It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Today, Münster is a small and unassuming city in the northwest of Germany, hardly the first place one would think of when asked to identify historical hotbeds of sedition and rebellion. Yet for several surreal months in 1535-6, Münster was the scene of a radical religious and political experiment, an attempt by a small group …
Continue reading The Münster rebellion: the creation of a 16th-century theocracy
Regular readers may have noticed that my posts have been thin on the ground during the past academic year. This is because I was preparing for my Finals exams at Oxford and had lamentably little time for extra-curricular history, as it were. I finished Finals in June, but the intervening time has been a whirlwind of …
Marriages for money, although they had been criticised on moral and practical grounds for centuries, were still very common in eighteenth-century European society, particularly among the wealthy and landed classes. Even in Jane Austen's supposedly romantic novels, money is always a consideration when deciding whom to marry, to the point that some of her characters contract entirely …