Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
The Caroling season is beginning! A month from now, many of us will be attending candlelight Christmas Eve services where, if you’re like me, you’ll end up a bit weepy as the church goes dark, and you try to sing Silent Night in your voice part because you’ve sung it so many times now you…
The Tudors lived in a world that was at least several generations ahead of the Enlightenment. But the seeds of that revolution in scientific thought were being sown in the Renaissance when society started to value classical and secular learning for the first time in a millennium. The Renaissance became firmly established in England when Henry…
Everyone loves an underdog story. And when the underdog wins because of his wit and smarts, beating out someone who is supposedly more powerful, it just makes things even better. This was what seemed to happen in 1598 when The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the theater company employing Shakespeare and managed by Richard Burbage, was unable…
They say that there are three things you shouldn’t talk about at a family dinner table: Sex, Religion, and Politics. Keep that in mind for Thanksgiving, my American friends. Please. Turkeys everywhere right now are saying, “seriously, I’m not giving up my life so that you can argue over me about Syrian refugees.” At least,…
I’ve been listening to a book called Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt which is a biography of Shakespeare from a holistic world-view perspective. How did a provincial young boy, who was the son of a glover, who may or may not have been a recusant Catholic wind up being…
I just posted a fresh Renaissance English History Podcast on Fashion, Clothing, and Sumptuary Laws in Tudor and Elizabethan England. Below is the audio to listen, and the show notes are on the podcast website, englandcast.com. Here are some fun things I learned this episode: Decorating a fur with jewelry, like sapphire claws or a…
I was thinking about shopping in England because I’m making a grocery run to Gibraltar tomorrow – it’s nearly 2 hours on two main roads, and I need my passport to get to the giant Morrison’s supermarket, but once there I can easily read the labels since they’re in English, and everyone around me is…
In 1598 a very old man decided to write a history of his changing city, a snapshot of a city that was going through enormous transformation, and he wanted to capture the city he knew as a younger man for posterity. The man was called John Stow, and the city was London, and the Survey…
I’ve written before about how much I love this author, who epitomizes all that is good in hilarious historical humor (history “as it might have happened, but probably didn’t”). The best way I can describe him is to tell you to imagine reading Monty Python and the Holy Grail in a novel format, only slightly funnier. I…
One way of looking at the Protestant Reformation in England was that it was completely because of a woman that Henry VIII broke away from the Pope, for whom he had been such a staunch defender just a decade before. If Henry hadn’t been so besotted with Anne Boleyn, and if she had been more…