Malcolm Gaskill

In the autumn​ of 2013, archaeologists digging beneath the chancel of a ruined church in Jamestown, Virginia, discovered four graves. They belonged to some of the earliest inhabitants of England’s first permanent colony in America. One was for Ferdinando Wainman, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council; another for Robert Hunt, the church’s first minister and chaplain...

There’s​ a scene in Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine in which Oliver, the teenage protagonist, is served carrots so overcooked they look ‘out of focus’. It’s a joke repurposed in Children of Radium to describe Dunthorne’s acerbic grandmother’s ‘fuzzy’ woollen jumper. Here, though, the blurring effect becomes a metaphor for our misty view...

In​ 1524, astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests, sickness and war. The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’. But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant. When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer, the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect snail shells to...

When​ I was growing up, there was only one name for the fifth of November: ‘Bonfire Night’. Much of the excitement lay in anticipation, which gained momentum in the last week of October, brushing confidently past Halloween, not yet the extravagant rite of autumn it has become. Like all memories, this flies back as a scatter of images: pestering Dad for an old shirt and trousers;...

Teresa of Ávila​ was a late starter, but that was no bad thing for a paragon of piety. A perplexed or misspent adolescence emphasised the transforming power of grace in both Catholic hagiography and puritan conversion narratives. She was born into a Castilian merchant family in 1515, but her fortunes were compromised by her family’s dubious status. Her converso grandfather was...