History Today

For nine days Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess was the greatest box office phenomenon of the English Renaissance. Then a warrant was issued for his arrest.

‘The most important lesson history has taught me? Destroy your drafts and personal papers, because one day a graduate student will comb through them looking for incriminating titbits.’

A community of Ethiopian monk-scholars in Renaissance Rome brought their learning, language and liturgy into the heart of the Roman Church.

On 10 July 1873, decadent duo Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic frenzy ended with a gunshot.

In Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution, Anne Higonnet brings three dedicated followers of fashion to the fore.

Was Sir Thomas More born on Milk Street – and does it matter?

Does a state need a book of rules by which to operate? And who are those rules for, anyway?

For those learned in medieval medicine and astronomy, the dog days of July heralded dangerous times.

Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America by Amir Alexander explains how the grid system put the United States on the map.

In a BBC interview on 1 July 1952, self-taught linguist Michael Ventris announced that he had deciphered the Linear B script of Minoan Crete.