WRITER & HISTORIAN
By the end of the 11th century, Muslim Europe was in retreat. In Spain, Christian kingdoms were slowly pushing south, while in Sicily over 200 years of Islamic rule had been ended by the Norman conquest of the island. One unexpected result of this intermingling of peoples was an unparalleled assimilation of Islamic knowledge and... 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 →
In 1693 some quarrymen working near Caerleon, outside Newport in Wales, uncovered an alabaster sculpture of a figure they did not recognise. The man wore a suit of armour, which had once been covered in gold leaf. In one hand he held a sword, in the other a pair of scales. The scales themselves held... Continue Reading →
“What more pleasing to a Christian parent whose heart yearns over his children… [than] to see them thus engaged in the best of all causes, even the extension of the Redeemer’s kingdom,” wrote the Methodist Joseph Blake in The Day of Small Things, his 1849 tract encouraging the promotion of missionary zeal to the youngest... 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 →
It wasn’t exactly a motto, but they liked it nonetheless. “The sword is our Pope,” the Livonian Knights said, “and it is a Pope that is never far from you.” Formerly known the Sword Brothers, the Livonian Knights were a military monastic order akin to the Knights Templar. They were founded around 1202 to bring... Continue Reading →
Saint Nicholas was dead, to begin with. On 6 December 343, to be precise, in Myra, in present-day Turkey. But, as is the way with saints, death was no hindrance to miracles. Indeed it was an accelerator. Myrrh flowed from his tomb from the moment of interment. Solving problems, giving gifts; that was what he... Continue Reading →
Why you? It was a good question. Brother Masseo repeated it three times. What do you mean, Francis of Assisi asked him. “You aren’t a handsome man in body,” Masseo explained. “You aren’t someone of great learning, you’re not noble; so why does the whole world come after you?” Because, Francis said, there is no-one... Continue Reading →
Sometime in 1506, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, stopped at a tavern in the German town of Gelnhausen. There he encountered Doctor Faustus - then going by the name of Georg Sabellicus - handing out what were in essence business cards. Faustus was, the cards said, “the chief of necromancers, an astrologer, the second magus,... Continue Reading →
“‘Deep breath,’ says the doctor. I take one and hold it.” Thus begins the fourth chapter in Ann Wroe’s new book, Lifescapes. It is apt, because this is a book about the breath of life itself. It is good advice for the reader too: Wroe’s writing is intense and visionary, bordering on the ecstatic. But... Continue Reading →
I didn’t recognise the book on my shelf. I barely noticed it, scanning the titles quickly for a different one I had mislaid. But somehow the thin tattered spine of its dusty, crumbling dust jacket caught my eye as it rested in the dark, shadowed end of the book case. It was one of my... Continue Reading →
In 1700 a mathematician submitted a paper to the Royal Society in which he attempted to calculate, among other things, the rate at which oral testimony – that is, memory – decayed over long periods of time. It’s a quixotic idea, to be sure. But that such a thing might even be attempted speaks not... Continue Reading →
In April 1550, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, halted Spanish conquests in the Americas. He needed to know if such conquests were lawful. He had scruples; could they be overcome? A panel of over a dozen theologians, officials and administrators gathered in the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid to hear... Continue Reading →
When the Jesuits first arrived in Ethiopia in 1557 they encountered a Christian society whose roots rivalled Rome for antiquity. The region had converted in the fourth century; its royal family claimed descent from the bibilical king Menilek and the queen of Sheba. But, from the point of view of western Christendom, it had been... Continue Reading →
In the summer of 1992, Gloria Davey discovered an old ruined church near Swaffham in Norfolk. It had no roof, no windows, no door. Satanists were using it for their rites: inverted crosses daubed the walls, a pentagram the floor. A grave had been opened, giving up its bones. Gloria’s husband Bob, who before retirement... Continue Reading →
Walkelin, the Norman bishop of Winchester, had a problem. He needed more wood for his new cathedral, being built on unpromisingly marshy ground a little way from the city’s two existing Saxon minsters. He went to the man who had appointed him, William the Conqueror. William offered him as many trees from a nearby royal... Continue Reading →
The Archpriest Avvakum Petrov spent the last fourteen years of his life in a pit in Pustozersk, high above the Arctic Circle. Born around 1620 in a small village in Nizhny Novgorod, he had become a leading figure among the Old Believers in the schism that split the Russian church in the 17th century. Patriarch... 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 →
“Many historians begin their chronicles by praising history, but these praises always sell the matter short,” wrote Damião de Góis, a Portuguese royal archivist, in his account of the reign of Manuel I, published in 1566-7. “History is infinite,” de Góis reckoned, “and cannot be confined within any limits.” It is an unusual manifesto for... Continue Reading →
On 4 August 1540, Thomas Epsam, a former monk of the Benedictine Abbey at Westminster, was brought from Newgate and made to stand before the justices. He had been a prisoner for three years, but still “he wold not aske the kynges pardon nor be sworne to be true to him”, the chronicler Edward Hall... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 