Tudor England: A History

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It’s been a good long time since a book season featured a whopping-big general-purpose history of the Tudor era. The last was probably G. J. Meyer’s The Tudors, and Lucy Wooding’s new book, Tudor England, new from Yale University Press, is twice as long, seeks to tell the story of England from 1485 to 1603, and brandishes its modernity on its calling card. “In the last fifty years or so, we have seen significant advances in historical writing,” Wooding writes. “Anthropology, sociology and the history of race have provided important fresh perspectives. Women’s history, gender history and ‘history from below’ have transformed our view of society, popular culture and the political process, while the study of mentalites has added a kind of ‘history from within’.” We can’t seem to get enough of the Tudor dynasty and its soap-opera twists. But in her book Tudor England: A History, Lucy Wooding argues that to really know the Tudors you must look past the famous names and racy plotlines. While Wooding visits the period’s kings and queens—was Henry VIII the lusty man we imagine? How “bloody” was Mary? What about Henry VII?—she also leaves the court to roam England’s streets and fields. WOODING: I think it created the most extraordinary sort of mindset, and one that’s not just limited to, you know, the occasional genius playwright.

WOODING: Yes. I think, actually, the arguments that people have in this period, or the debates that they have about the role of women, are fascinating, and really confound a lot of the assumptions that… I mean, we just assume that early modern society is a patriarchal society, and that women were going to have the rough end of every deal. But the more you probe the way people are thinking and writing about gender and the relations between the sexes, the more you realize that there’s a huge diversity of views. There are people who, you know, will quite emphatically stand up for the education of women, and sometimes the sort of moral superiority of women. WOODING: No, although girls in the village would also have the… well, they would get a basic education probably within the home. And, there were, kind of, much more unassuming schools where, you know, sometimes girls might be educated. Fasting was a regular part of Tudor life, both before and after the Reformation. In the pre-Reformation period, everyone abstained from meat and dairy on Wednesdays and Fridays, on the eve of important saints’ days, and throughout Advent and Lent. One of Protestantism’s attractions was that it dispensed with these requirements. However, the threat to the fishing trade was such that Friday fasting was hastily restored during Edward VI’s reign – although it remained unpopular, as the attempts to regulate butchers’ sales on fast days indicate. [35] In later Protestant culture, it became common to mark times of mourning, or special intercession, with fast days. Public fasts might be held in parish, town or by the nation at large in response to a particular crisis, whilst the godly might keep private fasts, accompanied by prayer and almsgiving, in pursuit of greater personal sanctity. [36] The response to the terrible famines of the 1590s, after three consecutive harvests had failed, was to declare public fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays – with the pious objective of showing penitence to a providential God for the sins that had merited such punishment, and with the practical objective of giving the food saved to the starving poor. The Council interpreted God’s displeasure as a response to the ‘excesse in dyett’ and ‘nedeles waste and ryotous consumpcion’ prevalent throughout the kingdom. [37] In more private fashion, many dedicated Protestants resumed the medieval practice of fasting the night before receiving communion. [38] Growing Vegetables to Feed the Poor BOGAEV: Well, we’ve barely scratched the surface, but how could we? It’s been so interesting. Thank you so much for talking today. Then, if you can imagine Henry VIII succeeding him, he’s 17 years old. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s full of life. He wants to separate himself from his very overprotective and sort of careful, father. He wants a court which is perhaps a little bit more ostentatiously magnificent. He takes part in a lot of jousting, which was actually a bit irresponsible of him, because kings were not really supposed to risk their lives in this way. But he didn’t care, he was going to do it anyway.Our memory of Bloody Mary’s reign, and her unfortunate sobriquet, are still heavily informed by the horrifying tales recorded by Foxe. In Lucy Wooding’s radical new history, she argues that singling out her tenure as uniquely bloody is a deliberate decision made by subsequent writers – a way of telling the story that ignores, for instance, those murdered by Protestant mobs under Edward VI when he dissolved the chantries, and the 700 Yorkshire people with Catholic loyalties who were executed during the period of martial law that Elizabeth I imposed in the wake of the 1569 Rising of the North.

Andrew Borde, Hereafter foloweth a compendyous regyment or a dyetary of helthe (1542), STC 3378.5, Sig. Ciiiv.Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman Now that we look more at the underbelly of society. Now that we look at what it’s like to live through these upheavals, we are more alive to the reluctance, I think, that many people felt about this new, quite contentious way of looking at religion. And a religion which did require a level of literacy and which deplored the kind of material sensory culture of pre-reformation religion, which, I think, made it hard to understand and assimilate for a lot of society. Now, we are looking at it from that perspective. We realize that the advance of Protestantism was a lot slower and more halting, and more reluctant than we ever thought. Teaching with the Folger Method An accessible and immersive way to teach students about any kind of literature I mean, if you look at late 16 th-century culture more generally and the way that women are depicted in ballads, as well as in plays, as well as in poetry, you don’t really get the overriding impression that women were quiescent, submissive, and silent. Far from it. WOODING: Yes, but Shakespeare’s got to be careful because Elizabeth is, you know, still a very powerful memory. And Protestantism is still a bit precarious. And, also, we are not entirely sure, are we, where Shakespeare’s own religious loyalties lay? So, if you are going to talk about the religious politics of the 1530s and 1540s, it’s getting a little bit close to home and you might well find yourself in trouble. So yeah, you could see why you need to sort of steer carefully around Henry VIII as a subject.