The Tudor Fair Blog
How the Protestant Reformation Made Elizabethan Theater
Last week I got podcasty with Elizabethan Theater, which is appropriate considering Shakespeare’s birthday is coming up. I’ll be doing several episodes on the theater – this was a general introduction to this great Elizabethan institution, and then my next episodes will be more focused on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Burbage, and…
New Podcast Up
So I just posted a fresh podcast on the Iron industry in the Weald of Kent in the 16th century. It’s an area I’m interested in, as I explain in the podcast, because one of the things that I really find most fascinating about the 16th century is the movement…
5 Tudor Scholars who changed Learning in England
The Tudors lived in a world that was at least several generations ahead of the Enlightenment. But the seeds of that revolution in scientific thought were being sown in the Renaissance when society started to value classical and secular learning for the first time in a millennium. The Renaissance became firmly…
Richard Hakluyt: England’s first Travel Writer
I’m working on a new Renaissance English History Podcast about trade and exploration (because of course the two were linked – without the possibility of new trading markets, there could be no exploration of new lands). It’s impossible to read much about any of the early English explorations without stumbling…
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…
Queen or Pope – Catholics in Elizabethan England
Caitlin Moran talks in her book, How to be a Woman, about the idea that often when we discover a particular book, we are suddenly introduced to all its friends, and so join this society that we hadn’t even known existed before. So if you, for example, start reading Dorothy…
The Week in Books: Mary Queen of Scots wasn’t Actually a Catholic Martyr
I’ve been working on a podcast about Mary Queen of Scots, which I’ll be recording this week, and as part of that I’ve been reading John Guy’s book, Queen of Scots (available to read on Oyster, too). Most people who know Elizabethan history are familiar with the story of the tragic Catholic queen,…