Al Andalus

Greg Jenner is joined in late antique Egypt by Professor Edith Hall and comedian Olga Koch to learn about the life of mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. An important mathematical and astronomical thinker, Hypatia is best known today for her brutal death at the hands of Christia ...  Show more

Greg Jenner is joined in medieval England by Professor Marion Turner and comedian Mike Wozniak to learn all about Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the Canterbury Tales. Since the fifteenth century, Chaucer has been referred to as the father of English literature. He was one of the fir ...  Show more

During the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christ ...  Show more

1492 marked the beginning of the Colombian Exchange - the transfer of people, goods, ideas and commodities across the Atlantic between Europe and the Americas. We hear a lot about the conquistadors, the settlers, Jesuit priests and colonisers from Spain, Portugal and Britain w ...

Europe’s earliest known humans lived over 1.2 million years ago. After initially roaming the plains of Iberia in small groups, they spread across the Pyrenees into the wider European continent. But for more than 100,000 years all traces of humans in these regions vanish. The q ...

For centuries Spain had been an outlier in Europe due to its religious diversity; Christians, Jews, and Muslims all existed reasonably peacefully across the Iberian peninsula. Under Isabelle of Castile that all changed. She began the Spanish Inquisition and brought to the fore a ...  Show more