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.
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.
Medieval England was proudly Catholic and ostentatiously loyal to Rome. But from the late sixteenth century until recent times – and even now – anti-Catholic prejudice has been a cornerstone of English and British identity.
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.
This series has argued that the origins of modern secularism lie in the age of the Renaissance. This last lecture will track that legacy down to the present.
The newly discovered Salvator by Leonardo, the world’s most costly picture, is one of his most notable creations, in which he used his ‘science of art’ to transform a stock subject into a profound expression of the ineffability of the divine. We will look at the remarkable story of its discove
The Protestant Reformation set out to purge Christianity of error. But once you have started, how do you know when to stop? Some radicals tore up layer upon layer of tradition in the tireless search for deeper truths, proving their faith by their refusal to believe.
This lecture will look at how and why Christians in the seventeenth century first began seriously to wrestle with unbelief, whether troubled by feelings that God was absent, worries about religious variety or fear of damnation.
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