Renaissance

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.

A community of Ethiopian monk-scholars in Renaissance Rome brought their learning, language and liturgy into the heart of the Roman Church.

In Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World, Roger Crowley explains how Spain and Portugal turned up the heat in the age of imperialism.

In the 17th century news spread that the Jewish messiah had finally arrived. Within a year he had converted to Islam. Who was he, and what had happened?