History Reading Party 2025

This year’s history reading party took a dozen history undergraduates to Herefordshire for wide-ranging discussions of social, political and cultural history. The later middle ages and early modern Europe were prominent in our debates, but we also ventured far beyond. We were put in the mood for our visits to Leominster Abbey and Goodrich Castle by books on Giotto’s Arena Chapel and the Oxfordshire masons who built many of Wren’s most famous designs. 

Different approaches to noble and princely lordship came out in studies of the Milanese aristocracy, the Burgundian ducal state, the German Peasant War and the role of noble power in decentralised polities. 

We zoomed in on mid-Tudor England with Mary I, Lady Jane Grey and Edward VI’s Books of Common Prayer and on Mao’s China with Manchurian steelworks and political justice. We zoomed out to think about black youth in postcolonial France and the strategies by which non-European powers as different as Ethiopia and Thailand avoided subjection to colonialism. 

Entertainment was less vigorous than in some previous years, but intense sessions of word puzzle solving over breakfast were balanced by a bracing walk on the Malvern Hills and a long-running pool contest.