JUSTICE FOR JEHANNE: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor, and thriver, and role model on top of all that

JUSTICE FOR JEHANNE: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor
SARA McDOUGALL
Princeton University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A spellbinding narrative history that defies modern assumptions about women’s lives in the Middle Ages and informs contemporary debates about sexual violence and the limits of justice

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival.

Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.

Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The idea that sexual assault is a death knell for a woman's reputation is *still* dying a slow, noisy death. It was my experience in my own lifetime that a woman pregnant and without some kind of man in her life to take the credit was a "slut" and never anything but; her reputation was set, her future decided, that was that. Many were the women who had abortions, fewer went away for "cures" and came back thinner; all were "fallen" ant thus tainted. This was the twentieth century pre-The Pill and well pre-Roe v Wade.

I thought that was just how it was, probably moreso in earlier times, but certainly not better.

Reading is very dangerous to one's ignorance.

A young woman arrived in Dijon, pregnant and alone, spouting some silly-sounding story about a husband visibly absent who...well, no one was buyin' it, but no one was really all that interested in it either because being pregnant was a very common and unavoidable hazard of being female in the world of men. Jehanne settled into a mundane life, making friends, doing work, being alive. All that came to a chaotic halt when mercenaries fighting some endless wars drifted through Dijon and...noticed...pretty, pregnant, manless Jehanne and bad things ensued.

So far it's a tale as old as time. But post-bad things, details not foregrounded (neither glossed over, just not dwelt on) in the text, Jehanne was not going to let herself be cowed into silence about the outrages she'd endured. One sees in this fact the root of her problem, and the reason she floated into Dijon instead of staying wherever she got pregnant in the first place. (Absent any details about this subject in the records, as Jehanne was not forthcoming, the author posits a possible reason for her landing in Dijon that I thought sounded very believable.) Seeking legal remedy for her violation was stunning in its effrontery, enduring the horrible humiliation of the trial, reliving the awful events, having deeply impertinent, invasive questions that can not be avoided asked, Jehanne showed amazing strength of character.

Her neighbors—including the very surprising man who conducted the investigation we still have documented—of fairly short duration, to my utter amazement, mostly had her back.

The records of the trial, the details of which are almost brain-meltingly boring...I deeply do not care about medieval tax-dodging schemes, but they were important to the witnesses' identities...made for what should have been a slog of an academic read. Author Sara, take your bow. Yes, I now know what people did for fun in 1470s Dijon, dreamt up ways to skive off paying taxes and damn do I wish I didn't, but this is leavened by Author Sara peppering the dough with interesting asides and details not strictly on topic. I will say that all those details added up to Jehanne's becoming a firmly embedded member of Dijon's community, a rough patch in the weave to be sure, but really part of a vibrant interesting bunch of folks.

It surprised me, it entertained me...yes, in spite of the stuff about who had what spurious tax exemption...and it gave me a ghost of gleeful recognition in getting to know Jehanne. She's someone I wish I'd known in the flesh.

Proof that academic, footnoted reads can be well worth reading for more than a degree.

ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island, new data and modern analysis change the game

ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island
MIKE PITTS
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archaeological scholar Mike Pitts—a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island’s collapse.

Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world.

For too long, people have imposed their own theories on this extraordinary place and its inhabitants. Thor Heyerdahl, after his famous Kon-Tiki expedition, claimed the island had been discovered by light-skinned people from South America, believing only they could have been capable of travelling there and building the statues. Erich von Däniken took it to greater extremes, saying the statues had been carved by aliens. More recently, Jared Diamond's theory of ecocide—that Islanders destroyed their world by cutting down all the trees—has become popular as a vital message about the need to conserve our planet's resources.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World, archaeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: An archaeologist with access to twenty-first century morals and mores and technology is not going to write with kindness towards the previous generations' conclusions. They're rooted in outdated assumptions, using techniques that feel shockingly cursory to modern sensibilities; most shocking is the unquestioning racism of so very much of the analysis made by earlier generations.

A third, the first third, of the book relays those earlier analyses with what felt to me as condign levels of condemnation or disagreement, couched in evocative language. If you're offering a different light on past data with newer data and previously unavailable technology, casting shade is inevitable. Why not begin with tendentious tones? Many cavil at this. I do not.

After bringing attention to, in the second third, an underknown and too-little celebrated Katherine Routledge and her astute observations and contextualizations of the society and culture of the island, Pitts goes into the modern archaeology and emerging understanding of Rapa Nui. It's a paradigm shift, and we're seeing it in its earliest days.

I found the book as a whole fascinating, creating a gestalt of scholarly opinion's mechanisms of change as evidence...and society's changing mores...demand. It is not a simple bowing to the winds of fashion as the reactionaries and recidivists with political axes to grind insist. It is the scientific method at work, correcting its data to account for developments across all fronts of scholarship. No "Truth" is immutable, scary as many people find that fact. Fixing thoughts into cages of ideology is never permanent. Examining data, analyzing orthodoxy's tenets, is how Einstein blew open the ideas of physics...out came cell phones, computers, the entire internet.

