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.
Simon Thurley, Visiting Professor of the Built Environment unearths the lost mercantile buildings of medieval London and shows how influential they were.
In the first of two lectures with the theme ‘Merchants, Money and Megalomania’, Simon Thurley will unearth the lost mercantile buildings of medieval London and show how influential they were.
What do we mean by a hero and where does our understanding of the ‘heroic’ idiom come from? In this lecture, Jonathan Bate will show how Shakespeare’s idea of the hero was shaped by the classical tradition, going back to the ancient tale of Troy and Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid.
Jonathan Bate tells the story of how and why Shakespeare was steeped in the classics, from his earliest plays such as Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors to his dramatisations of the stories of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.
'When well-appareled April on the heel / Of limping winter treads'. A calendar month cannot dress, nor can a season walk. This lecture will explore the magic of personification in Shakespeare's poetry.
Amongst all his astronomical allusions, Shakespeare demonstrates a deep knowledge of the night sky and its movements, including the new Copernican world-view. What can we learn of Elizabethan astronomy and Shakespeare's knowledge of it from the plays?
How might the study of the first 1,500 years of London's port history (encapsulating profound changes ranging from location, infrastructure and technology to variations in river levels) help when making predictions for the future?