Richard Whittington, known to many as Dick Whittington, was the hero of modern pantomime. Born to a disgraced knight in Gloucester, he travelled to London seeking his fame and fortune. Whittington lived through five reigns - Edward III, Richard, II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI - and was personally known and regarded by all these Medieval monarchs. A fabulously wealthy mercer and prosperous wool merchant, he became the most important benefactor to the City of London. His projects numbered funding a refuge for unmarried women; instituting a novel piped water system; creating a grand latrine that discharged into the River Thames; rebuilding Newgate Gaol; improving Guildhall Library; repairing London Bridge; and creating a College of Priests with an Almshouse that still flourishes today at Felbridge, Sussex. He also financed Henry V's French campaign that culminated in the spectacular victory at the Battle of Agincourt. ... But what of his ubiquitous cat?
Weaving together literary and archaeological evidence, Emily Hauser illuminates the rich, intriguing lives of the real women behind Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Achilles. Agamemnon. Odysseus. Hector. The lives of these and many other men in the greatest epics of ancient Greece have been pored over endlessly in the past three millennia. But these are not just tales about heroic men. There are scores of women as well--complex, fascinating women whose stories have gone unexplored for far too long. In Penelope's Bones, award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser pieces together compelling evidence from archaeological excavations and scientific discoveries to unearth the richly textured lives of women in Bronze Age Greece--the era of Homer's heroes. Here, for the first time, we come to understand the everyday lives and experiences of the real women who stand behind the legends of Helen, Briseis, Cassandra, Aphrodite, Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso, Penelope, and more. In this captivating journey through Homer's world, Hauser explains era-defining discoveries, such as the excavation of Troy and the decipherment of Linear B tablets that reveal thousands of captive women and their children; more recent finds like the tomb of the Griffin Warrior at Pylos, whose tomb contents challenge traditional gender attributes; DNA evidence showing that groups of warriors buried near the Black Sea with their weapons and steeds were, in fact, Amazon-like female fighters; a prehistoric dye workshop on Crete that casts fresh light on "women's work" of dyeing, spinning, and weaving textiles; and a superbly preserved shipwreck off the coast of Turkey whose contents tell of the economic and diplomatic networks crisscrossing the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Essential reading for fans of Madeline Miller or Natalie Haynes, this riveting new history brings to life the women of the Bronze Age Aegean as never before, offering a groundbreaking reassessment of the ancient world.
With equal measures of wit and wisdom, the author of 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret draws a deeply original, hilarious, and telling portrait of the Queen herself.
She was the most famous person on earth; she first appeared on the cover of Time magazine at the age of three. When she died, few people were old enough to recall a time when she was not alive. Her likeness has been reproduced--in photographs, on stamps, on the notes and coins of thirty different currencies--more than any since Jesus. It is probable that, over the course of her ninety-six years, she was introduced to a greater number of different people than anyone else who has ever lived--likely well over half a million. Yet this most closely observed of all women rarely left any real impression on those she encountered beyond vague notions of her "radiance" and "sense of duty." A high proportion of those she met can remember what they said to her, but not a word of what she said to them. Up until now, the curious tactic employed by biographers of the Queen has been to ignore what is interesting and to concentrate on what is not. Craig Brown, the author of 150 Glimpses of the Beatles and Hello Goodbye Hello, rejects this formula, bringing his kaleidoscopic approach to the most famous--and most guarded-- woman on earth, examining the Queen through a succession of interlocking prisms. With Q, this fantastically funny, marvelously insightful journalist gives us an unforgettable portrait of the omnipresent, elusive Queen Elizabeth II.
Our story begins in 1920s London, at a time when women's rights were surging after the long battle for suffrage and nightclubs emerged as spaces where single women could socialise unchaperoned. This was the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending 'Flapper', who inspired the creation of the Gargoyle club, a nocturnal hunting ground for Femmes Fatales.
Meanwhile, London's Bohemia was ruled by the 'Queen of Clubs', Kate Meyrick; the taboo-breaking 'Tiger Woman', Betty May; the original 'Chelsea Girl', Viva King; the artist, Nina Hamnett; the 'Euston Road Venus', Sonia Orwell; and Isabel Rawsthorne, artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse ... to name but a few.
Using previously unpublished memoirs and interviews, Queens of Bohemia creates a soundscape of voices that gives the reader a taste of their world, so exotic and yet often wracked with despair. It offers a unique insight into a generation of women for whom ideals of duty and self-sacrifice had been debunked by the horrors of war and whose morality resided in being true to one's self, as they took their struggle for freedom into the wider world and learned to value their individuality along the way.
