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Having written enthralling biographies of London and of its great river, the Thames, Peter Ackroyd now turns to England itself. This first volume of six takes us from the time that England was first settled, more than 15,000 years ago, to the death in 1509 of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. In it, Ackroyd takes us from Neolithic England, which we can only see in the most tantalising glimpses - a stirrup found in a grave, some seeds at the bottom of a bowl - to the long period of Roman rule...

This entirely fresh narrative of the "British Reformations" focuses on the emotional as well as the material experience of living through the reformations in Britain during the sixteenth century. The Protestant reformations that took place in England and Scotland during the sixteenth century were, even by the standards of the period, unusually and uniquely fractious and complicated. By combining politics, theology and culture – and by complementing its narrative with key documents from the per...

Elizabeth I has been portrayed as a 'man's woman', yet it's the women in her life who provide a fascinating insight into her character. Historian Tracy Borman explores Elizabeth's relationships with her mother, the governesses and stepmothers who cared for the young princess. New light is shed on her formative years. Elizabeth's turbulent relationships with her rivals are examined: from her sister, 'Bloody' Mary, to the sisters of Lady Jane Grey, and finally her deadliest rival, Mary Queen of Sc...

The story of Henry VIII and his six wives has passed from history into legend - taught in the cradle as a cautionary tale and remembered in adulthood as an object lesson in the dangers of marrying into royalty. The true story behind the legend, however, remains obscure to most people, whose knowledge of the affair begins and ends with the aide memoire 'Divorced, executed, died, divorced, executed, survived'. David Loades' masterly book recounts Henry's whole sorry tale in detail from his first...

'Consistently illuminating ... Like all the best stories, it is about the timeless tides of power and influence ... trade deals can sometimes be sexy, thrilling and epic' Sinclair McKay, SpectatorLife in Europe was fundamentally changed in the 16th century by the astonishing discoveries of the New World and of direct sea routes to Asia. To start with England was hardly involved and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. But as the century progressed something extraordinary happen...

Sunday Times bestsellerA Telegraph Book of the YearA History Today Book of the YearA BBC History Magazine Book of the Year The Tudors are a national obsession; they are our most notorious royal family. But, as Leanda de Lisle shows in this gripping new history, beyond the well-worn headlines is a family still more extraordinary than the one we thought we knew.The Tudor canon typically starts with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, before speeding on to Henry VIII and the Reformation. But this leave...

This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern ‘public sphere’, the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularisation to th...

Drawing on intensive new research, this volume covers a dozen ancient parishes straddling the south-west end of the Chiltern hills, set within a large southwards loop of the Thames close to Reading, Wallingford, and Henley-on-Thames. London, connected by river, road, and (later) rail, lies some 40 miles east. The uplands feature the dispersed settlement and wood-pasture typical of the Chilterns, contrasted with nucleated riverside villages such as Whitchurch and Goring. Caversham, formerly "a li...

Originally published in 1969 this book considers the theoretical extent of the royal supremacy in the Elizabethan church and examines how far this supremacy was effective in practice. The first part considers the reactions of Catholics and of moderate and more enthusiastic Protestants, both clerical and lay, to a lay head of the English church and the second part investigates the limits of the queen's authority. The documents, which range from the formal Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity to the l...

The elder daughter of Henry VIII, Mary I (1553-58) became England's ruler on the unexpected death of her brother Edward VI. Her short reign is one of the great potential turning points in the country's history. As a convinced Catholic and the wife of Philip II, king of Spain and the most powerful of all European monarchs, Mary could have completely changed her country's orbit, making it a province of the Habsburg Empire and obedient again to Rome. These extraordinary possibilities are fully d...

The pastor in print explores the phenomenon of early modern pastors who chose to become print authors, addressing ways authorship could enhance, limit or change clerical ministry and ways pastor-authors conceived of their work in parish and print. It identifies strategies through which pastor-authors established authorial identities, targeted different sorts of audiences and strategically selected genre and content as intentional parts of their clerical vocation. The first study to provide a bo...

A young woman forced to fight for her beliefs. A chaplain with a secret that could determine the fate of a kingdom. England, 1452. Under the reign of King Henry VI the country is on the brink of civil war after the Hundred Years’ War. Young mystic Lady Isabelle d’Albret Courteault’s family is forced to flee the Duchy of English Gascony for a new and unforeseeable life in England. While they become established in the courts, Lady Isabelle discovers dark secrets about their chaplain and tutor. A...

From Margaret of Anjou to Katherine Parr, All the Queen’s Jewels examines the jewellery collections of the ten queen consorts of England between 1445–1548, and investigates the collections of jewels a queen had access to, as well as the varying contexts in which queens used and wore jewels. The jewellery worn by queens reflected both their gender and their status as the first lady of the realm. Jewels were more than decorative adornments; they were an explicit display of wealth, majesty and aut...

Originally published in 1988, and the companion book to The Puritan Gentry, covering the period of the Civil War, the English republic and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, this book gives an account of how the godly interest of the Puritans dissolved into faction and impotence. The fissures among the Puritan gentry stemmed, as the book shows, from a conflict between their zeal in religion and the conservative instincts which owed much to their wealth and status.

The Wars of the Roses, which tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in fifteenth-century England, was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. But as acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals, while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the men who fought and died seeking the throne, a handful of powerful women would prove just as decisive as their kinfolks' clashing armies. A richly drawn, absorbing epic, Blood Sister...

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of hist...

RETS Vol. 37. The Whole Book of Psalms, first published in a complete form in 1562, introduced congregational singing to England and contained the best known English verse in the early modern period. Often referred to by later critics as “Sternhold and Hopkins,” it was the dominant hymnal in England until the mid-eighteenth century and printed until 1861. This critical edition, the first to include both texts and tunes, is based on the 148 English impressions remaining from the reign of Elizabet...

A portrait of how people lived in the pre-industrial age describes how a lack of electric lighting separated daytime and evening into more contrasting worlds, explaining how superstition, work, fire, crime, religion, slavery, and other factors were different before the advent of electric lighting.