His interest in alchemy was the chief reason that his canonisation was so long delayed: it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked,...
Act of Oblivion, the title of Robert Harris’s novel, refers to the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion, introduced to the Convention Parliament in May 1660 and given royal assent on...
Calvin denounced the idea that the seven-day week was divinely ordained as ‘crass and carnal Sabbatarian superstition’. Why then do we use this odd system to cut the year into its smallest units? More...
The problem is not that we need to look elsewhere to find the true leaders of the February Revolution of 1848. It is rather that there were no leaders. For many years, the police authorities in Paris and...
Nature, witches and matriarchy formed a complex of which many disapproved, and it was pushed into remote places. Who knew what those peasants were doing in the dark?
The many things that filled houses in the later Middle Ages made for much heavier work: finer foods were cooked by more complex means; an ever expanding array of napkins had to be washed and arranged;...
The idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were...
For the Roman senatorial elite, networks of knowledge production were also social networks. They read each other’s work, lent each other books and discussed philological and philosophical matters. Caesar...
Poring over family stories to give meaning to our lives is something most of us do. For the descendants of people who have survived traumatic historical events, it takes on an added intensity – and,...
Toy theatres reproduced specific productions, but the early ones required considerable imagination on the part of the purchaser. They offered an unadapted play text, a selection of scenes and some, but...
Liberals and socialists saw Józef Piłsudski as an enemy of parliamentary democracy; it would be fairer to say that he had nothing against elected parliaments so long as they stopped chattering and contradicting...
If the Crécy campaign was about anything, it was about Edward pressing his legalistic claim to be king of France as well as king of England. The battle did nothing to support that: indeed, it made him...
For minor kings and junior dynasts, the extra-European world was a place to amass wealth or responsibilities denied them at home. But they didn’t get to perform these fantasies of empire under conditions...
On 8 September 1919, the New York Times reported on a convention being held in Manhattan to discuss the atrocities then taking place in Ukraine. ‘Ukrainian Jews Aim to Stop Pogroms,’ the headline...
The tacit questions were: who is black and why? And what does being black signify? Black, it was commonly understood, signified Africa and slavery. But the puzzle was also a religious matter, since the...
These days it is rare to talk about ‘restoration’, ‘conservation’ being the preferred term. But while approaches change, the central problem of entropy remains. If you want to preserve an artefact...
Many Italians, including supporters of the resistance, condemned the partisans for inciting German reprisals. After the war, the myth of the left was that there had been mass support for the partisans,...
The demarcated ring on the grassy plateau was from its outset about heaven, in the sense of afterlife. Was it always also about the heavens, in the sense of sky-watching? Can we rediscover how Stonehenge’s...