Historians return to Herefordshire

The long tradition of history reading parties resumed after two years’ intermission with a trip to Herefordshire in late March by eleven finalists and their tutors. The books under discussion ranged from ancient Greece and Rome to 1990s Albania, from Renaissance Mantua to Afro-Mexico and transnational Latin America, and from medieval parish elites, political cultures, medical care, emotional regimes and the use of space in manor houses to slave marriage, fascist masculinity and global feminisms.

A new destination for an outing was Leominster Priory, where the remarkable sequence of 12th, 13th and 14th-century building styles taught us memorably how to distinguish between billet, stiff-leaf and ballflower in the company of Pevsner’s Buildings of England.