Is history a mirror? One steals glimpses of this question throughout this excellent book, even though the author never steps through the looking-glass to answer it directly. Guenther’s subject is the mirror test, defined broadly as the use of mirrors to probe the capacity for self-recognition. This is a serious and superb intellectual history, tracking how mirrors function as material and metaphorical reflections of cognition across a range of fields. But the book also reflects aspects of the historian’s craft, or at least of the assumptions we bring to it. Near the frame, where the glass warps, there is a flickering image of the historian at work, projecting a model of the mind many of us take for granted onto the very figures who brought that model into being.

Guenther’s chapters sketch a menagerie of human and non-human animals placed before mirrors. From Charles Darwin’s son in 1840, to many...

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