Social

Alan R. Young describes how, in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, village witches were prosecuted as the scapegoats for local anxiety.

Bruce Chatwin describes how the dispute between Abel and Cain, the nomadic shepherd and the city-dwelling planter, has continued throughout history.

John Nowell introduces and translates a contemporary portrait of the eighteenth-century actor at work, originally penned by G.C. Lichtenberg.

Norman Lloyd Williams analyses the observations of Etienne Perlin during his visit in 1553.

Stephen Usherwood describes how an Asiatic flea, living as a parasite upon black rats, caused as many as 100,000 deaths during the summer and autumn of 1665.

R.W. Davies describes how the Romans were often suspicious of doctors; and contemporary satirists, including Martial, cracked many jokes at their expense. Medicine, however, was now beginning to be practised on strictly scientific lines.

Michael Paffard opens for the visitor Thomas Tusser’s books on husbandry, which expounded the practical virtues of ‘thrift’ to Tudor farmers.

Stewart Perowne describes how, in the fourteenth century ‘the last of the Roman tribunes’, but one of the first of political liberators.

Joanna Richardson describes how, during the 1830s, the world of Bohemia offered a warm and fruitful climate to artists and writers.

George Green describes the experiences of his grandfather, a typical Liverpool docker’s life of the late nineteenth century.