Christina, Queen of Sweden, is arguably the most fascinating female monarch in Early Modern history. One of learning and science, independence and free thinking. She is Scandinavia’s Elizabeth I in many ways, but their legacy is very different.
Corruption, family drama, betrayal. The pontificate of Innocent X would certainly not be a dull one with Olimpia Maidalchini at the helm.
Olimpia was very different to her Renaissance forebears, but whose partnership with her brother-in-law would see her become the true power behind the throne of St Peter.
You might expect Felice della Rovere’s place in history to more or less end with the death of her father - but in fact, she was just getting started.
Fortune played very little role in Felice's impact on history - few women achieved more in the Italian Renaissance than she.
Lucrezia emerges from her self-imposed isolation, starts a family and meets the next great love of her life - and I don’t mean her husband.
Lucrezia is pulled out of mourning to get married for the third, and final, time - but not before getting embroiled in scandal.
History has many great femme fatales - but the very byword for femme fatale, the archetype for centuries, is Lucrezia Borgia.
Caterina takes on her most powerful yet - the Borgias
With her husband indisposed after an illness and treasury empty, Caterina would need to work hard to prove herself once more as the regent of Imola and Forli.
Caterina Sforza was married young to a scheming relative of the Pope. She would find quickly that to survive, she would need to take matters into her own hands.
Catherine's fame and influence grow, leading her to the papal court itself in Avignon and the heat of the ruptures that would lead to the Great Schism.
Introducing the writer, church doctor and eventual saint, Catherine of Siena.
I speak to historian and author Hallie Rubenhold about the victims of Jack the Ripper, why they have been forgotten and the importance of social history.
Buy The Five The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Now nearly 40, Joanna had given up hope of producing a natural heir, meaning that now she had to solve a bit of a conundrum - who should succeed her as ruler of Naples?
Joanna sits in triumph back in her capital city, but her kingdom still faced three terrible foes: invaders, plague and internal foes.
Following the grisly murder of her husband, Joanna ends up facing war from within and without her kingdom, all of which would end up with her on trial for her life in Avignon.
We travel to fourteenth-century Naples to hear about one of the most powerful female rulers of the whole medieval period. Joanna of Naples is one of very few queens regnant in the Middle Ages - her reign was action-packed.
Call it the Dark Century, Rule of the Harlots, or, as I have, the Pornocracy, the tenth century was a nadir in papal history, with powerful nobles calling the shots. And at the centre of it all its matriarch: Marozia
The legend of Pope Joan is quite possibly the most intriguing and enduring of Vatican myths. But how could the Papacy allow a story this astonishing, this embarrassing, to survive for centuries?
Women make up half of the world's population, and yet history books often consign them to the sidelines. They are dismissed as merely the wives of powerful men; babymakers and nothing more. Yet women have been the driving force behind history for millennia, from female Pharoahs, warrior princesses and pirates, to the revolutionaries who sought to topple the male-dominated political systems of their day. From host of the popular 'Queens of England Podcast', The Other Half tells the forgotten and ignored stories of the most powerful and influential women in history.
