Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book is ...

T he sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

The Russians were among the first Europeans to sense California's potential. Had they not sold their settlement there in 1841 ...

The vagaries of palace politics are notoriously difficult to record. Historians should pay attention to rumour.

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of ...

T he question of how history judges prime ministers can be answered in one word: haphazardly. This is because, of course, ...

It is, however, actually a sampler from Barbados – the earliest known Barbadian sampler in any collection. The RSN sampler is ...

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was ...

British soldiers fighting in the American Revolutionary War were unprepared for the terrain awaiting them across the Atlantic ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a case for the Rennaissance as a triumph not of individuality, but of ...

In 1861 serfdom, the system which tied the Russian peasants irrevocably to their landlords, was abolished at the Tsar’s imperial command. Four years later, slavery in the USA was similarly declared ...