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 ...

Some seeds of modern science dropped into the ground when the flower of Graeco-Roman learning withered. A few survived even the ignorance and superstition of the worst period of the Dark Ages; but for ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Catherine of Siena (1347-80) was made a saint in 1461, less than a century after she died. In 1970 Pope Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church, a rare title given only to saints who have made ...