The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a case for the Rennaissance as a triumph not of individuality, but of universal experience.
For the Portuguese empire to rise, an old world had to give way. Rivals in Europe’s lucrative spice trade, how much did they know about the powerful Mamluk sultanate?
The concerns of daily life prompted early modern people to seek reassurance in fate, stars, and astrologers.
Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning flourished.
An enfant terrible shook up Renaissance medicine by denouncing experts and debunking accepted wisdom. Was Paracelsus as radical as he seemed?
In Catherine de’ Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen, Mary Hollingsworth helps the pragmatic queen escape her ‘black legend’.
The unholy alliance between France and the Ottoman Empire in 1530 caused great concern but had little military success.
A bloody massacre in Stockholm’s city square set Sweden on a course for independence under the leadership of Gustav I Vasa. A master of the ethos of 16th-century monarchy, his legacy is complicated.
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.
For nine days Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess was the greatest box office phenomenon of the English Renaissance. Then a warrant was issued for his arrest.
