Here are 100 books that Rebellion fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a Professor of early-modern British History at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, who was a specialist in the Tudor period, especially the life and reign of Elizabeth I. However, while doing research over the past six years, I became excited by the politics, religion, and culture of the Jacobean period. James I’s reign had been a topic I taught in a week to undergraduates, but I realised that I didn’t do justice to this rich and important period. Not only is it fascinating in its own right, but James’s reign had a huge impact on a long stretch of British and world history.
I love this book because it combines history and literature, doing justice to both. By setting Lear and Macbeth in their cultural and political contexts, Professor Shapiro has given me new insights into both plays. Before seeing them again, I’ll go back to this book.
Shapiro is a model for me of an academic historian who successfully addresses a wider audience by avoiding academic jargon, explaining the unfamiliar, and telling a good story. He wears his great scholarship lightly, but he has done a huge amount of research and has a mastery of his subject.
Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare in a Divided America, shows how the tumultuous events in 1606 influenced three of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies written that year—King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. “The Year of Lear is irresistible—a banquet of wisdom” (The New York Times Book Review).
In the years leading up to 1606, Shakespeare’s great productivity had ebbed. But that year, at age forty-two, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn—King Lear—then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
I am a Professor of early-modern British History at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, who was a specialist in the Tudor period, especially the life and reign of Elizabeth I. However, while doing research over the past six years, I became excited by the politics, religion, and culture of the Jacobean period. James I’s reign had been a topic I taught in a week to undergraduates, but I realised that I didn’t do justice to this rich and important period. Not only is it fascinating in its own right, but James’s reign had a huge impact on a long stretch of British and world history.
I love exhibition catalogues. They are usually lavishly illustrated with expert explanations of the visuals. I can dip into them at will, especially when I’m too tired for a major investment of time in reading.
This one is particularly fine as its production values are high and the explanations lengthy. Prince Henry, the son of James VI and I, who died suddenly in November 1610 at the age of eighteen, was, like his mother, Queen Anna, a patron of music, paintings, masques, architecture, and gardens. These interests are amply revealed in the fascinating pictures and text of this wonderful catalogue.
This exploration of Henry's life and image, and the extraordinary reaction to his death, transforms our understanding of this exceptional prince and the time in which he lived. In November 1612, shortly before his nineteenth birthday, Henry, the eldest son of James I and Anne of Denmark, died of typhoid fever after a short illness. The nation was struck by grief at the loss of this most promising prince who, it was believed, would become a king to transform Britain. Unlike his father, Henry was seen as militaristic, ardently Protestant and fiercely moral; he was also a precocious patron of…
I am a Professor of early-modern British History at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, who was a specialist in the Tudor period, especially the life and reign of Elizabeth I. However, while doing research over the past six years, I became excited by the politics, religion, and culture of the Jacobean period. James I’s reign had been a topic I taught in a week to undergraduates, but I realised that I didn’t do justice to this rich and important period. Not only is it fascinating in its own right, but James’s reign had a huge impact on a long stretch of British and world history.
I found this book utterly engrossing. The subject of Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy to India from 1616 to 1619 interested me in part because of my interest in cross-cultural exchanges and partly because of my own visit to some of the places previously trodden by Roe.
I liked the fact that the book had a clear argument, namely that Roe’s previous personal and political experiences influenced his perceptions and conduct in India.
Above all, I found the writing a joy. Despite its undoubted scholarship, the book reads as a novel. Das brings colour to all the descriptions, whether of people, places, or events. I wish I could write like that.
WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE
A SPECTATOR, WATERSTONES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE, PROSPECT AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR
A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century.
'A triumph of writing and scholarship. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story' - William Dalrymple, Financial Times
'A fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire . . . drawn in dazzling technicolour' - Spectator
'Beautifully written and masterfully researched,…
I am a Professor of early-modern British History at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, who was a specialist in the Tudor period, especially the life and reign of Elizabeth I. However, while doing research over the past six years, I became excited by the politics, religion, and culture of the Jacobean period. James I’s reign had been a topic I taught in a week to undergraduates, but I realised that I didn’t do justice to this rich and important period. Not only is it fascinating in its own right, but James’s reign had a huge impact on a long stretch of British and world history.
I like to get stuck into specialized studies to extend and deepen my historical knowledge. This recent monograph, based on research in Denmark, England, and Scotland, taught me a great deal about how Queen Anna used visual and material culture to forge her own identity and bring prestige to the Jacobean monarchy.
I very much enjoyed reading Field’s descriptions of Anna’s clothes, jewelry, and collecting practices, all of which displayed the queen’s pan-European identity and interests. As a scholar, I am particularly interested in the public image of kings and queens, so this book greatly appealed to me.
