Renaissance

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes

Zaga Christ died on 22 April 1638 leaving Europe no wiser as to the authenticity of the self-proclaimed Ethiopian prince who might bring his homeland to Catholicism.

Thieves, cheats, and scoundrels. How did early modern millers get their bad reputations?

On 9 March 1522 the Swiss Reformation began with an ‘ostentatious eating of sausages.’

The Great Siege of Malta by Marcus Bull upends the myth of the Knights of Malta and their last stand of 1565. 

More than 100,000 people took up arms across the Holy Roman Empire in the spring of 1525. What drove them? And why were they ultimately crushed?

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a case for the Rennaissance as a triumph not of individuality, but of universal experience.

For the Portuguese empire to rise, an old world had to give way. Rivals in Europe’s lucrative spice trade, how much did they know about the powerful Mamluk sultanate?

The concerns of daily life prompted early modern people to seek reassurance in fate, stars, and astrologers.

Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning flourished.