Welcome to Historia’s most popular regular feature, our round-up of books published by members of the Historical Writers’ Association (HWA) to look out for during the coming year. For 2024, there are more than 200 books covering history, biography, and historical fiction and spanning eras from Ancient Greece and Egypt to the 1980s. They sweep […]
Hecate’s Daughter by Jo Tiddy (the 2023 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story winner)
Jo Tiddy’s story, Hecate’s Daughter, won the 2023 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Competition. “A clever story, written deftly and colourfully, showing the cruelty and ignorance (and small kindnesses) of the period,” the judges said. “[We] adored this original and subversive take on a well-worn tale, told in such a vivid and powerful voice that […]
The Protestant Wind
The course of English, and later British, history could have been changed on several occasions by fleets setting out from southern European countries if it hadn’t been for a number of weather events which have come to be known, collectively, as the ‘Protestant Wind’. Maggie Craig explains. The Protestant Wind is the name given to […]
The Burnings by Naomi Kelsey
In 1589, Scottish housemaid Geillis and Danish courtier Margareta lead opposite lives, but they both know one thing: when a man cries “witch”, no woman is safe. Yet when the marriage of King James VI and Princess Anna of Denmark brings Geillis and Margareta together, everything they supposed about good, evil, men, and women, is […]
Witch’s Mummy: corpses and cure-alls
A powder made of corpses helped cause the execution of two of the North Berwick Witches at the end of the 16th century. Yet ‘mummy’ was used as a cure-all by royalty. How did ground-up dead bodies come to play a part in early modern medicine? Naomi Kelsey, author of The Burnings, explains. On 28 […]
Ritual of Fire by DV Bishop
Florence. Summer, 1538, and a night patrol finds a wealthy merchant hanged and set ablaze in the city’s main square. More than mere murder, this killing is intended to put the fear of God into Florence. Forty years earlier, puritanical monk Girolamo Savonarola was executed the same way. Does this new killing mean his fanatical […]
Historia extract: Ritual of Fire by DV Bishop
To celebrate the publication of Ritual of Fire, DV Bishop’s third Cesare Aldo crime thriller set in 16th-century Florence, Historia is publishing an extract from the book – the whole first chapter. Thursday, May 23rd 1538. Cesare Aldo could still smell flesh burning, even from this distance. In Florence it would have been one scent […]
Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I by Tracy Borman
Anne Boleyn is a subject of enduring fascination. By far the most famous of Henry VIII’s six wives, she has inspired books, documentaries and films, and is the subject of intense debate even today, almost 500 years after her violent death. For the most part, she is considered in the context of her relationship with […]