Writing & research
Alice Cornwallis made damn fine desserts
My search for a half-named woman from the 16th Century.
‘A Survey of London’: a pioneering history of a rapidly changing city
‘A visionary conception’ of telling the story of 16th and 17th-Century London.
A brief history of the development of the field of women’s history
Let’s get meta this Women’s History Month.
Is it time to re-examine the ‘witch’ as a symbolic feminist figure?
Or at least, make sure we’re clear about and comfortable with its origin story?
What’s in a recipe book?
The simple name that belies a wealth of culinary, medical, scientific, and social historical knowledge.
Reading, writing, and irregularities of logic
In the 1650s in Salisbury, southern England, 80-year-old Anne Bodenham was hanged for witchcraft. She was a cunning woman, or occultist, who had...
How a 16th Century book lover approached the threat of the Dissolution of the Monasteries
John Leland (c.1503-1552) was variously a poet, a tutor, a rector, a royal chaplain, and is described as Britain’s first antiquarian. Indeed, after...
Research: the influence of women’s under-representation on women history practitioners
Analysis of a data sub-set from an online survey of almost 1,000 history practitioners. This is the third (and final, for now) in a series of...
Research: the state of women’s (under)representation in history outputs
Findings from an analysis of almost 27,000 history outputs from 2024. This is the second in a series of articles drawn from my Public Histories MA...
Research: the who, what, and why of history practice today
Findings from an online survey of almost 1,000 history practitioners. This is the first in a series of articles drawn from my Public Histories MA...
The candid smile that caused a stir
In 1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee – 50 years on the throne. Over two days, from 20-21 June, she was the guest of honour at a...
Love in the archives
A couple of the links/topics I shared in Wednesday’s monthly post (what makes historians go ‘wait, what?’ and ruin lust) had me tangentially...
Marian Farquharson fought for women’s rights; she was punished when she won
In last fortnight’s post about women’s role in the development of commercial photography in Great Britain and Ireland in the mid-19th Century, I...
The development of commercial photography in the 19th Century was liberating for women
On the front page of London’s The Times newspaper on 5 January 1853, almost half the height of one column was dedicated to raising money for the...
There’s a universal pattern in profanity, but it’s not what you probably think
When I was in my teens, my best friend and I decided that we were swearing too much. Our solution was to come up with an alternative word for...