In April 2025, the Society's President Lucy Noakes published the following article in History Workshop. The article is part of an occasional HW series exploring the scale, form and implications of cuts to history departments and courses in UK higher education. In her contribution, Lucy provided a perspective from the Royal Historical Society, drawing on recent surveys of RHS members on the impact of cuts for staff and students, and the wider community. We are very grateful to History Workshop for the opportunity to reproduce Lucy's article in full on the RHS site

In this post Hannah Jeans introduces her new book—'Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England'—which is published in the Society's 'New Historical Perspectives' series with University of London Press. Hannah's book explores traditional views of reading in the seventeenth century and challenges the enduring binaries of 'good' and 'bad' literature or 'active' and 'passive' reading. In their place, Hannah views the activity from the multiple perspectives of seventeenth-century women readers. Through an investigation of women readers' personal engagement with literature, the book extends our understanding of women's reading habits and the place of reading in the development of self-identities. 'Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England' is the 22nd title in the Society's New Historical Perspectives series and, like other NHP titles is published free, Open Access, and in paperback print. 

Women's and gender history are well-established and vibrant fields of research. In schools, by contrast, the presence of women is far more limited, especially for those teaching and studying the pre-modern period. In this post, Natasha Hodgson considers the scale of this deficit and some of the barriers preventing the take up of new work in schools history. As a co-founder of the Teaching Medieval Women group, Natasha considers the negative implications of school curricula that fail to pay sufficient attention to the place of women as subjects of historical study. In the midst of the government's curriculum and assessment review, Natasha's post also provides examples of Teaching Medieval Women's engagement with schools to enhance students' understanding of women's place and prominence in pre-modern societies, and the value of this work.