Dr Rowan Tomlinson is a historian who specializes in the cultural history of the Renaissance. She has been fascinated by history since she was a child: her father once found her kneeling in front of a wicker chest and hitting herself repeatedly on the neck: she was, she explained to him, re-enacting the execution of Catherine Howard. On visits to old houses, inspired by what she had read about Huguenot refugees in the 16th and 17th centuries, she would relentlessly knock on every wooden panel in the hunt for secret doors and passages.
Today, the kind of history Rowan loves, and writes, looks not to remember Kings and famous warriors but to tell the hidden tales of history, exploring the lives and experiences of our everyday ancestors, rather than the ‘movers and shakers’ and well-trodden events of the past. This approach to history is inspired by the ending of one of her favourite novels, George Eliot’s Middlemarch: ‘for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’