Daniel Pursglove, the reluctant spy at the centre of KJ Maitland’s crime-thriller series, is back. In Traitor in the Ice he’s sent to Battle Abbey, seat of the Roman Catholic Montague family, to find a murderer in a nest of suspected priests. Karen tells Historia about the strange rituals that surrounded serving meals in this […]
Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby by Timothy Ashby
This is the biography of William Ashby, Elizabethan intelligence agent and diplomat who served as ambassador to Scotland during the Spanish Armada crisis. It provides a fresh social, political and foreign policy insight from the perspective of a gentleman spy who took part in some of the most important events of his time. Much of […]
The Saracen’s Mark by SW Perry
London, 1593. Five years on from the Armada and England is taking its first faltering steps towards a future as a global power. Nicholas Shelby – reluctant spy and maverick physician – and his companion, Bianca Merton, are settling into a life on Bankside. But in London there is always a plot afoot… Robert Cecil, […]
The Serpent’s Mark by SW Perry
The Serpent’s Mark by SW Perry
Elizabethan medicine: spectacularly wrong – and likely to kill you
Medicine in Elizabethan times was all too likely to kill the patient, author SW Perry tells Historia. But it wasn’t necessarily the doctors’ fault. Most of what they believed about curing diseases and healing injuries was based on theories which were spectacularly wrong.