Botany in the romantic era played a role in debates about life, nature, and knowledge, as evidenced in this ambitious, beautifully illustrated study. Winner, 20

Katharine Cleland's Irregular Unions provides the first sustained literary history of clandestine marriage in early modern England and reveals its controversial

While marriages were supposed to be celebrated publicly by priests, in churches where the parties were known, many couples had reasons - among them parental dis