Literature

Not a queen or a saint, witch or idealised lady-love, the Wife of Bath is a much-married working woman and an enthusiastic traveller.

The smooth whiteness of paper belies the mess and hard labour that went into its production.

Controversy surrounding the ‘Satanic Verses’ is centuries old.

Notes in the margins of early modern books can be very revealing about their readers’ lives and interests.

Is King Lear the Shakespearean tragedy for a world of capitalism and catastrophe?

The advent of telecommunications gave rise to a new literary genre through which female telegraphers and writers found social freedoms.

As the Nazis enclosed Warsaw’s Jewish quarter in a ghetto, a librarian set up a secret children’s library.

Dinner parties in the ‘Revolutionary Age’ with the publisher Joseph Johnson.

Evliya Çelebi was born on 25 March 1611.

Early modern parish libraries, frequently established for the benefit of the general public, were often deliberately inaccessible.