Abstract This article attempts to explain when, and why, it came to be thought appropriate to hang men but to burn women. Concentrating on wives who slew their husbands, it aims to answer these questions, focussing less on the crime than on the punishment, investigating its origins and outlining the form it took. But it also aspires to go beyond these fundamental issues, by employing burning as a kind of prism through which light can be shed on some of the forces and outlooks at work in medieval English society, both those which might lead to women being confronted with this dire fate, and those which might enable them to escape it.

Abstract This article contends that Winston Churchill's tenure as Secretary of State for War was the most consequential period for his relationship with Russia. By helping to consolidate his views on the county's geopolitical position and of communism and providing a glimpse of a nation which was capable of democracy and neither inherently Tsarist nor Soviet, those years shaped his perceptions of modern Russia more than any other period. Such views later played a role in forming Churchill's approach to Anglo‐Soviet relations in the build up to the Second World War, and his insistence on co‐operation with Stalin. His experience of Russia's civil war is therefore necessary for understanding his views of the Soviet Union: he judged it relative to an ideal of modern Russia. Ultimately, the article supports the conclusion that the Grand Alliance with the USSR was the result of a complex evolution in Churchill's views of Russia and international politics, rather than simply sharing a common foe.

Abstract The study of history is traditionally characterized by written assessments. And yet, more creative forms of assessment have the potential to empower students, develop new skills and exhibit ‘imaginative insight’. Such an approach is in line with the recommendations of the UK's Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, as reflected in its ‘Subject Benchmark Statement’ for the discipline of history. This Forum piece critically examines creative assessment in history using practitioner research. It examines the pivotal role creative assessment played in the design and redesign of two undergraduate modules. It then considers the student experience of undertaking creative assessment using qualitative and quantitative research data. The article concludes by advocating for greater creativity in assessment design.

Abstract Historians disagree about how best to conceptualize nineteenth‐century British Liberalism in relation to its international contexts. This article argues that we can better understand the patterns involved by interrogating individuals who bridged the worlds of partisan politics and elaborated thought. The article centres around Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff (1829–1906), whom it identifies as the Liberal parliamentary party's most ambitious interpreter of global and imperial order in the 1860s and 1870s. It suggests that Grant Duff's highly intellectualized and internationally minded ‘philosophic Liberalism’ was aimed at energizing the fractious Gladstonian coalition, and at helping Liberals see themselves as part of a global progressive tide, running against the false and losing cause of Conservatism. The article contends that Grant Duff's case opens up new questions about how British Liberals situated themselves in relation to counterpart foreign liberalisms, as well as having wider methodological implications for the study of nineteenth‐century international thought.

Abstract This article draws upon insights from queer pedagogy to explore the ways that creative assessments can be used to disrupt rather than reproduce existing power structures within the academy. Queer pedagogy challenges essentialist categories, centres questions of subjectivity and addresses how knowledge is socially produced. I propose that creative writing can be used to ‘queer’ assessment practices by encouraging teachers and students to rethink what counts as ‘academic’, both in terms of the ways we think about skills and learning outcomes, and in terms of the questions we enable students to ask about the past.