Early Modern
From the Archives: Kepler’s Mother-A Scary Story for Halloween
The seventeenth century was a period of scientific revolution. Astronomers, like Galileo, worked out the motions of the planets and stars in the sky, and overturned the concept that the earth stood at the center of the cosmos.(1) Galileo, Newton and others created a new science of mechanics that applied the laws of mathematics to…
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Telling Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Sarah Gristwood
A couple of weeks ago, responding to a question from Vanya Eftimova Bellinger, I said that Sarah Gristwood’s Game of Queens and Blood Sisters:the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses transformed the way I think about women’s roles in medieval and early modern European power politics. I must admit that I reached out to…
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Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen
Sixteen century Irish clan leader Grace O’Malley was the most famous “pirate queen” in the English-speaking world, and in fact the woman for whom the term seems to have been coined. Ireland in the sixteenth century was a decentralized society, ruled by independent clan chieftains who were continually at war with each other. It…
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