Recently published

As promoters, propagandists, patrons and warriors, women were everywhere during the Crusades. 

An account of the sex lives of European intellectuals is full of gossip – and as shallow as the society pages.

Recent royal crises reveal echoes of discontent in 1870s Britain, when disquiet with monarchy manifested in calls for its abolition. 

Art reveals the past – if you know how to look.

The anti-Russian poetry of Frances Browne, the ‘Blind Poetess of Ulster’.

Great cities more than a mile long, ‘banquette houses’, elephants, and birds with heads ‘as big as a man’s: the journey of David Ingram.

Was the subjugation of indigenous peoples a just means to expedite Christianity? On 15 August 1550, a humanist scholar and a Dominican friar debated. 

Is it time to say goodbye to Eastern Europe, a world remade so frequently by empires, war and political ideologies that it scarcely stays the same for two generations in a row?

What does it mean to be happy? For poets, medieval and modern, joy comes in many forms.