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THE DESTRUCTION OF A PRIORY
Posted on April 23, 2013 | No CommentsMerton priory was now suppressed, and demolition began immediately. There would have been countless workmen and craftsmen employed at the priory, but would they have been willing to destroy the work of their own hands? All strata of society had difficult decisions to make. Principles could so easily be forgotten, especially where there was a family to feed and no prospect of other employment. -
The Wives of King Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon
Posted on April 22, 2013 | No CommentsCatherine and Henry VIII were married June 11, 1509. They were crowned together at Westminster Abbey on June 24. Catherine was 23 and Henry was just 18. -
The Kildare Rebellion and the Early Henrician Reformation
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsThe Kildare Rebellion and the Early Henrician Reformation Steven G. Ellis (The Queen's University, Belfast) The Historical Journal, 19, 4 (1976), pp. 807-830 Abstract In the 1530s, Henry VIII and Thomas... -
Henry VIII, rebellion and the rule of law
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsHenry VIII, rebellion and the rule of law Steven G. Ellis (University College, Galway) The Historical Journal, 24, 3 (1981), pp. 513-531 Abstract It has been traditional to regard the reaction... -
Brewers’ tales: making, retailing and regulating beer in Southampton, 1550-1700
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsBrewers' tales: making, retailing and regulating beer in Southampton, 1550-1700 James R. Brown Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract For some years now early modernists have been... -
Women, ale and company in early modern London
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsWomen, ale and company in early modern London Tim Reinke-Williams Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract This article explores attitudes to female ale- and beer-drinkers and the... -
Representations of Elizabeth I
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis looks at three themes in representations of the Queen in Elizabethan literature. They are: the problem of representing a female ruler; the relation between the cult of Elizabeth and the cult of the Virgin Mary; and representations of Elizabeth as Cynthia, the moon-goddess. These topics are seen as focal points for problematic issues in panegyric. -
The First French and English Translations of Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsAn investigation of the editions of the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is an exciting subject in itself, but a comparison of the first French and English translations throws remarkable light upon the parallel developments of the two countries in Renaissance literary history. -
“Cruel and Abominable Tyrant”: The Pope Who Took on Henry VIII
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsHenry VIII's enemy, Pope Paul III, was a man of determination but with his own dark side. -
The Singing ‘Vice’: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsAmidst non-textuality and the resulting shortage of extant scores to serve as documentation of musical activity, even the most restrained speculative approach still leads to the conclusion that music and musicians were crucial both to the emergence of the interlude as a genre of household entertainment and in the actual performance of interludes. -
Saints on Stage: An Analytical Survey of Dramatic Records in the West of England
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay provides an analysis of the known surviving records relating to mimetic representation of non-biblical saints in a broad region of western England, from the north (Cumberland, Westmorland) to the southern tip of Cornwall. The question of how many of these references can be considered 'scripted' drama is addressed, and other categories (pageant, costumed guild ridings, and festive customs such as boy bishop ceremonies) proposed. -
John Dee, King Arthur, and the Conquest of the Arctic
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsSince neither of the most significant early Arthurian pseudo-histories go so far as to place Arthur in Greenland, America, or the Arctic—although Geoffrey's account prefigures such claims by extending Arthur's conquests to the farthest known northern and western limits of European civilization—we must therefore turn to Dee's own manuscripts for some illumination as to where this idea came from and how it developed. -
Devising the Revels
Posted on March 19, 2013 | No CommentsRevels were the result of collaboration by painters, sculptors, costume designers, poets, composers, artisans, and labourers in relation to whom an appointed supervisor (beginning in 1510 called the master of the revels) stood as what we might call executive producer and director. -
Exhuming Henry VIII’s Court: The Tudor Household on the Jacobean Stage
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsBy revisiting the recent past of Henry's reign, the plays construct the events as a historical past, distinct and separate from the present. Early modern performance presents, reshapes, and diverges from the collective memory of a diverse socio-economic populace. Plays about recent history offer both a form of remembrance and construction of a memory for the historical moment brought to life on stage. -
Play Houses: Drama at Bolsover and Welbeck
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsBetween 1590 and 1634, a period more or less exactly coterminous with the great age of English Renaissance drama, a group of remarkable houses took shape in the north Midlands of England, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. -
