We often hear about villains in Medieval and Renaissance history, for example, King John, Edward the Black Prince and Cesare Borgia. But where are the stories about naughty women? Were there villainous women during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance? OF COURSE! Here’s a look at a few women well known for their infamy… 1. Isabella…
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The Love of A Lifetime by Mary Fitzgerald
Oh, Secret Book Club, I love you. I love you for always giving me a book I never would choose and then letting me be honest about it. ‘The Love of A Lifetime’ is an odd book; it’s a novel about an old, old man dying of cancer on the family farm. The basic premise…
12 of the Worlds Strangest Museums
Source: CRRA If you are looking for an exhibition that is totally rubbish, then this might be for you. Central to their display is the Trash-o-saurus which is made from a ton of trash, signifying the amount the average person generates each year. To really demonstrate the recycling process, visitors are allowed to walk through…
How to become a Renaissance Pope
The history of Papal elections is full of intrigue, plotting, bribery and in some rare instances, holiness. By the mid-fifteenth century the form for Papal elections was firmly established after the chaos of the Avignon schism. Unfortunately, Conclaves of the fifteenth century were shrouded in secrecy and tight security so very few accounts survive. So…
Still Waters by Katie Flynn
When Still Waters first dropped through my letterbox at its full 672 pages, I wasn’t phased. I usually read epic fantasy which can easily be a third again as long. But this wasn’t fantasy, it was a fictional story of a girl’s attempt to find herself amidst family tragedy and wartime hardship. We first meet…
Fit For a King: Our Top British 10 Castles
If you follow us on Twitter, then you will be well aware of our obsession with castles (we even coined #CastleOfTheWeek). Standing as shining symbols of strength, wealth and status; castles were the strongholds that once held the powers of the realm. Built as both fortresses and residences alike, they stood as beacons of authority and were the centre of…
Can You Cancan?
Ooh la-la! Long skirts, frilly petticoats, stockings, feathers, whooping and high kicking ladies in a line. This is the saucy and sassy image we conjure up when visualising a performance of the cancan. The outfits hark back to Parisian fashions of the 1890s, but the dance has rather inauspicious origins some 60 years earlier. It…
How hindsight could have saved the people of Pompeii
When Vesuvius erupted on the morning of 24 August, AD 79, the local population was utterly unprepared. Frustratingly evidence today suggest that all the tell-tale signs were there to warn them if only they had known what to look for. But as we all know, you can’t change the past with hindsight… So let’s take a look back at those…
The Reluctant Bride by Beverley Eikli
A young woman has her head turned by a dashing soldier, who turns out to be a ne’er-do-well, and then slowly falls in love with a man who seems cold and aloof on first meeting, but who has a heart of gold. So good, so Pride and Prejudice. But the superficial similarity with Jane Austen’s…
It’s Archaeology… In YOUR hands!
Polly Heffer, archaeology graduate and DigVentures intern, describes why crowd-funding is a new and exciting future for archaeology – and how DigVentures is leading the way… A new way to fund archaeology is here. Crowd-funding is a way to put power in the hands of the public: you choose who and what you want to invest your time and…