During the nineteenth century, as the rapid growth of industry transformed life in both America and Europe, many new churches and public buildings were designed in an imposing style based upon medieval and early Christian models. Kathleen Curran's book traces the origins of this phenomenon, known either as the Rundbogenstil or Romanesque Revival, in Rome, Karlsruhe, and the Munich of Ludwig I and charts its spread from Germany to London and the United States, where it shaped the design of such landmarks as Trinity Church in Boston and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC....

Italian villas are generally regarded as beautiful havens where a privileged elite, fleeing the harsh realities of the city, found peace and harmony amid buildings and gardens framed upon classical ideals of proportion, balance, and the natural. In her interdisciplinary book, Dianne Harris presents a radically different view of villa life as it developed during the eighteenth century on the vast estates dominating the fertile Lombard plain. Governed from Vienna by a Habsburg regime bent upon increased tax revenues, the great landowning families lived lives fraught with tensions and...

In recent years, Sufism has become all but synonymous with the mystic poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273) and the ritual "whirling" of dervishes from Turkey. This branch of Islam does, however, have a long, complex history, and spiritual retreat was only one aspect of its significance. In medieval Anatolia, Cities and Saints contends, Sufis made alliances that gave dervish lodges powers so vast that they were able to alter the layout of cities and serve as the means of forging new social bonds.

Through close examination of the design and function of...