Social

Medicine in Ancient Rome

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.

A Sixteenth-Century Farmer’s Year

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

Cola Di Rienzi

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

Romantic Bohemia

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

The Armenian Dilemma

Anthony Bryer describes how, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, between Turks and Byzantines, Armenian kingdoms led a perilous life. 

The Duchess and the Doctors

David Green describes how, during her long life, the Duchess of Marlborough ceaselessly sought for a panacea against illness and disease.

The Keelmen of Tyneside

From the fourteenth century until the building of the railways, writes D.J. Rowe, the Newcastle keelmen were indispensable and pugnacious carriers between collieries and sea-going ships.