History Reading Party goes virtual

Merton’s historians have kept up the venerable tradition of a finalists’ reading party, this year not in Cornwall or Herefordshire but online.

The books discussed ranged as widely as ever. War and politics stretched from Justinian and the Crusades to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Cultural Revolution and the civil war in El Salvador. Religious topics included John Calvin, French religious orders and the global politics of conversion, and there were analyses of urban life in the Low Countries and gold rushes around the world. Courts and science came together in a study of chambers of curiosities and there was even a book by a Mertonian, Eliza Hartrich’s Politics and the Urban Sector in Fifteenth-Century England.