The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe linking of thunder and lightening with supernatural figures was not theatrical in origin; rather, the effects were a theatrical reproduction of unnatural disruptions generally believed to accompany the appearance and actions of figures such as witches, devils, and conjurers in the real world of the audience. -
“Be unto me as a precious ointment”: Lady Grace Mildmay, Sixteenth-Century Female Practitioner
Posted on March 7, 2013 | No CommentsLady Grace Mildmay's manuscripts represent an unusual presentation of three interrelated areas of family, devotion, and medicine -
The politics of piracy : pirates, privateers, and the government of Elizabeth I, 1558-1588
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis addresses the distinctions between 'pirates' and 'privateers' and the reasons for and usefulness of these distinctions. -
‘Thou glorious kingdome, thou chiefe of empires’: Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a rise in European travel to Persia, and consequently in writings about such travel. -
Romeo and the Apothecary
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsSince the apothecary in the source is no more than a plot device, we might wonder why Shakespeare devotes so much space to him if he is only such a device in the play as well. -
How Holinshed’s Chronicles shaped Shakespeare and English history
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles brings together leading specialists in a variety of fields - literature, history, religion, classical studies and bibliography - in order fully to evaluate the multi-faceted book. -
The impact of the Reformation on the Tudor royal household to 1553
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe primary objective is to examine the impact of the Reformation upon private devotional practices of individuals within the royal household. -
With This Ring, I Surrender: Politics, Religion, and Marriage in Shakespeare and Tudor England
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ideas I wish to explore are the overarching themes of politics, religion, and marriage in the Turor period under the rule of King Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. The popular opinion of the period on Henry VIII's behavior can be seen in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. -
The royal armour workshops at Greenwich
Posted on January 29, 2013 | No CommentsSoon after he came to the throne in 1509 Henry VIII established a royal armour workshop that was to survive him by about 100 years. -
Research Intelligence in Early Modern England
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsThis is a good place to introduce the early modern intelligence network and particularly the activities of John Dee, one of the most colorful and enigmatic characters of the English Renaissance. -
Vengeance, Variously: Revenge Before Kyd in Early Elizabethan Drama
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsAccordingly, this essay will respond to Broude’s call for ‘a systematic study of revenge tragedy’s dramatic antecedents in England’. -
Miraculous Rhetoric: The Relationship between Rhetoric and Miracles in the York ‘Entry into Jerusalem’
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsI argue that the York playwright juxtaposes overt references to verbal persuasion with depictions of miracles to highlight the differences between the uncertainty of his audience’s world and the miraculous certainty of the biblical narrative performed before them. -
The Kirk, the Burgh, and Fun
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis complex web of interests and principles produces individual ironies, and the paper contrasts the activity of Haddington's one-time schoolmaster and play director, James Carmichael, who, as he reformist minister of the town, was chosen to subdue the author of a local May play (here named for the first time). -
Burghley: Minister to Elizabeth I 1520-1598
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsJoel Hurstfield's pen portrait of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520-98) appeared in History Today in December 1956. -
“We Must Fight with Paper and Pens”: Spanish Elizabethan Polemics, 1585-1598
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis dissertation examines books written by a group of English Catholic exiles who, because of their close ties with the Spanish Monarchy, have been called Spanish Elizabethans. -
The “Gresham Ship”: an interim report on a 16th-century wreck from Princes Channel, Thames Estuary
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe ‘Gresham Ship’, which takes its name froma gun thought to be from the Mayfield furnace of Sir Thomas Gresham ( c. 1519–79), first came to the attention of archaeologists in July 2003. -
Guns, Gales & God: Elizabeth I’s ‘Merchant Navy’
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsIan Friel argues that popular ideas of the nature of Elizabethan seapower are distorted by concentration on big names and major events. Elizabethan England’s emergence on to the world stage owed much more to merchant ships and common seamen than we might think. -
Conflicts and Loyalties: the Parliaments of Elizabeth I
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsParliament, in the modern sense as a permanent body, has existed only since the late seventeenth century. In Elizabethan England there were parliaments (plural). They were infrequent. In 1509-1603 there were 43 years during which parliaments were not called at all, and 26 of these occurred during Elizabeth’s reign. When parliaments did meet, moreover, they were short-lived. -
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Ermine: Elizabeth I’s Coronation Robes and Mothers’ Legacies in Early Modern England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe first part of this essay explores how many links between mothers and children were therefore conceived through—even created by—mate- rial goods. -
The Gran Armada of 1588 and the Commanders of the English Military: Francis Drake, Robert Dudley, and Charles Howard
