The springtime holiday of Hocktide not only allowed villagers to cross social boundaries in the name of fun, it helped them raise funds for nonsecular needs.

The Eleutherian Adventurers departed Bermuda for the Bahamas in 1647, hoping to create the first democracy in the Americas.

The defrocking ceremony was meant to humiliate a disgraced member of the clergy while discouraging laypeople from viewing him as a martyr.

The sixteenth-century handwritten collection of poetry and commentary offers a glimpse of intellectual life at the court of King Henry VIII.

The failed campaign to put Lady Arbella Stuart in the line of succession began with a matchmaking scheme between her two grandmothers.

Scholars of early modern England have shown how plague and protest are often correlated. The Black Death of 1348 laid the groundwork for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for example.

If thieves’ cant—a language known only to criminals—was the Devil’s cabinet, bourgeois society couldn’t help but peep inside.