Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
This lecture will survey this ‘black legend’ and ask what made it so enduring – and why some parts of the story, such as the Inquisition’s genocidal campaign against Spanish Jews, received so much less attention than others.
Architecturally incoherent these places may have been, but James’s remarkable forgotten country houses tell us a huge amount about the man and the dawn of the Stuart age.
Sir Richard Evans, one of the world's foremost authorities on modern German history, asks why the Republic failed in its attempt to make Germany democratic, and what lessons can be learned for the future of democracy in the 21st century.
Dr John Guy presents a special illustrated lecture to commemorate the 500th Anniversary of the birth of the College’s founder and benefactor Sir Thomas Gresham.
Professor MacMillan, a specialist in British imperial history and the international history of the 19th and 20th centuries, will consider if the treaty led to the outbreak of the Second World War and whether the attempt to create a new world order was a failure.
The changing balance of power and wealth between the aristocracy and the monarchy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has fundamentally influenced today’s national cultural landscape of art and architecture.
This lecture questions this view and shows how, from the sixteenth century, aristocratic families deployed their collections and commissioned their buildings in both town and country in order to further their political and dynastic ambitions.
An integral part of the tumultuous political events of the century was the cultural ambition of the principal players who form the subject of this lecture.
London was crucially dependent on continental Europe for its economic resilience in the mid-sixteenth century, and Sir Thomas Gresham’s fortune piggy-backed off the special relationship with Antwerp.