History Today

William Chester Jordan’s study of one of medieval Europe’s great monastic rivalries suggests that social mobility may have been more common in the Middle Ages than historians previously thought.

In October 1943 the Allies liberated the area around the infamous volcano in the Bay of Naples. Its sudden eruption in March 1944, as war in Italy raged, stretched the resources of the combined services to the limit. What followed was an exemplary emergency operation.

Kathryn Hadley examines the life and enduring influence of the French theologian 500 years after his birth.

To imagine the beliefs and desires of our fellow beings is fundamental to the pursuit of history. Such empathy is needed now more than ever.

Eighty years on from the height of the Battle of Britain, four historians confront the nature of this key episode in the Second World War.

Holbein’s creative life during three decades of extraordinary political, religious and intellectual turbulence.

Plant, animal or other? The struggle to categorise jellyfish mirrors the desire to impose a hierarchy on the natural world.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a commentary on the Industrial Revolution, nor is it a simple retelling of the myth of Prometheus. It is far more original than that.

The global crisis wrought by the First World War prompted the birth of free mental health care for the treatment of shell shock and ‘war neuroses’.