The Tudor Fair Blog
Elizabeth I’s Working Holiday in Kenilworth
It’s not much of a secret that Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley had a Sort Of Thing going on in her court. The famously-Virgin Queen had one possible True Love – Robert Dudley, the 1st Earl of Leicester. In 1575 Elizabeth was on one of her summer progresses through the…
Random Friday Fun Facts: The South Sea Bubble
Fair warning – I am sitting in an airport in Berlin as I write this. It’s 9am local time and I’ve been here for almost two hours on a layover waiting to go back to Spain after an overnight flight during which time I didn’t sleep, but I did watch…
Random Friday Fun Facts: Dr. David Skinner and the music of the 16th century
About a month ago I was in the UK for a girls’ weekend (by myself), and as I’ve been trying to do more with my Renaissance English History Podcast lately (like my Tudor Minutes on youtube), I decided to find an interesting person to interview for the show. At the…
Random Friday Fun Facts
I’ve started doing something fun on youtube this week. I run the Renaissance English History Podcast, which currently gets about 120k listeners each month, and I’ve been trying to figure out ways that I can make more of a community out of it. Do more episodes, lead tours of England,…
Random Friday Fun Facts: The Swindon Magic Roundabout
Recently on a train trip from Gatwick to Cirencester, I passed through Swindon. Swindon, in general, isn’t a huge tourist attraction. In fact, Jasper Fford seems to have built a website dedicated to taking the piss out of Swindon as a tourist attraction (pointing out the double helix carpark as a major…
Random Friday Fun Fact: Inigo Jones and British Architecture
I keep hearing the name Inigo Jones in various books I’m reading, and it always makes me kind of want to giggle because it reminds me of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. It’s kind of hard to take seriously someone who makes you think that they’re about to jump…
Random Friday Fun Facts: Coffee and How it Works
“As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle” 19th century philosopher Balzac Before I had a kid I was never a big coffee drinker. Oh,…
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…
Random Friday Fun Facts: The Music of the Spheres
“music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired” Boethius: De institutione musica Most serious musicians understand that music and math are inextricably linked. The early mathematician Pythagoras discovered many different ratios within musical harmonies (a perfect fifth, for example) by…