It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Many of us in England like to think of ourselves as a fairly tolerant people, accepting of many traditions and ethnic groups (whether that is always true is another question). At any rate, when we hear the term 'anti-Semitism' we are most likely to think of Nazi Germany, or the Russian pogroms of the 19th …
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
To hear church bells ringing continuously for as long as half an hour, several evenings a week, is no surprise if you live in central Oxford as I do, so I was particularly amused at something I read about today. In 1797 a book called Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth was …