The Tudor Fair Blog
Black Tudor History
It’s Black History Month in North America, and in honor of that, I am going out of the planned narrative of war with France, and doing this episode on Black Tudors, and the experience of life for black people in Tudor England. For those of you who prefer reading over…
Watching the Tudors, Episode 7
I’m starting to do individual Show Notes for each episode of Watching The Tudors. If you haven’t listened to that podcast yet, we’re on Episode 7 of the first season so you can go back and listen to the others at http://www.watchingthetudors.com. The Tudors is currently available on Netflix, and…
Old Music Tuesday: Henry’s Musical Court & The Western Wynde Mass
Yep, you read that right. The musical court of Henry VIII. While many of us think of the monarch with six wives as fat and pretty darn corpulent, he wasn’t always this way. In fact, when he was young, he was quite the hottie, impressing women with his jousting feats,…
The Most Surprising Things I Learned about Catherine of Aragon this month
I’ve been podcasting with Tudor Times again, this month about Catherine of Aragon. I have read countless books about Henry’s six wives, and Catherine always takes up a huge proportion of each book simply because of the large role she played in Henry’s life. She was married to him the…
Music for Impressing a King: Taverner’s Missa Corona Spinea, Wolsey, and Henry VIII
In March 1527 Henry VIII and his wife Catherine of Aragon visited Cardinal Wolsey’s new foundation – Cardinal’s College – in Oxford. John Taverner, one of the most famous composers of his time, was commissioned to write an appropriately stunning piece of choral music that would wow the King and…
Henry’s Navy
I just put up another Renaissance English History Podcast on Friday (I’ve been sticking to my schedule of putting out two a month – proud of that) on Henry VIII’s Navy. I’ve been wanting to podcast on this for a while, mostly because I wanted to learn about it for…
Medieval Monks and Nuns weren’t as Promiscuous as We All Think They Were
I recently came across a post on medievalists.net about a thesis by Christian D. Knudsen concerning sexual misconduct in convents and monastic houses. The idea that the monasteries were corrupt, and in “decline” just before the Dissolution is a narrative that has been largely unchallenged for 500 years, and in…
Anne Boleyn’s Songbook: sharing the intimate emotions of a Queen
I posted recently about my interview with Dr. David Skinner, an eminent musicologist based out of the College of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge. When I posted before it was about the logistics of my interview (getting caught in the rain, microphone not working, etc etc). But now that his CD is…
The Week in Books: The boring and the totally awesome
In my seemingly never-ending quest to get rid of all my physical books before we move (and buy an ebook of ones worth keeping, but getting rid of the physical book either way) I’ve been going through the stack of books that I’ve kept around which look interesting. One of…
Random Friday Fun Fact: Shakespeare’s Richard III (aka the Victors get to write the History)
I’ve had a project going on over the past few years that I call my Shameful Shakespeare Catch-up (shameful because it’s shameful that so much of my life has gone by without me reading any Shakespeare at all – it’s been since college, which, sadly, was fifteen years ago) and today…