England

A male heir might have saved Queen Mary’s reign, and changed the shape of global Catholicism for good.

Less famous than its 1215 predecessor, the Magna Carta of 1225 held the true power.

The monks of Peterborough told strange tales of the Wild Hunt. Were they ghostly apparitions or wishful thinking?

Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War by Minoo Dinshaw views the conflict through the sad case of Bulstrode Whitelock and Edward Hyde.

Are beavers beasts or fish? For medieval philosophers, this was an important question with implications for the dining table.

Written into history as the ‘Mad Duchess’ of Albemarle, what brought about the downfall of Elizabeth Cavendish?

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of the controversial satirist and philosopher.

The first year of Edward I’s reign saw waves of strictures placed on a Jewish community in an already perilous situation. It set the path to their expulsion.

What makes someone a king? More importantly, what unmakes a king? Henry II’s experiment in co-kingship saw one Henry III fall and another rise.

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle about identity.