Not Just the Tudors

Best known for St. Paul’s Cathedral, Christopher Wren was the greatest architect Britain has ever known. But he was so much more: he applied his mind to astronomy, meteorology and anatomy. How did he ...

14 Aug 202336min

Books belonging to Henry VIII, Richard III, Mary I and Edward VI are among the treasures in the historic library of the Archbishops of Canterbury, one of the oldest public libraries in England. In thi...

10 Aug 202343min

Seymour, Dudley and Parr are all well-known Tudor names. But often, behind the more famous men in those families, there were women who had a much greater influence than has previously been acknowledge...

7 Aug 202352min

How did an enslaved East African man become Japan’s first foreign samurai, and the only ever samurai of African descent? How did Yasuke catch the attention of Japan’s most powerful warlord Oda Nobunag...

3 Aug 202330min

Artemisia Gentileschi was the most celebrated female painter of the 17th century, as famous in her lifetime as Reubens or Van Dyke. But the events of her life were as savage as the events depicted in ...

31 Jul 202340min

How meaningful can a gift - especially of a book - be? In the fickle world of the Tudor court, the strategic gifting of books was a common practice, bound up in relationships of power, politics and pr...

27 Jul 202341min

In the sixteenth century, religious beliefs underwent a dramatic change. As differences between the late medieval Roman Catholic Church and the nature of Luther's Protestantism spread across Western E...

24 Jul 202354min

The name Ivan the Terrible is synonymous with brutality and ruthlessness. While Western scholars insist that the first crowned Tsar of all Russia did create a policy of mass repression and execution, ...

20 Jul 202337min