I won't pretend I was completely fascinated during the whole read. It was a slog to read the archaeology jargon but it yielded a really fascinating new understanding of a place most of us are intrigued by. More than that, though, this is a perfect example of how science works: take a data set, examine it, add to it, and analyze both the before and after data sets. Present conclusions as "this new data refutes/supports previous data; the current, amended data set supports/refutes the following conclusions."

It's a message I like, I support, and I choose to amplify.

THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, capitalism has a lot to answer for

THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
DAINA RAMEY BERRY
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Almost ten years ago, I read this appalling chronicle of the profit-and-loss mentality as applied to human beings.

It horrified and appalled me.

Cliometrics, the science of statistical analysis applied to databases of historical origin (eg, census data, tax rolls), is a discipline we've only developed in the past half-century or so. The wealth of data regarding enslaved people collected by different governments and organizations has made tracing the stark outlines of how the property impacted the economy; Author Daina Ramey Berry had to come along before someone got up the support and the courage...it definitely took a lot to do this work in a post-Ferguson/George Floyd world...to merge the statistical analysis of the past with the stories of the people who lived it.

No, it's not a breezy little bagatelle to read. It is a work of solid, enduring value to historians, and to historical researchers in economics and medicine and sociology and anthropology. I'm not going to apply the "a-word" to it, you know the one; it sends all y'all's wallets into torpor. Instead I'll note that the style's readable, there's flashes...rare, but there...of humor; and for the non-fiction snobs, there's no getting away from the fact that it's got deep roots in the primary and secondary sources.

There are quite a number of period illustrations to, um, liven things up. I found them somewhat distracting, which could be good when I was in a darker passage, or bad, if the illustration was cheerless. I'm glad on balance to have them included.

ROPE: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization, enjoyable, informative microhistory of an invisibly ubiquitous invention

ROPE: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization
TIM QUEENEY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A unique and compelling adventure through the history of rope and its impact on civilization, in the vein of single subject bestsellers like Salt and Cod

Tim Queeney is a sailor who knows more about rope and its importance to humankind than most. In Rope, Queeney takes readers on a ride through the history of rope and the way it weaves itself through the story of civilization. Considering Magellan’s world-circling ships, the 15th century fleet of Admiral Zheng He, or a Polynesian multihull with crab claw sails, he shows how without rope, none of their adventurous voyages and their discoveries would have been possible. Time traveling, he describes the building of the pyramids, the Roman Coliseum, Hagia Sofia, Notre Dame, the Sultan Hasan Mosque, the Brooklyn Bridge and countless other constructions that would not have been possible without rope.

Not content to just look at rope’s past, Queeney looks at its future and how the re-invention of rope using steel strands to make wire rope and later synthetic fibers will likely provide the strength for cables to support elevators into space. Making the story or rope real for readers, Queeney tells remarkable nautical stories of his own reliance on rope to survive—“While approaching Buzzard’s Bay in the dark of night, we were hit by a fierce squall…The wrong line was eased, and the 200-pound hunk of wood that holds the top of the sail, went flying out of control, swaying wildly and threatening to knock us into the inky ocean. Finally, the proper ropes were located in the dark, firm hands hauled them taught and the gaff was brought under control. It was a sobering display of rope’s often unacknowledged role and uncredited importance.” Rope is history, adventure and the story of one of the world’s most common tools that has made it possible for humans to advance throughout the century.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tim Queeney is treading on Mark Kurlansky's and Mary Roach's territories with this historical and sociological survey of rope, its development, its role in society, and its future uses.

While many short lengths of rope helped countless individuals through the centuries, rope also was a tool of human innovation writ large through collective action. Just as many small strands come together to form a rope, so, too, did many people gather to perform the biggest of tasks. The exemplar of this from the ancient world is the Egyptian pyramids. While we don’t know exactly how these human-built mountains were assembled, we can be sure that rope was an essential tool in their construction. In this way rope stands as both a tool and a symbol of humans working together to achieve the greatest things.

He sets his sights high. The book is even organized into "strands" not chapters, which seemed cutesy to me at first...it's not, it is in fact subtle and informative. I'm happy to report he succeeds in the rope-climb to success.

Its cultural significance is revealed by a parade of expressions: “roped me in,”“rope it off,”“tied in knots,”“rope-a-dope,”“roped and branded,”“give him/ her enough rope,”“at the end of my rope,”“throw me a rope,”“give me some slack,”“on the ropes ,”“go piss up a rope,”“learn the ropes,”“a rope of sand.” This incomplete list of everyday sayings just shows how deeply into our consciousness rope has entwined itself.

Readable, relatable, illuminating, and fun to learn about, who knew rope was so culturally significant? I've reached the end of my rope more than once, and still had not thought about the rope I was running out of. I've had enough fun in my life finding the men who live by the old gay truism, "if you can rope me, you can ride me," that I ought to be far more alert to how ropey my grasp of the subject is.

I have a greatly expanded respect for how many metaphors and concepts tie back to rope and its variants, starting with "religion"...re- (back to, again)+ligare (to tie, to rope onto)= "religion." A concept hiding in plain sight, one that could not exist without that extremely early invention of humankind, the rope.

