The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, by Stephen Alford, Bloomsbury, 2012, 398 pages, $35 England in particular has a long history of spying on its own people. It is no accident ...

As a hobbit in exile my heart’s hearth remains in the Shire; and, to be specific, to the English shire of Norfolk in East Anglia. For many people, the restfully rolling landscape of East Anglia will ...

British historian Cooper’s biography of Elizabethan spymaster Francis Walsingham is as thrilling and suspenseful as any modern spy novel. Plumbing both primary and secondary sources, Cooper deftly ...

In the closing years of Elizabeth I’s reign, England saw the emergence of arguably the world’s first effective welfare state. Laws were established that successfully protected people from rises in ...

This essay examines how Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V plays react to and comment upon English anxieties about the wars in the Netherlands and Ireland and the economic crisis of the mid-1590s. The ...

HERE is a first look at A Discovery of Witches season two, as the series confirms epic time jump to Elizabethan England. Adapted from Deborah Harkness’s All Souls book trilogy, the second installment ...

MAGIC: Charms, rituals and superstition in Elizabethan England will explore the magical folklore, rituals, fears and superstitions that were an everyday part of life in the second half of the 16th ...

Elizabeth I was a Tudor queen who ruled England from 1558 - 1603. She was the daughter of Henry VIII, and the final Tudor monarch. Her reign has often been described as a ‘Golden Age’ of culture, ...