Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
I recently came across a post on medievalists.net about a thesis by Christian D. Knudsen concerning sexual misconduct in convents and monastic houses. The idea that the monasteries were corrupt, and in “decline” just before the Dissolution is a narrative that has been largely unchallenged for 500 years, and in that light the Dissolution undertaken…
I’m working on a new Renaissance English History Podcast about trade and exploration (because of course the two were linked – without the possibility of new trading markets, there could be no exploration of new lands). It’s impossible to read much about any of the early English explorations without stumbling across Richard Hakluyt, England’s first…
I posted last week about the history of Ronda, the town where I’m living right now, and how its history spans pre-Roman Celtic times, through Christians, Moors, and back to Catholic with the Reconquista. Over the weekend I dove deeper into two of the epochs, Roman and Muslim. After spending Saturday in Gibraltar buying groceries…
A few months ago I went to pull up a recording of Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Alium, his famous 40 part motet written for 8 5-part choirs. I hadn’t listened to it in a while, and it was the kind of day that called for some later Tallis. The recording that came up first in the search…
I posted recently about my interview with Dr. David Skinner, an eminent musicologist based out of the College of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge. When I posted before it was about the logistics of my interview (getting caught in the rain, microphone not working, etc etc). But now that his CD is soon available on Amazon in the…
Caitlin Moran talks in her book, How to be a Woman, about the idea that often when we discover a particular book, we are suddenly introduced to all its friends, and so join this society that we hadn’t even known existed before. So if you, for example, start reading Dorothy Parker, suddenly before you know…
Ronda is the closest big town to where we live, it’s where our Spanish school is located, and where we do most of our shopping (when we don’t want to make the drive to Little England aka Gibraltar). It’s jam packed with history, and the architecture is a constant reminder that Spain was ruled by the…
Last week when I was interviewing Suzi Digby for my podcast episode on her Los Angeles based project The Golden Bridge, which pairs choral music of the English Renaissance with that of contemporary composers, she mentioned a madrigal by Thomas Weelkes called The Andalusian Merchant. Since I live in Andalusia, I looked it up immediately,…
In 2011 I met Suzi Digby via Twitter. Having found out that she is a choral goddess and was in Los Angeles for a visiting professorship in choral conducting and arts leadership, I immediately asked if I could take her to coffee and meet her. I visited her in Queen’s College, Cambridge, and we talked…
Yesterday I was talking with a friend about how I’m excited to go to the Spanish Archives in Simancas, north of Madrid, where all of the letters from Eustace Chapuys are displayed. He was the Spanish Ambassador to England when Henry VIII was giving the middle finger to the Pope in order to marry Anne Boleyn,…