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The Wives of King Henry VIII: Catherine Howard
Posted on May 22, 2013 | No CommentsOf all of Henry VIII’s six wives, the most beautiful was probably the nubile Catherine Howard. Henry called her his 'rose without a thorn'. -
The Wives of King Henry VIII: Anne of Cleves
Posted on May 14, 2013 | No CommentsPoor Anne of Cleves was sitting at the home of her brother the Duke of Cleves, minding her own business when who do you think came calling? -
The Wives of King Henry VIII: Jane Seymour
Posted on May 6, 2013 | No CommentsAfter all the storm and drama of Henry VIII’s first two marriages, his third marriage to Jane Seymour seems almost serene. -
The Wives of King Henry VIII: Anne Boleyn
Posted on April 30, 2013 | No CommentsAnne has the distinction of being the first Queen Consort to be beheaded and because of her, the course of ecclesiastical history in England changed forever. -
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... -
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. -
“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. -
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. -
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. -
Wicked Women of Tudor England: Queens, Aristocrats, Commoners
Posted on February 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis fascinating and occasionally salacious historical study delves into the lives of six Tudor women celebrated for their reputed wickedness. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
The Polarization of Henry Tudor’s Wives: Jane Seymour
Posted on January 14, 2013 | No CommentsI began to wonder, was it Jane Seymour that Henry was in head over heels in love with? Or was Henry forever in love with change. -
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. -
Tournaments at the court of King Henry VIII
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsTournaments were not just good sporting occasions: they had political importance and above all were splendid opportunities to impress foreign ambassadors who were likely to write glowing reports of the King’s evident wealth and power. -
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. -
Images of the courtier in Elizabethan England
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsWho, exactly, counted as a courtier? Was the holding of court office a prerequisite, or was sporadic attendance on the monarch sufficient qualification? What hierarchies, official and unofficial, operated within the royal entourage? How readily was service - often menial in nature - reconciled with self-aggrandizement and the brokerage of power? What was a courtier’s primary duty, and what could he or she hope to achieve? -
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. -
Book Trade in The Tudor Period
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsIn London the Stationers' Company and its Register, the old guild which goes as far back as 1404, made amonopoly of the book trade in Tudor England (1485-1603), except those printed by the university presses (1478). -
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. -
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. -
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. -
‘High Housewifery’: the Duties and Letters of Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester
Posted on November 29, 2012 | No CommentsBarbara Sidney makes a particularly rewarding study because of the rich archival sources preserved by the Sidney family over many generations—account books, estate papers, genealogical records, and a wealth of correspondence. -
Sincere Lies and Creative Truth: Recantation Strategies during the English Reformation
Posted on November 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis leaves a blank page in the history of religious persecution and tolerance in sixteenth- century England. This paper hopes to contribute to some recent studies which are attempting to fill it, such as those of Susan Wabuda and Brad Gregory. These historians both suggest that the crown did not press for recantation only to maintain power. -
“The Wonderfull Spectacle” the Civic Progress of Elizabeth I and the Troublesome Coronation
Posted on November 27, 2012 | No CommentsElizabeth I faced far more challenging ecclesiastical and liturgical difficulties than either of her predecessors, and yet, characteristically, her solution was more adroit and more oblique. -
Othello’s Alienation
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough I agree broadly with the arguments of Jones and Hunter, it seems to me important to appreciate the particularityof Shakespeare'sportrait and its resistance both to negative stereo- typing and abstractuniversalizing. There is little question that in choosing Othello for his protagonist Shakespearesought to create a realistic portrait of a Moor. -
A Special Reference to the Correspondence between England and the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt 1585-1587 ; Diplomatic Communication in the Early Modern Europe
Posted on November 21, 2012 | No CommentsA significant part of this Leicesterian correspondence has been preserved to our days, and it offers an excellent case study of the diplomatic communication in the Early Modern times. The original letters are located in the various archives of the Netherlands, Great Britain and France. In addition, many of them are printed in collections. By examining this correspondence, it is perhaps possible to trace the broader conventions of communication in the Early Modern Europe. -
Managing Change in The English Reformation: The 1548 Dissolution of the Chantries and Clergy of the Midland County Surveys
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsDid the English Reformation happen because Thomas Cromwell, seeing political possibilities in the new religious ideas now abroad, applied these to resolving Henry VIII‟s marital difficulties? After all, Henry VIII wanted a son and, despairing of his now middle-aged wife, Katherine, had found a likely fruitful replacement in Anne Boleyn. -
Elizabeth Tudor: Reconciling Femininity and Authority
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsDespite the misogyny of her time, Elizabeth Tudor was a woman who presided at the top of a male hierarchy and successfully reconciled her rank to her gender. -
Some Bloody good reads for Halloween!
Posted on October 30, 2012 | No CommentsSome Bloody good reads for Halloween! -
Cunning Folk and Wizards in Early Modern England
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsI aim to offer an original perspective on white witchcraft in this period; revealing its relevance to the historical study of witchcraft in which it is often overshadowed. -
Gold is the strength, the sinnewes of the world’: Continental Gold and Tudor England
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThis survey will examine finds of foreign gold coins from Tudor England to ascertain their prevalence, use and impact upon the English currency. -
Poor Relief in Edinburgh and the Famine of 1621-24
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough Scottish (and English) historians have not ignored the famine of 1621-24, the crisis still needs to be adequately contextualised within investigations into the development of poor relief in the early seventeenth century. -
Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII
Posted on October 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe aim of this bachelor thesis is a detailed analysis of Anne Boleyn`s life. The thesis is divided into five main chapters. -
New image of Henry VIII discovered
Posted on October 19, 2012 | No CommentsHe is shown as a mourning 11 year old boy, weeping at the empty death-bed of his mother. -
James VI ‘s Ius Suum Conservare: His Intrigues with Spain, 1580-1603
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1580, Scotland was drowning in a sea of instability. James was in a position which, for good or ill, was fraught with momen- tous issues for the future of the kingdom. Yet the task of controlling the forces in Scottish political life might well have been too much even for a skilful and determined statesman. James, aged only fourteen, faced two complex tasks: to govern an intractable realm, and to successfully endure, and if possible take advantage of, the increasingly tense relations between England and Spain. -
The Rise and Decline of the British “Patriot”: Civic Britain, c. 1545-1605
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsHume’s dialogue provides one of the earliest instances of the Anglophone neologism “patriot” used to describe a participant in either Scottish or English politics. The term itself, however, was far from new: it had appeared in print in Huguenot tracts at least from 1574, following the St. Bartholomew catastrophe.