Rustic figurines of a resigned-looking Virgin clutching her child may have no obvious literary or artistic merit to us today. But understanding what they meant to the spiritual lives of their owners can offer a glimpse of the human hopes and fears that people have, for centuries, invested in inanimate objects.
The journals and scrapbooks of Pierre de L’Estoile have for generations provided a vivid picture of France in a time of religious upheaval. Now Cambridge historian Tom Hamilton has written the first book devoted to the life of L’Estoile as a diarist, collector and man about town.
A photography exhibition capturing the black South African Zionist community – the most popular religious denomination in the country – opens at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) today.
Treasures from the world’s largest and most important collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts – chronicling 1,000 years of history in Old Cairo – have gone on display in Cambridge today for a six-month-long exhibition at Cambridge University Library.
Beards are back in fashion. But today’s hipster styles convey rather different messages to the hair men cultivated in the early modern period. Historian Dr Stefan Hanß investigates the ways in which daily ‘performances of hair’ for men and women reflected the profound religious and social changes sweeping through Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Some of the world’s most important religious texts are currently on display in Cambridge as part of Cambridge University Library’s 600th anniversary exhibition – Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World.
A dark shadow lay over his family name when, aged 24, Sir Kenelm Digby raised a fleet to sail against the enemy French in the multicultural world of the Mediterranean. In his new book, Joe Moshenska (Faculty of English) looks at the intellectual, political and culinary life of a man driven by a thirst for knowledge.
Some of the world’s most valuable books and manuscripts – texts which have altered the very fabric of our understanding – will go on display in Cambridge this week as Cambridge University Library celebrates its 600th birthday with a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of its greatest treasures.
A team of experts has pieced together the architectural context of two treasures of Renaissance art in the National Gallery collection. The research behind the 3D-visualisation combines traditional and digital methods – and benefits from invaluable input from the local community.
People in the ancient world did not always believe in the gods, a new study suggests – casting doubt on the idea that religious belief is a 'default setting' for humans.
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