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War Games at the Field of the Cloth of Gold

2020 marks the 500th anniversary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, one of the most extraordinary diplomatic events of the late medieval period.

Choosing Religious Atrocities in Ireland

Nowhere in Europe have the wars of religion lasted longer than in Ireland. At the heart of this are two rival sets of memories of atrocities: above all, Protestants recall the massacres of the 1641 rebellion, and Catholics recall the massacres perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell in 1649.

Charles II: The Court in Exile

For a decade after the execution of Charles I the Stuart courts were based in the Low Countries and France. Always short of money, but determined to maintain splendour and dignity, Charles II rented a series of mansions and used them as the headquarters of the exiled monarchy.

The Japanese Martyrs

In the age of exploration, Catholic missionaries fanned out across the world, meeting with extraordinary success but also extraordinary opposition: nowhere more so than in Japan, where the fast-growing Catholic community was brutally suppressed in the early seventeenth century.

The Cato Street Conspiracy, 1820: A Study in Terrorism

The lecture discusses their identities, motives and impact, and the forgotten fact that their failure ended British revolutionary fantasies for a century.

How to Survive a Massacre in Europe’s Wars of Religion

Europe’s Wars of Religion were fought against entire populations, and were punctuated by events remembered as atrocities: such as the siege of Leiden in 1573-4 or, most notoriously, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacres in France in 1572.

The Business of Santa Claus in Lapland

The myth of Santa Claus has been translated into an extraordinary market on a global scale. But how did this marketing success materialise? How did Finland become the home of Christmas?

Charles I: The Court at War

During the Civil War Charles I’s court, denied access to its usual country residences, was forced to set itself up in a series of makeshift locations. The most important of these was Oxford which Charles converted into a large and well-organised courtly campus.

Slavery, Memory and Reparations

This talk will examine how the history and memory of enslavement shaped questions of identity and citizenship in Europe.

Organ Transplants and Human Rights Abuses in China

This lecture reports on the findings of "The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China" (June 2019), which examined reports of state-sponsored murder for the harvesting and sale of organs.

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