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Historical Period

Secular
There's a deeply based assumption that the secular is something that exists in the ether, that it's a concept that makes sense globally and back through time. But in fact, this is wholly false. The notion of the secular is highly…
Young Pepys
Samuel Pepys is best known for his diary, which he kept from 1660 until 1669, when he gave it up over fears of his eyesight failing. As such, his views are often quoted over the Restoration, the plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Chatham Raid…
Histories of the Unexpected promo
What does the history of doors have to do with Viking death? How are Roman walls subversive? And how on earth does the history of puppets link to the struggle for freedom in the Second World War? Histories of the Unexpected tells all!
Arminius and Calvin
Since the establishment of the Church of England under Elizabeth I, a myth has been built up - and perpetuated by historiography - that showed puritans as a dangerous group, seeking to turn the world upside down, to destroy the sacred position of…
Samuel Pepys
Pepys’s diary is remarkably frank when it comes to his pursuit of love. Between 1660 and 1669 he recorded his daily life, including his interest in over twenty women who weren’t his wife, and much of what he wrote was so explicit that editors before…
Pierre Henri Révoil, Mary Queen of Scots Separated from Her Faithfuls, 1822
Mary Queen of Scots is an enigma. For the last four hundred and fifty years she has been presented as a romantic heroine, a Catholic martyr, a weak and feeble female used as a pawn by scheming men, and a murderer and adulteress. But despite the…
Philippe de Mezieres presents his treatise to Richard II
The last two decades of the fourteenth century stand out in English history, distinguished by cultural, social and political shifts that have echoed through the centuries. Yet perhaps the most widely-accepted and lauded change in this period came…
The ruins of a church in the mud of No Man's Land.
The myths of the ‘Great War’ are the foundation myths of the twentieth century, providing a frame of reference for understanding ourselves and our community. In Britain, the pervading myth is one of soldiers bravely sacrificing themselves in a…
The sentencing of Strafford in parliament, 1641
That by the early 1640s parliament’s relationship with the king had become so oppositional it was unworkable is obvious, but what is less obvious is how it came to be so: had there been a ‘high road to civil war’, evident in the increasingly…
Copy of the Whitehall mural showing Henry VIII, his parents, and Jane Seymour
Henry VIII could be called England’s most memorable king. Everyone has seen his image: tall, imposing, and rotund. Likewise, everyone knows that he had six wives, and that he divorced two of them, and executed a further two. He brought the…
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