How 18th and 19th century London supported its unmarried mothers and illegitimate children – essentially establishing an earlier version of today’s Child Support Agency – is the subject of newly-published research by a Cambridge historian.

Six academics from the University of Cambridge have been made Fellows of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social sciences.

A new interactive online atlas, which illustrates when, where and possibly how fertility rates began to fall in England and Wales during the Victorian era has been made freely available from today. 

A collection of essays explores understandings of a vital bodily fluid in the period 1400-1700. Its contributors offer insight into both theory and practice during a period that saw the start of empiricism and an overturning of the folklore that governed early medicine.

Extremely rare, early Christian gold cross, gifted to Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

One of the largest surviving collections of suffrage posters from the early twentieth century are housed in Cambridge University Library’s famous tower. 

Our Georgian and Victorian ancestors probably celebrated Christmas with more modest wine consumption than we do today – if the size of their wine glasses are anything to go by. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found that the capacity of wine glasses has increased seven-fold over the past 300 years, and most steeply in the last two decades as wine consumption rose.

A heavy oak chest in the Parker Library (Corpus Christi College) was used to store objects left as collateral for loans of money. Its ironwork features the outline of a plant – but no-one knew why. Now a visitor to the Library may have unravelled the meaning of this decorative motif.

The Cambridge papers of Sir Isaac Newton, including early drafts and Newton’s annotated copies of Principia Mathematica – a work that changed the history of science – have been added to UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register.

Researchers have pinpointed the date of what could be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded. The event, which occurred on 30 October 1207 BC, is mentioned in the Bible and could have consequences for the chronology of the ancient world.