A fresh, enthralling narrative history chronicling the dynamic reigns of the first five queens in the Plantagenet family, who ruled England and France for over three centuries, from the New York Times bestselling author hailed as "the finest historian of English monarchical succession writing" (The Boston Globe) "A magnificent tapestry, skillfully woven . . . This rich and robust account will appeal to readers interested in medieval England and some of its most fascinating royal women, whose stories are often left out of the history books."--Booklist The Plantagenet queens of England played a role in some of the most dramatic events in history. Crusading queens, queens in rebellion, seductive queens, learned queens, queens in battle, queens who enlivened England with romantic culture--these determined women broke through medieval constraints to exercise power and influence. This second volume of Alison Weir's acclaimed history of the queens of medieval England moves into a period of even higher drama, from 1154 to 1291: years of chivalry and courtly love, dynastic ambition, conflict between church and throne, and the ruthless interplay between the rival monarchs of Britain and France. We see, from a new perspective, events such as the murder of Becket, the Magna Carta, and the birth of parliaments. Queens of the Crusades begins with the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose marriage to Henry II established a dynasty that ruled over three centuries and created the most powerful empire in western Christendom--but also sowed the seeds for destructive family conflicts and the collapse of England's power in Europe. The lives of Eleanor's four successors were just as remarkable: Berengaria of Navarre; Isabella of Angoulême; Alienor of Provence; and finally Eleanor of Castile. Alison Weir provides a fresh, enthralling narrative focusing on fascinating female monarchs during a dramatic period of high romance and low politics, with unwavering women at its heart. Don't miss any of Alison Weir's fascinating England's Medieval Queens series:
QUEENS OF THE CONQUEST - QUEENS OF THE CRUSADES - QUEENS OF THE AGE OF CHIVALRY - QUEENS AT WAR
QUEENS OF THE CONQUEST - QUEENS OF THE CRUSADES - QUEENS OF THE AGE OF CHIVALRY - QUEENS AT WAR
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost won his case, when a man with a wooden leg swaggered into the French courtroom, denounced du Tilh, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. This book, by the noted historian who served as a consultant for the film, adds new dimensions to this famous legend.
Roma Rights and Civil Rights tackles the movements for - and expressions of - equality for Roma in Central and Southeast Europe and African Americans from two complementary perspectives: law and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book engages with comparative law, European studies, cultural studies, and critical race theory. Its central contribution is to compare the experiences of Roma and African Americans regarding racialization, marginalization, and mobilization for equality. Deploying a novel approach, the book challenges conventional notions of civil rights and paradigms in Romani studies.
How did the characters and events of Scottish history make the Scotland of today? These stories make sense of it all. How much do you know about Scottish history? We all know bits of it. This book by the authors of Scottish History: Strange but True sets out to show how these 'bits' fit together - how the characters and events of Scottish history made the country of Scotland. How did Scotland embrace kilts and tartan after it banned them?How was Robert the Bruce the real Braveheart?How are there more songs about Jacobites than anybody else?How did a King of Scots declare war on Scotland?How did a 'Merry Monarch' destroy the Covenanters?How did King David save Scotland AND give it away?How did John Knox have trouble with Marys?How did a Scottish King love fart jokes and write a bible?
Explores the deployment of racial thinking and racial formations in the visual culture of the pre-modern world. The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance. Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls "the racial matrix" and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition "Seeing Race Before Race"--a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library--as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.
By the subject of the National Geographic documentary Endurance, streaming soon on Disney+
"As thrilling as any tale from the heroic age of exploration. . . Bound's account is a triumph. The storytelling is piano-wire taut, the writing saturated with polar moodiness." ― Sunday Times
The inside story of how the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton's legendary lost ship, was found in the most hostile sea on Earth, told by the expedition's Director of Exploration.
On November 21, 1914, the Endurance succumbed to the surrounding ice. Ernest Shackleton and his crew had navigated the three-masted wooden vessel ten thousand miles to Antarctica in hopes of becoming the first to cross the barren continent, but early season pack ice trapped them in place offshore. Marooned on the ice for six months, Shackleton's expedition to push the limits of human strength took a new form: one of survival against the odds.
A century after this legendary story entered the annals of polar exploration, renowned marine archeologist Mensun Bound and an elite team of explorers joined a new global race to find the wrecked Endurance. Bound experienced failure and despair in his attempts to locate the wreck, and very nearly found his own vessel frozen in ice. Finally, a century to the day after Shackleton's burial, the discovery: nearly ten thousand feet below the ice lay a remarkably preserved Endurance, its name still emblazoned on the ship's stern.
Told "with passion and flair" (Washington Post), The Ship Beneath the Ice is a modern-day adventure narrative of the intrepid spirit that joins two mariners across the centuries--both of whom accomplished the impossible.