Histories Of The Unexpected

Happy Valentine's Day to our listeners! For this episode let us join the Cupid of history, Professor James Daybell and the Casanova of historical crime, Dr Sam Willis as they, with arrows notched and ready to fly, bring you from the back catalogue: the unexpected history of LOVE.Our two star crossed history hunters take the lead along love’s fickle twisting and turning path, from the modern phenomenon of attaching inscribed padlocks to public bridges in Paris to the votive offerings made through centuries past, from the tempestuous affair between Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil in the 12th century and one of the earliest examples of a love letter to Verona in the 1930s and the beginnings of the ‘Juliette Secretary’s’, from the in-twinned savagery of politics and courtly love of the Tudor period and the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt to Stalin and the Soviet state and the poignant last letters of those condemned to death, and from the letters of Sir Edward Dering to his ‘dearest and best