The newsletter is a little late this month. Best wishes for Yule and the coming year!

Tudor mince pies: A taste of Christmas past. Julia Martins on the meatiness of mince pies in bygone days.

Professor Alison Rowlands on witches.

"Professor Alison Rowlands has been instrumental in how we understand the history of European witch hunts and witch trials. Her work is shaping education around this dark period in our history and ensuring that the accused and the complex stories of why they were persecuted are never forgotten. She explains why its so important that we remember those victims who were labelled as witches"

Amy Mantravadi, Broken Bonds: A Novel of the Reformation (Fear and Trembling, 1).

"The Church is fracturing, revolution is brewing, and society is changing rapidly. Three authors who shaped this new world with their pens—Martin Luther, Desiderius Erasmus, and Philipp Melanchthon—will now be shaped by it in turn. When the pope and King Henry VIII of England pressure Erasmus to take a public stand against Luther, both authors will be forced to wrestle with literal and figurative demons. Erasmus is haunted by his illegitimate birth. Luther struggles with the rejection of the Church and his own father. Melanchthon, Luther’s associate and a long-time admirer of Erasmus, is increasingly caught in the middle, forced to choose between two men he venerates or be torn asunder. The three men’s lives and fears are woven together as events spiral out of their collective control."

Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds. Ambereen Dadabhoy introduces her monograph on "the coded ways in which Islam and Muslims appear" in Shakespeare's plays.

Entangled Histories and Cultures: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Premodern Mediterranean through Literary and Folk Sources. Vol. 15 No. 3 of Entangled Religions. Open access. 

“Money, money, money”: Early Modern Ottoman coins and England. Murat Öğütcü explores references to chequins in Jonson's Volpone, Brome's Novella, and Purchas his Pilgrims.

Anne Douglas, Countess of Morton, The Countess of Morton’s Daily Exercise (1696). Joseph Black sets the record straight about Anne Douglas, the author, and outlines her adventurous life.

How Was the First Folio Physically Made? Cassidy Cash talks to Adrian Edwards, head of the Printed Heritage Collections at the British Library.

The Reformation and Violence. The 31st Annual Conference of the Society for Reformation Studies. Hybrid event, Tue, 8 Apr 2025 14:00 - Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:00 BST.

Spike Gibbs, Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Open access publication, due in February 2025.

Patricia Anne Simpson, Early Modern Women’s Work Kinship, Community, and Social Justice, due April, 2025.

From the Margins to the Centre in Seventeenth-Century England. Essays in Honour of Bernard Capp. Essays by Richard Blakemore, Heather Falvey, Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Anu Korhonen, Peter Marshall, Angela McShane, Elaine Murphy, Naomi Pullin and Tim Reinke-Williams.

"Novel studies of hermits, sailors and surgeons, as well as shedding fresh light on topics such as the politics of the parish, the lives of plebeian women, men's emotions, and the cultural worlds of 'Jane' Shore and John Taylor the Water-Poet." Edited by Angela McShane and Tim Reinke-Williams. Volume 54 of Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History. To be published in May 2025.

After decades, tiny 500-year-old royal portrait is identified as Mary Tudor.

John Gallagher, "Migrant Voices in Multilingual London, 1560–1600". Online, open access.

James D. Reid, Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes and the Rationalists.

The course, run by Birkbeck College, University of London, runs from Wednesday 15 January - Wednesday 26 March 2025, 6pm-9pm.

A StackExchange discussion of a line from Titus Andronicus ("Chiron, we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound").

The Surprising Source of Shakespeare’s Inspiration.

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