England

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, line engraving by B. Reading after S. van der Passe. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain.

‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ by Ramie Targoff review

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff refutes the claim by Virginia Woolf, that the women of Tudor England left only empty bookshelves.

The will of John Birche of Hatfield Peverill, 1628. Essex Record Office.

The Value of Wills to Historians

Wills in early modern England tell us much more than simply who left what to whom, and should not be discarded lightly.

Portrait of Anne of Cleves, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1539. The Victoria & Albert Museum.

Challenging the ‘Ugliness’ of Anne of Cleves

Anne of Cleves became known to posterity as the ‘Flanders Mare’ and Henry VIII’s ‘ugly wife’, thanks to disparaging descriptions by ambassadors and diplomats. What motivated them?

Divorce illustration © Ben Jones/Heart Agency.

Reforming England’s Divorce Law

Reforms to divorce law inevitably prompt moral panic as they did in Victorian England. It has not yet proven to be justified.

SS General Karl Wolff, c.1944 (left) and following his arrest in 1962 (right) as an accessory to the murder of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Keystone Press/Getty Images

‘The World at War’ and the Holocaust at 50

‘Genocide’, the Holocaust episode of The World at War, was pioneering when it first aired. Does it stand the test of time?

Stormy weather: illustration for the month of March by Mackenzie in The Sketch, 1 March 1916. Illustrated London News/Mary Evans.

Beware the Lides of March

March is the loudest month. The late survival of a dialect name – Lide – for the month poses a medieval puzzle.

Louis IX feeding the poor and washing their feet, from the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1370-75. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The Golden Age of Medieval Nostalgia

The 14th century was a period of great upheaval. People yearned for the good old days, when everyone knew their place, prices were lower and kings were better.

The monastic seal of Chertsey Abbey during the reign of Henry VIII, April 1525. The National Archives.

Once maligned as a record ‘of the dullest kind’, a 1535 audit of Church wealth – the Valor ecclesiasticus – offers a unique view of England’s religious, social and cultural life just months after the break with Rome.