Approaching the Stuart courts through the lens of the queen consort, Anna of Denmark, this study is underpinned by three key themes: translating cultures, female agency and the role of kinship networks and genealogical identity for early modern royal women. Illustrated with a fascinating array of objects and artworks, the book follows a trajectory that begins with Anna's exterior spaces before moving to the interior furnishings of her palaces, the material adornment of the royal body, an examination of Anna's visual persona and a discussion of Anna's performance of extraordinary rituals that follow her life cycle. Underpinned by a wealth…
I was born in rural Bannockburn in Scotland, two fields from the site of the famous Battle (a rare victory over England) of 1314. From the start, the Past has always been very present to me. I have written 22 books: novels, non-fiction memoir, and poetry. In differing ways they all explore aspects of Scotland and being Scottish – our landscape, geology, history, culture, and psyche. I was brought up in East Fife, near St Andrews, and live in Edinburgh and Orkney; my mother was English, as is my wife, novelist Lesley Glaister. Which is by way of saying I am interested in writing the joys, aches, and complexities of being human, in the universal and the local, in our present and the Past that shapes it.
So it is not a novel, but might as well be for its twists, turns, and transformations. Edinburgh in 1572 was a small town of some 3,000 families, so my real-life narrator William Fowler would know and meet one of its most notable citizens, Preacher John Knox of Haddington, along with his young and socially aristocratic second wife (the latter attribute was more a matter of gossip and criticism than the thirty-seven years age gap), and witnessed him being helped up into the pulpit at St Giles to give his congregation a last good talking to. This is the most recent (drawing on a major new cache of letters), and highly readable, life of the man who pushed Scotland towards a Presbyterian Calvinist form of Protestantism – crucially distinct from that evolving in England under the Auld Hag aka Elizabeth I. He is revealed as a much more complex and…
The definitive biography of John Knox, a leader of the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Scotland
"Never before has there been such a thoroughly and sympathetically critical treatment of the 16th-century Scottish reformer's thought and times. . . . A joy to read and a book to value."-Sean Michael Lucas, Gospel Coalition
Based in large part on previously unavailable sources, including the recently discovered papers of John Knox's close friend and colleague Christopher Goodman, this biography challenges the traditionally held stereotype of the founder of the Presbyterian denomination as a strident and misogynist religious reformer whose influence rarely extended beyond Scotland.…
Like anyone else who takes an interest in Ireland, I’ve been fascinated by the long and often very difficult history of the island’s experience of religion. Where I live, in county Antrim, religious imagery appears everywhere – in churches and schools, obviously, but also on signboards posted onto trees, and in the colourful rags that are still hung up to decorate holy wells. This book is the fruit of twenty years of thinking about Christian Ireland - its long and difficult history, and its sudden and difficult collapse.
This book is an eye-opener. Callan investigates a sudden unexpected sequence of heresy trials that shook the Irish church in the fourteenth century. She uncovers all manner of badly behaving churchmen – from the mendacious to the cavalier – and highlights the experience of the women who were so often their victims. Callan argues that the heresy trials often mark out differences other than theological within the Irish church – and shows that two centuries after the Norman invasion, ethnic and cultural differences continued to destabilise its always fragile communion.
Early medieval Ireland is remembered as the "Land of Saints and Scholars," due to the distinctive devotion to Christian faith and learning that permeated its culture. As early as the seventh century, however, questions were raised about Irish orthodoxy, primarily concerning Easter observances. Yet heresy trials did not occur in Ireland until significantly later, long after allegations of Irish apostasy from Christianity had sanctioned the English invasion of Ireland. In The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish, Maeve Brigid Callan analyzes Ireland's medieval heresy trials, which all occurred in the volatile fourteenth century. These include the celebrated case of…
Like anyone else who takes an interest in Ireland, I’ve been fascinated by the long and often very difficult history of the island’s experience of religion. Where I live, in county Antrim, religious imagery appears everywhere – in churches and schools, obviously, but also on signboards posted onto trees, and in the colourful rags that are still hung up to decorate holy wells. This book is the fruit of twenty years of thinking about Christian Ireland - its long and difficult history, and its sudden and difficult collapse.
Since the later sixteenth century, historians have been trying to explain why the Irish refused to follow their political leaders into the newly established protestant church. Jefferies’s book highlights the scale of the problem – showing that by the turn of the seventeenth century, seventy years after the beginnings of protestant reform, the number of native Irish converts amounted to little more than one hundred. Pushing against the triumphalism that marked an older way of writing the history of the reformation, Jefferies demonstrates the popularity of the late medieval church and argues that historians should reframe their research questions.
