Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...

Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito. O n the ...

Zaga Christ died on 22 April 1638 leaving Europe no wiser as to the authenticity of the self-proclaimed Ethiopian prince who ...

Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss Edited by Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (Hambledon xxviii + 270 pp.) The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John ...

James II is generally considered to have been one of the worst of English kings. Recently, two American historians have incidentally had something to say in his defence. But in earlier times, ...

Bolesław Chrobry was finally crowned king of Poland on 18 April 1025. It was an elevation two decades in the making. Otto III ...

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud ...

As Christianity spread, it carried Catherine of Siena’s legacy to the Americas. Her asceticism inspired Rose of Lima, Kateri ...

Patricia Fara is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and a columnist at History Today.

From a Gaelic perspective, however, it is clear that Ossian is a manifestation of a well-attested tradition that existed long ...

Scholars and Their Kin: Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments, edited by Stéphane Gerson, has historians scaling their family trees.

In the early 1910s a young woman set out every day to walk the river banks near Galashiels in the Scottish Borders. Ida Hayward was recording something extraordinary: the arrival in the UK of hundreds ...