Not Just the Tudors

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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juli 202337min

From the mid-15th century to the mid-16th century, there were 10 Queens Consort of England, from Margaret of Anjou to Katherine Parr. For each of these Queens, jewellery was a way she could signify he...

17 Juli 202341min

As Queen Elizabeth I lays dying, King James VI of Scotland is waiting to accede to the throne of England. But who will thrive and who will fall under the new King? Will it be the scholar Francis Bacon...

13 Juli 202332min