It might be less important to ask why the protestant reformation failed, he suggests, and more important to ask why – despite everything – the Catholic church remained so popular.
This important book examines Ireland's experiences of the Tudor reformations. Part I shows that the Irish Church, far from being in decline, enjoyed an upsurge in lay support before Henry VIII's reformation. Part II shows how the early Tudor reformations failed to address the pre-existing weaknesses of the Irish Church, while Cardinal Pole's program for Catholic restoration in Mary's reign did not enjoy the time needed to do so. Instead, the problems of the Irish Church were exacerbated as Tudor policy in Ireland became increasingly militarist and expansionist. Under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth, the English crown was able…
I am a historian of early modern Britain, with particular interests in the cultural and religious history of the English Reformation, as well as in the fields of historical memory and time. I enjoy pursuing these subjects not only through research and reading, but also teaching. I am currently the J. H. Plumb College Lecturer in History at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.
There have been many histories of the English Reformation, but Peter Marshall sets the standard in this engaging and profoundly human take on the religious changes of the sixteenth century. I admire the way in which he balances the sweeping story of the legislative Reformation with small details and anecdotes that really bring the period to life.
This book reminds us that the Reformation cannot be understood simply as an institutional transformation but also as a cultural phenomenon and that real lives and livelihoods were at stake in the process of religious change.
Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. Peter Marshall's sweeping new history-the first major overview for general readers in a generation-argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of "reform" in various competing guises. King Henry VIII wanted an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora's Box from which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life.
With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing historical and institutional developments, Marshall…
I’m a blogger, vlogger, historian, and author of 14 history books, and have a true passion for Tudor history. Tudor history grabbed me at the age of 11, when I had to do a project on Henry VIII and his six wives, and has never let me go. Anne Boleyn is my historical heroine and area of expertise, but I love anything to do with the Tudors. I’m a complete Tudor nut and if I’m not researching and writing about Tudor history, I’m talking about it or getting lost in a good book about it. I love any book that brings my favourite character to life or transports me back to the 16th century.
This is my all-time favourite history book. It’s non-fiction, but is far from dry or academic, it grabs you from the get-go and is like a thriller, a real page-turner.
We all know about the religious persecutions of Mary I’s reign, a queen who has gone down in history as Bloody Mary, but in God’s Traitors, historian Jessie Childs explores just how dangerous it was being a Catholic in Elizabethan England.
Childs focuses on the Vaux family and their experiences of being Catholic as Elizabeth I swings from religious tolerance to viewing Catholics as the enemy.
*Winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize* *Longlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction* *A Sunday Times Book of the Year* *A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year* *A Times Book of the Year* *An Observer Book of the Year*
A woman awakes in a prison cell.
She has been on the run but the authorities have tracked her down and taken her to the Tower of London - where she is interrogated about the Gunpowder Plot.
The woman is Anne Vaux - one of the ardent, brave and exasperating members of the aristocratic Vauxes of Harrowden Hall.
I am Professor of History at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College in Canada. Previously a journalist and a diplomat serving in the Middle East, since returning to academia I have published several books and a wide variety of academic articles – winning the 2014 Eusebius Essay Prize. My work is focused on source analysis and the use of sources to reconstruct the truth of the past – especially in the early Middle Ages: as a result, I have been able to discover the date of Augustine of Canterbury’s death; the underlying reasons behind the need to appoint Theodore of Tarsus as bishop; and the essential story of how Bede produced his Ecclesiastical History.
Patrick Wormald’s early death was a tragedy for early medieval studies as a whole.
Thankfully his former student, Stephen Baxter – an exceptional scholar in his own right – had the energy to carry some of his mentor’s projects over the line, including this collection of some of Wormald’s best essays, articles, and book chapters relating to Bede and his world.
Patrick was also my tutor for several undergraduate courses at Oxford as well as being the supervisor for my Master's Thesis and I too owe him a great debt. This edited collection – with the advantage of updated references and comments – showcases the searing brilliance which made Wormald such a prized commentator on everything connected to the early Middle Ages.
Coupled with Campbell's Essays in Anglo-Saxon History, readers will quickly gain nuanced perspectives on elements and themes crucial in comprehending the conversion of the early English.
Written by the late Patrick Wormald, one of the leading authorities on Bede's life and work over a 30-year period, this book is a collection of studies on Bede and early English Christian society.
A collection of studies on Bede, the greatest historian of the English Middle Ages, and the early English church.
Integrates the religious, intellectual, political and social history of the English in their first Christian centuries.
Looks at how Bede and other writers charted the establishment of a Christian community within a warrior society.
Features the first map of all known or likely early Christian communities in…
