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Due to the Duke of Marlborough‘s military genius and the crush that Queen Anne had on his wife, the duchess, the Marlboroughs were presented with two of the greatest houses of the age.
Were the Crusades an early example of European colonialism? What value did the crusading frontier hold for the knights who fought to defend it? What was the relationship between the Crusades and the knightly culture of chivalry?
In 1615 Katharina Kepler, illiterate mother of the astronomer Johannes Kepler, was accused of being a witch. At that time in Germany, there was a witch ‘craze’. Over half of the c.50,000 executions in Europe for witchcraft between 1500 and 1700 took place in Germany.
Lord Richard Harries has selected 30 images to convey the essential truths of the Christian faith, some ancient and some modern. Drawn from both the West and the East, a few are well-known masterpieces and others will be unfamiliar.
Prokofiev’s piano music struck his contemporaries as matching the new era: its dynamism was compared to sport (“football music”), and its grinding repeated patterns to industrial sounds (“machine music”).
Italo-Byzantine art will be considered as background to the early or ‘proto’ Renaissance at a time when Italy was a focus of stylistic cross-currents from South, East and Northern Europe.
Mata Hari was an erotic dancer who, in 1917, was executed by the French army for treason. She has been portrayed as the ultimate femme fatale, extracting information from hapless men through exploiting her sensual charms.
The English Reformation – unlike many of the other Reformations convulsing sixteenth-century Europe – was at heart more about politics and law than about religion.