hymns and a short biography can be found at the Cyberhymnal.
• Stanley M. Burstein, The Reign of Cleopatra (Greenwood, 2004).  The most recent production from Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt.
• Clare A. Simmons, ed., Medievalism and the Quest for the "Real" Middle Ages (Frank Cass, 2001).  Essays on literary and scholarly attempts to deal with the Middle Ages, covering the eighteenth century to the present.
• Piya Pal-Lipinski, The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (New Hampshire, 2005).  History of the odalisque.
• Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago, 2004).  Focuses on the Anglo-American tradition. (Alison very kindly wrote a nice blurb for my own book.)
• George P. Landow, ed., Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Ohio, 1979).  Form, themes, major figures (Ruskin, Newman, etc.).
• David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (Oxford, 2005).  Examines the function and evolution of symbols associated with, as the title says, "liberty and freedom," moving from the colonial period to the present day. 
• Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods (Oxford, 2004).  The Renaissance appropriation of classical myth.

• Umberto Eco, ed., History of Beauty (Rizzoli, 2004).  History of aesthetics, focusing on standards of physical beauty.