I talk to Simon Healy about early modern money: the currency and coins, how big is a loaf of bread, bullion smuggling and bribing politicians.

I talk to Dr Katie McKeogh about how music was first printed, what that did to how people heard and played music, and how we can trace this story in the libraries where their music books have come to rest. And about finding slanderous gossip in the margins of contraband liturgy books.

Family, religious conflict, and what to do when your outlawed cousin/brother/son rings your doorbell. This episode explores how family networks and the ties of kinship shaped Catholic resistance in Protestant England.

Children's antics and domestic theatre in the 1660s, as William Blundell - Lancashire gentleman, Royalist solider, recusant, amateur antiquarian - writes play-scrips for his children in which they make fun of him behind his back...

Many thanks for my brother, daughter and nieces for lending their dramatic talents to bring the Blundells to life!

Episode 1 of Series 2.

Alban - first known Christian in Britain, executed by the Romans for hiding a priest. Recusants - shorthand for English Catholics who rejected the Protestant Reformation, and occasionally got executed for hiding priests. This episode is about fights over who owns history, school plays in the 1600s, and naming your kids after prisons.

Elections in the 1600s: Elections by show of hands, votes for saltpans, and did women vote?

I talk to Dr Simon Healy about how Members of Parliament were chosen in Tudor & Stuart England, why people stood for Parliament, who got to vote, where, and why, and how elections were run.

Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, lived from 1586-1639. She was a writer and translator, was seen as eccentric, was a Catholic convert when it wasn't strictly legal - and may have been autistic. Her "Life", composed and preserved by her daughters, records her struggles to be an intellectual woman, a Catholic, and a mother - and their struggles to be daughters.

If you are a dissident who wants to uphold the Law, while breaking unjust laws, what do you do? Especially when you’re on trial for breaking a law you don’t believe in. This episode is about some examples of what you might do, from Catholics in Elizabethan England.