Reformation

The woman who set our country in a roar

9 September 2023 9:00 am

Such was the emotion Anne Boleyn inspired in Henry VIII. But before long that scalding love had turned to a brutalising hatred of his second wife, culminating in her bloody beheading

Henry VIII’s windfall from the monasteries was shockingly short-term

6 November 2021 9:00 am

In 1536 there were 850 monastic houses in England and Wales; just four years later they were all gone. The…

Sumptuous and saucy: Compton Verney's virtual tour of their Cranach show

9 May 2020 9:00 am

‘Naughty little nudes,’ my history of art teacher used to say of Cranach’s Eves and Venuses. Aren’t they just? Coquettish…

The English clergy at their oddest – a compendium

29 September 2018 9:00 am

As the wordy title of this book and the name of its author suggest, this is a faux-archaic, fogeyish journey…

Detail from the great and strange Altar of the Holy Blood by Tilman Riemenschneider at the Jakobskirche, Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Is this the greatest sculpted version of the Easter story? It's certainly the strangest

4 April 2015 9:00 am

In April 1501, about the time Michelangelo was returning from Rome to Florence to compete for the commission to carve…

Why calling for an ‘Islamic Reformation’ is lazy and historically illiterate

7 February 2015 9:00 am

What’s wrong with calls for an ‘Islamic Reformation’

The erotic Mary, left, by Gregor Erhart (c.1515–20) and the penitent Mary, right, by El Greco (c.1577)

No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene

22 November 2014 9:00 am

A bogus history book and a new oratorio turn Mary Magdalene into the wife of Jesus and a human rights activist. Damian Thompson feels sorry for the poor woman