Hannah Whittingham Books

Get in to the hardest poses and get out alive Five years ago your average yoga class contained a few down dogs, a standing tree and a cushion for meditation. Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that many wish to gain enlightenment through sticking their foot behind their head. Preferably in a handstand, ideally in the splits. And then post it on Instagram. Whether enlightenment is achievable through a one-armed handstand or not, crowded yoga studios are not the ideal places to start nailing risky moves, so this handy guide is here to demystify the big poses in full technicolour. Most importantly, you will learn how to take impressive pictures of your journey to enlightenment, so you can win at yoga, publicly. From sunset splits to backbends in Bali, packed with drills for strength and flexibility and tips for costume and hair, How to Win at Yoga makes those apparently impossible yoga poses possible, and look great on the 'gram.

Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities. Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge.