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Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women and God’s Own Gentlewoman bring the real world of medieval women out of the margins.

Meant to live a life of perfect peacefulness and contemplation, in reality monks were human and fallible. How violent could life in the medieval cloister be?

Uruguay was the only nation where fighting a duel in defence of honour was perfectly legal for most of the 20th century. Why?

In A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, Richard Slotkin attempts to untangle the stories that the US tells itself about race, colonialism and the Civil War. Is it a lost cause?

The acute housing crisis of mid-Victorian Britain generated stormy opinions about the nature of state intervention and the need for ‘wholesome despotism’.

Who were the female blacksmiths of medieval England? 

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492, Marcy Norton shows through Indigenous American practices and beliefs that colonisation was a catastrophe for the natural world.

Rumours about the sexual proclivities of King William III began to spread as soon as he took the English throne. What went on behind the closed doors of the royal court had implications for the nation.

Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes follows the reinvention of the cat from working animal to purrfect pet.

Despite their reputation, London’s private members’ clubs have never been entirely for men.