In a phenomenon historian David Courtwright termed the "psychoactive revolution," the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the...

Studying the explosion of vernacular literature is fundamentally important to historians of the Middle Ages because it informs them about...

During the early modern period, gender issues within society caused the criminal justice system and its authorities to target those who...

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries British merchants, diplomats and soldiers attempted to break into China by a number of...

In the period between the conquest of Constantinople and the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire rapidly increased in...

It is an undisputable fact that enslaved Africans were put through violent, horrific practices in all areas of enslavement. Some...

Early modern English perceptions of China, as expressed in surviving print materials, occupy a liminal intellectual zone, suspended...

Shah Abbas I, the ruler of the Safavid empire from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, was accorded a legendary reputation...

The Timurid and Safavid empires were vast and in perennial fluctuation. This meant that the leaders of these polities required highly...

The Catholic Reformation, or Renewal began with the Council of Trent 1545 to 1563, and endeavoured to update the Catholic Church to an...

Thomas More’s 1515 text Utopia (fully titled On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia) has become one of the...

The most common historiographical stance regarding early modern revolts is that rebels were motivated by ‘blind rage’ and their actions...

November 2019. I’m sitting distracted in a lecture on late medieval London: half paying attention, half thinking about what I needed to...

Legend has it that coffee beans were first discovered in Ethiopia by a goat herder who had noticed his goats become more energetic and...

The extent to which the ‘gendered’ element or, more simply, gender prejudices shaped society, relative to their theoretical rigidity, is...

Customs in Common consolidated E. P. Thompson’s renown as a brilliantly original historian, provocative and passionate though always...