The development of rope was surprisingly technological; in fact if we had not been scientists by our very nature rope could not exist. Many aspects of its creation were impossible without trial and error based on what we today would describe as "materials science"...does grass get stronger or weaker when bundled together? is green grass more or less useful than dried grass? exactly how dried is optimal for making cordage?...a tiny, tiny peek into the huge variety of questions Author Queeney introduces us to as he explicates the scientific process as we developed it.

No tool is not also a weapon: "string him up" and its variants did not come about as a common phrase because someone was decorating a loved one in a string vest. Author Queeney does not shy away from elucidating the horrifying, evil uses humanity put its early invention the rope to. The details are stomach-churning, but the facts are incontrovertible. We love to be hatefully cruel. I'm sure some readers will skip right over these parts in order not to lose sleep. I strongly caution those highly averse to animal cruelty to pay close attention to prefatory language used as they read along.

I'm carrying on about a five-star read but there's not a whole fifth star. The half-star lost got hung up on that pesky thing, the content warning. The fact is there's not much human awfulness I haven't read about or seen in the past *mumble*ty-five years. I still felt blindsided by the overly-careful enumeration of the nasty uses we use rope for. Lingering on these unpleasantnesses slowed my roll through the story of rope. Don't get tied up in these things if you're at all squeamish; fresh strands await.

A thoroughly noted and sourced elucidation of the importance of an invisbly ubiquitous invention. Its many pleasures for the broadly curious reader require some common-sense personalization of the reading experience. Those who need chew-toys for their brains are going to batten on the trivia embedded in the long strand roping human history together.

FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750, scholarly work needed to read for queer-identity students

FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750
NOEL MALCOLM
Oxford University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$24.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A landmark study of the history of male-male sex in early modern Europe, including the European colonies and the Ottoman world.

Until quite recently, the history of male-male sexual relations was a taboo topic. But when historians eventually explored the archives of Florence, Venice and elsewhere, they brought to light an extraordinary world of early modern sexual activity, extending from city streets and gardens to taverns, monasteries and Mediterranean galleys. Typically, the sodomites (as they were called) were adult men seeking sex with teenage boys. This was something intriguingly different from modern the boys ceased to be desired when they became fully masculine. And the desire for them was seen as natural; no special sexual orientation was assumed.

The rich evidence from Southern Europe in the Renaissance period was not matched in the Northern lands; historians struggled to apply this new knowledge to countries such as England or its North American colonies. And when good Northern evidence did appear, from after 1700, it presented a very different picture. So the theory was formed—and it has dominated most standard accounts until now—that the 'emergence of modern homosexuality' happened suddenly, but inexplicably, at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Noel Malcolm's masterly study solves this and many other problems, by doing something which no previous scholar has giving a truly pan-European account of the whole phenomenon of male-male sexual relations in the early modern period. It includes the Ottoman Empire, as well as the European colonies in the Americas and Asia; it describes the religious and legal norms, both Christian and Muslim; it discusses the literary representations in both Western Europe and the Ottoman world; and it presents a mass of individual human stories, from New England to North Africa, from Scandinavia to Peru. Original, critical, lucidly written and deeply researched, this work will change the way we think about the history of homosexuality in early modern Europe.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Deeply researched, plentifully sourced and attributed...and as that would lead you to understand, it's an academic work. It isn't a browsing book, it's a studying book. I took over a year to read it. I wanted to do it justice, to focus on its theses, so I took my time.

I ended up surprised at some of Malcolm's conclusions, as one would hope to be the case in a scholarly work. His firm opinion that English buggery was simply not as common as the Mediterranean practice was specifically stated to include James I of England. He contends that the social conventions of male friendship then prevailing adequately explain His Majesty's somewhat fervent correspondence with his favorites. This is carefully hedged by explaining that, absent proof, it's reasonable to accept that we simply do not know with certainty what occurred at this distance in time.

How useful is it to go looking for ancestors of modern queer identities in the past? Where there are records, they are almost always legal ones, of prosecutions for offenses. Can that in any useful way be extrapolated to indicate broader trends of sexual activity? Is sexual activity actually a useful measure of a person's emotional inner life? What do we mean by "queer" or "gay" or "bisexual?" I know of my own personal knowledge men who have sex with other men exclusively, who reject any "queer" identity.

It's the identity, you'll note, that's being rejected. Malcolm contends that it's "the Mediterranean model" of pederastic sodomy that was absent in northern climes, not men having sex with other men. It's a contention that I think bears very serious consideration. If many men in the Mediterranean committed sodomy as their legitimate access to sexual release, given how late (compared to more northerly climes) they married, are they in any meaningful way "queer?" Or just horny, and unwilling to risk syphilis (fatal then) by using a female sex worker?

A book that treats its topic with bracing and refreshing unwillingness to bow to fashion while still refusing to stray far from its evidentiary base is a rare thing indeed. One that is carefully analytical of the terms used in the past and their intersection, or lack of intersection, with modern understandings of identity, is rare and precious.

Not a casual read but a profoundly informative and essential one for gay men, or those who wish to comprehend history's limits in identity politics.