Among the powerful medieval women whose stories have — against all odds — survived the years, Balthild, the seventh-century Neustrian queen, is one of the most extraordinary. A slave who became a queen and, later, a saint, she was an unexpected source of inspiration for Matthew Harffy’s latest Bernician Chronicles story, Forest of Foes. The […]
The women of the Gunpowder Plot
Think of the Gunpowder Plot and you think of the men involved. Yet, as Nicola Cornick explains, that’s a mistakenly narrow view; we need to take into account the role and influence of the women in the family networks which bound the plotters together just as much as their Catholic faith did. The Gunpowder Plot […]
Historia interviews: Laura Shepherd-Robinson
Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s acclaimed second novel, Daughters of Night, is shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award. To celebrate this, Historia dragged her away from editing her next book to talk about the award and her writing. Congratulations on being shortlisted! For anyone who hasn’t yet read Daughters of Night, can you sum it […]
Rediscovering Edinburgh’s New Town
Sometimes we can get access to a kind of time machine. Reading good historical fiction can transport us to our social and political past, as Sara Sheridan says. But things like Covid lockdowns, when the streets are stripped of crowds and transport, can also open a time portal – which is how she came to […]
The women left behind by Scott’s Antarctic expedition
Anne Fletcher’s latest book, Widows of the Ice, “brings a new perspective to a story that we thought we already knew” by focussing on the three women widowed by Scott’s Antarctic expedition – and sidelined by its ‘heroic tragedy’ narrative. The idea for this book came when I was on holiday and thinking about the […]
History, historicity, historiography and Arthurian legend
Does it matter whether King Arthur, or someone who the legend is built on, existed in history? For Nicola Griffith, author of Spear, it doesn’t. What was important when she was writing her book was to make a place and a voice for people who have been left out of the stories, and to create […]
An Easter assassination and an early medieval queen
There were many powerful female rulers during the early medieval period, but few records of them exist. Luckily a historical fluke has left accounts of two of them: the Frankish queens, Fredegund and Brunhild, as Shelley Puhak explains. On 14 April, 586, the cathedral of Rouen was crowded with the faithful, eager to celebrate the […]
Henry VIII, impotence and the thorny question of male heirs
Henry VIII died 475 years ago, on 28 January, 1547. To mark the occasion, we asked the author Carol McGrath to draw upon her new book, Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England, to examine the king’s notoriously turbulent sex life. She focusses on the driving force behind his many marriages: his obsession with fathering a […]