Not Just the Tudors

Jane Seymour is a paradox. Of Henry VIII’s six wives, she is the one about whom we know perhaps the least. She was the most lowly of the queens, but she had royal blood. She's often described as plai…

In the British Library, there is a manuscript copy of the memoir of Princess Gulbadan, the only surviving female-authored memoir from the Mughal Empire. In it, Gulbadan tells her extraordinary story…

Fairy tales exist everywhere and in every time. Through centuries of oral tradition and the invention of print and later advances in television and film, fairy tales have altered and shaped themselve…

Astronomer Johannes Kepler was an important and admired figure in the scientific revolution of the early 17th century. But when his widowed mother was accused of witchcraft, the scientist remarkably …

In Elizabethan and Stuart England, ghosts weren't supposed to exist. Protestant preachers and writers had banished them - but people continued to see them. So how did our early modern forebears recko…

How did Britain's islands become woven into our collective cultural psyche? Traversing Irish poetry, Renaissance drama and Restoration utopias, author Alice Albinia’s research has boldly upturned est…

The first surviving mention of condoms dates from the mid-16th century, in the writings of an Italian anatomist better known for the discovery of the fallopian tubes. Born out of a medical need to pr…

In the early modern period, belief in fairies was quite commonplace. But put all thoughts of Tinkerbell aside!  These fairies were altogether more dangerous beings - troublemakers, child-snatchers, s…

King James VI and I, the first monarch to reign over Scotland, England and Ireland, has a mixed reputation. To many, he is simply the homosexual King, the inveterate witch-roaster, the smelly sovere…

In the early modern period, it was patently clear to everyone that supernatural beings, foremost among them the devil, were at work in the world, intervening in human affairs.  Can we find the origin…

Henry VIII was termed "by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland.”  Ireland was England’s oldest colony.  But what bloody events and brutal actions led to the English conquest of Irela…

History books rarely make much reference to the impact of climate and the natural environment on people, and vice versa.  Yet volcanic eruptions and storms, droughts and cyclical pressures have shape…

Reginald Pole has been styled as both the nemesis of Henry VIII and as Mary I's bloody accomplice. Pole was related to the English royal family through the Plantagenets and was himself implicated in …

The public fascination with true crime is nothing new. Four centuries ago, the sensational story of the death in the Tower of London of Thomas Overbury, a lawyer in the court of King James I, led to …

In 1621 the Virginia Company of London put out a call for young, handsome and honestly educated women to become wives for the planters in its new colony in Jamestown. Hopeful husbands were supposed t…

Girolamo Savonarola was a late 15th century Dominican friar who rose to become a preacher, prophet, and politician. He took on the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and despotic rulers includin…

Life in Tudor England was risky. In addition to the outbreaks of plague, the threat of poverty and the dangers of childbirth, there were social risks - of not fitting in, of social death. How was a p…

For anyone studying the politics of the 1570s-80s, it would be hard to avoid Elizabeth I’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walsingham, who seemingly rose from nowhere to become one of the most important men …

The unsolved mystery of what happened to the Princes in the Tower - Edward V and Richard, Duke of York - is possibly English history’s greatest cold case. Were they murdered by their paternal uncle R…

From Henry VIII declaring himself as the ‘loyal and most assured servant’ of Anne Boleyn to the poems lavished on Elizabeth I by her suitors, the dramas of courtly love have captivated readers and dr…