This week I’ve been looking into one of the less glitzy and glamorous of Sir Walter Ralegh’s smorgasbord of careers: his service in the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament from 1584 to 1601.

The English Reformation had a profound effect on the role archbishops played in the hierarchy of the church.

The Camden Chair of Ancient History at the University of Oxford is the oldest professorship of history in England, having been established in 1622 by the historian and antiquarian William Camden.

This essay was inspired by a long read in The Guardian by Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson exploring the notion of a contemporary ‘age of decadence without pleasure,’ and comparing such an age to...

Recently I’ve been reading Ayoush Lazikani’s wonderful history of The Medieval Moon (2025) which explores a wide variety of lunar imaginings and representations stretching across the temporal Middle A...

The practice of and capacity to enact violence was an integral element of kingship during the Middle Ages.

Over the past twenty or so years, most areas of history have welcomed scholarship on trans identity with open arms.

In an environment such as the Tudor court, the personal was undeniably political.

Today is Father’s Day, and it feels a better opportunity than any to tackle one of historians of early modern masculinity’s most frequently cited sources: father-son instructional literature.

I recently finished reading Anthony Delaney’s Queer Georgians (2025), which was a fascinating introduction to the marginalised history of a period I’ve never known much about.

Last weekend I read Lyndal Roper’s fantastic Summer of Fire and Blood (2025) which recently arrived in paperback.

Over the course of my undergraduate studies, one of the ideas I encountered which has stuck with me the most came from Anthony Fletcher’s Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (1995).

Help Charlie Bowden raise money to support SSNAP

OxPods · Episode

Podcast · OxPods · The podcast by Oxford students and their professors. OxPods aims to create thought-provoking and easily digestible podcast episodes, made for anyone with an interest in the world ...