It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Coming across a compilation of University of Oxford women's exam papers from the 1870s and 80s was something of a treat for me. Having studied History and German at Oxford from 2011-2015, I was eager to find out how the exam papers from 130 years ago differed from those now. Imagine, then, my horror when I …
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is one of the most remarkable English women of the eighteenth century, yet she remains relatively unknown outside eighteenth century scholarship. This is certainly undeserved, as she was an influential courtier, a prolific writer, and the author of the entertaining Turkish Embassy Letters, in which she wrote of her experiences living in …
Stretching from the West End to the City, the coffee-houses of 17th and 18th century London formed the capital's intellectual and social heartbeat. Coffee, a relatively new and exotic import, was only half the attraction: coffee-houses were forums for intellectual discussion, havens for dirty business deals and places where lords and sharpers won and lost …