Richard Kurti writes about the inspiration behind his Basilica Diaries thriller series, set in Renaissance Rome at the time of the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica. He finds contemporary echoes, some unexpected… It was extraordinary to witness. Even in the tech-driven 21st century, with 10,000 satellites circling the Earth and information flowing between eight billion […]
Bess Throckmorton and the Gunpowder Plotters’ wives
Bess Throckmorton, Walter Raleigh’s wife, was a formidable character who survived disgrace under Elizabeth I and her husband’s execution under James VI and I. Intrigued by her, Alexandra Walsh found that Bess’s connections to the wives of most of the Gunpowder Plotters would give Bess a central role in her novel, The Secrets of Cresswell […]
Fake news, or the Horrid Popish Plot
The ‘Horrid Popish Plot’, as it was called, was an anti-Catholic conspiracy that flared up in the 1670s; a classic example of fake news infecting the public imagination. Anna Abney examines the bizarre and sometimes shocking events. ‘Since Hell is broke loose, and the Press set a work,By Jesuit, by Jew, by Christian, and Turk; […]
People-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean times
The Drowned City, the first in KJ Maitland’s Daniel Pursglove series of historical crime novels, is set in Bristol in 1606 – a year after the Gunpowder Plot – where a Jesuit conspirator is said to be hiding. KJ Maitland tells Historia how religious conflict caused an increase in people-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean England. […]
Transubstantiation. And why it matters (Honestly. It does)
Author SD Sykes tells Historia how researching a 14th-century dispute over church doctrine started her on the path that led to her latest Oswald de Lacy novel, The Bone Fire. When my son started his senior education in 2008 at a Catholic school, we dutifully attended the first family mass as part of our introduction […]