WRITER & HISTORIAN
Even when contemplating their own deaths, the two cousins inhabited different worlds. Richard II’s will, written in the spring of 1399, was largely devoted to lavish plans for his own funeral and to pursuing vengeance beyond the grave. The judgments he had recently made against his enemies, he wrote, must be defended “even to the... Continue Reading →
Three women are toiling in the field, gathering in the harvest barley. Or rather, two are bent double, scything through the stalks with short-handled sickles while behind a third pauses to stretch her back. It looks excruciating work. No doubt it was. England in the first half of the 14th century was in large part... Continue Reading →
Sometime in 1492 in Whitstable on the Kent coast a woman named Alice Breede went to visit a local soothsayer. She wanted assurance about the kind of life that her young child might expect, the kind of comfort any parent might seek, even today, never mind in an age of high infant mortality. What she... Continue Reading →
‘Piagnoni’, they were sometimes called: the ‘weepers’. They were gangs of teenage boys and young men – mostly middle class – who patrolled the streets of Florence in the 1490s, hurling abuse at the impious – drunks, gamblers, women – and hurling stones too. They were called ‘pinzocheroni’, too: bigots. They, like the city, were... Continue Reading →
She was born in Domrémy in north-eastern France, where she was known as Jeannette. When she signed her name, she wrote Jehanne. But she called herself Jeanne La Pucelle, Joan the Maid. Even to call her ‘Joan of Arc’ – after her father’s name – is to deny something of her identity. Saint Michael’s had... Continue Reading →
The Nuremberg trials that followed the close of World War II were, like the atrocities they prosecuted, unprecedented in international law. And yet the idea that political and military leaders might be held accountable for their actions was not entirely new. Cases cited in the trials themselves included the actions of the Imperial Diet at... Continue Reading →
Over the course of this morning, thousands of people will gather in Leicester for the re-interment of the bones of Richard III. Many more – hundreds of thousands certainly – will watch proceedings on TV as Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the actor Benedict Cumberpatch speak at the ceremony. What does it mean,... Continue Reading →
We are all familiar with the opening life of LP Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Like all elegantly expressed truths it quickly became a cliché. And, as such, like all clichés, it obscures as much as it reveals. It is difficult not to look... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 