History Today

Evelyn Hardy visits an English architectural monument of elaborate richness.

Dorothy Margaret Stuart gives the political background of the career of Joan of Arc, when France was enfeebled by foreign invasion and civil strife, and the Duchy of Burgundy had almost achieved the status of an independent European power.

One of the most discreditable episodes in the history of the West is the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, writes Donald Nicol, when the leaders of the Fourth Crusade inflicted a savage punishment upon their Eastern brethren.

Twenty-three crucial years in English history were covered by the arch-episcopate of Thomas Cranmer, whose most enduring monument is the English Book of Common Prayer. By H.A.L. Rice.

D.H. Pennington examines an economic burden that the “poor oppressed people of England” believed no government could relieve them of.

Had these early artists a purely practical aim? Or were they inspired by a true creative impulse? “This conflict” writes Jacquetta Hawkes, “exists only in the mind of the disputants.”

At the close of the third century B.C., Rome and the Seleucid Empire confronted one another in the neutral ground of disputatious Greece. By E. Badian.

John B. Morrall describes how worldly learning and a reverence for Christian tradition were combined in the character of “one of the best of the Renaissance Popes.”

Jacquetta Hawkes explains how, at an unpromising period in human history, a sudden upsurge of creative power produced the earliest masterpieces of European art.

To most modern readers little more than a resounding name, the Kingmaker is here described by Paul Kendall as an “early exemplar of that Western European energy” which was presently to transform the civilized world.