What is our relationship with the past? A quiet revolution has transformed the ways in which History provides us with answers. Indeed, not so long ago the very question might have seemed odd. But in recent decades the solid moorings to which History was seemingly tethered have proved less secure than earlier supposed. That realization has produced some discomfiture, but also many more opportunities for understanding worlds with which we have lost connection.
No single book can hope to reflect all the ways in which History has 'changed with the times' nor can, or should, a volume with...

Dressing Up shows why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. It imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people's appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves.

Using an astonishing array of sources, Ulinka Rublack argues that an appreciation of people's relationship to appearances and images is essential to an understanding of what it meant to live at this time - and ever since. We read about the head accountant of a sixteenth-century merchant firm who commissioned 136...

What is our relationship with the past? A quiet revolution has transformed the ways in which History provides us with answers. Indeed, not so long ago the very question might have seemed odd. But in recent decades the solid moorings to which History was seemingly tethered have proved less secure than earlier supposed. That realization has produced some discomfiture, but also many more opportunities for approaching worlds with which we have lost connection.
No single book can hope to reflect all the ways in which History has 'changed with the times' nor can, or should, a volume with...

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was one of the most admired astronomers who ever lived and a key figure in the scientific revolution. A defender of Copernicus' s sun-centered universe, he famously discovered that planets move in ellipses, and defined the three laws of planetary motion. Perhaps less well known is that in 1615, when Kepler was at the height of his career, his widowed mother Katharina was accused of witchcraft. The proceedings led to a criminal trial that lasted six years, with Kepler conducting his mother's defense.

In The Astronomer and the Witch, Ulinka Rublack...