D. Vance Smith, Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe. Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2025, xii, 410 pp., 1 b/w illus.

For many years medievalists focused solely on Europe – indeed, if one met a “medievalist,” one presumed that he or she studied Europe. But of course Europe was not the only region of the world during the Middle Ages, and in recent years a growing number of scholars have begun to insist that Medieval Studies should include the entire world in its remit. To this body of scholarship one may add D. Vance Smith’s Atlas’s Bones, an intriguing examination of the role which Africa played in ancient, medieval, and modern European thought.