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsKing Philip II of Spain’s 1588 mobilization of the Gran Armada against his northern foe represented perhaps the direst of these instances. Armed with what was believed to be an invincible fleet and an equally esteemed army, the Catholic monarch viewed as inevitable a triumph over the heretical Elizabeth I. -
The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Toleration
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe relatively minor role torture played in the Gunpowder Plot investigation is a good example of the myths that surround this emotive subject. Permission was given to employ torture on Fawkes, who initially refused to say anything, but whether it was actually used and how much is unclear. -
The Purgation Of The Hero In Shakespearean Tragedy
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsIn each play, when the hero has seen the failure of his subjective passion, the nature of the universal Good, upon which all goods, natural and human depend, begins to appear. -
Renaissance plays as a useful source for the comparison between English and Croatian early modern medicine
Posted on January 3, 2013 | No CommentsAs Renaissance made no particular distinction between arts and sciences, plays of that time provide a very common source of medical narrative. -
Common Woman to Commodity: Changing Perceptions of Prostitution in Early Modern England, C. 1450-1750
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsI began this project under the assumption that the modern definition and conception of the term “prostitute” had materialized by the eighteenth century. This is not a difficult conclusion to draw when examining the existing historiography of illicit sexuality in early modern England. -
Rethinking the fall of Anne Boleyn
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsThis article argues that the fate of the queen and those accused with her was not the result of wider factional battles or a cynical sacrifice, either to appease a jaded king or to enable a shift in religious or diplomatic policy. Nor was it a case of justice catching up with a libidinous woman who was guilty as charged. -
In a Short Time There Were None Almost Left: The Success and Failure of the Tudor Conquest in Ireland
Posted on December 29, 2012 | No CommentsWhile England succeeded in pacifying the Irish with ‘fire and sword’ during the Desmond Rebellion (1579-1584) and again in the Nine Years’ War, its success came at an enormous cost, both in terms of lives and coin. Furthermore, the goal of ‘reforming’ Ireland religiously, socially, and agriculturally--so frequently expressed in contemporary English writing--was not achieved in any meaningful or lasting way during this period. -
Nonsuch Palace
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsDavid Gaimster recalls the excavation of Henry VIII’s most extravagant palace, which spawned the discipline of post-medieval archaeology. -
Social status and literacy in north-east England, 1560-1630
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsExamination of the surviving depositions from our ecclesiastical jurisdictions reveal something of the pattern of illiteracy in England from the age of Elizabeth to the end of the Stuart era. -
Mother Shipton and the End of the World
Posted on December 21, 2012 | No Comments'A carriage without a horse shall go; Disaster fill the world with woe; In water iron then shall float; As easy as a wooden boat.' -
The Reasons of Misrule Revisited: Evangelical Appropriations of Carnival in Tudor Revels
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsI want to suggest that this delightful anamorphic image, coupled with the Gallery’s dry commentary, provides an ironic but apt metaphor for the critical tradition addressing Edward’s reign and its theatrical spectacle: only when viewed from a one-sided point of view – in hindsight, from the anachronistic vantage point of an Anglo-American tradition inflected by subsequent protestantism – can the boy king, his often riotous court spectacle, and mid-Tudor evangelicals in general be made to resemble a ‘correct’ portrait of the protestant sobriety, indeed the dour puritanism, of later generations. -
Household Politics: The View From Early Modern England
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsThat’s a glimpse of the sort of evidence I’ll canvass in this book. I hope to conjure up a social world full of ornery, funny, sickening, and lethal controversies about gender, patriarchy, misogyny, public and private, and more. -
Shakespeare’s Richard II: Machiavelli for the Good of England
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe name Machiavelli has negative connotations, and this way of thinking is not new. Throughout Europe, in Shakespeare’s time and earlier, Machiavellianism was associated with unscrupulous abuse of power, and Machiavellian methods were seen as immoral and evil. -
The Sad Death of a King: The Legacy of Richard the Second
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will examine the manner in which Shakespeare drew upon existing sources material to depict a king whose inherent character flaws made him unworthy of his crown. -
Recusancy and Regicide: the Flawed Strategy of the Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsRecusants, or those who refused to attend protestant services, were acknowledged by the Catholic Church to be the highest, most noble sort of Catholics. -
Negative Portrayals of Poles in Elizabethan Literature
Posted on December 8, 2012 | No CommentsAnglo-Polish relations improved during the first half of the sixteenth century. The newly established power of the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania probably raised English hopes that English merchants would gain greater access into the Baltic Sea. High-level diplomatic contacts between the two nations became more frequent.