Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors
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Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors
Renaissance England was a bustling and exciting place...new religion! break with rome! wars with Scotland! And France! And Spain! The birth of the modern world! In this weekly podcast I'll explore one aspect of life in 16th century England that will give you a deeper understanding of this most excit...
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Spinster: The Job Title That Became an Insult
Before it was an insult, "spinster" was a job title. It meant a woman who spins thread. It appeared in tax rolls, court records, and legal documents....
The Tudor Women Who Controlled Access to the Queen (And Paid the Price)
You think office politics are bad? Imagine your entire career depending on whether the queen liked how you handed her a towel.Lady in waiting sounds l...
The Tudor Legal Loophole That Gave Women Their Lives Back
The moment a Tudor woman got married, she legally ceased to exist. No property, no contracts, no rights - her entire legal identity absorbed into her...
The Tudor Woman Who Ran the Household Pharmacy (And Accidentally Poisoned Everyone)
In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to sur...
She Told Two Kings No and Kept Her Castle (And They Had to Wait Until She Died)
In 1293, King Edward I finally got what he wanted: the Isle of Wight. He'd been trying to take it for decades. He had to wait until its owner, Isabell...
Patriotism in Tudor England: How a Nation Learned to Love Itself
It's Memorial Day, and I've been thinking about patriotism -- where it comes from, why people feel it so strongly, and whether Tudor people felt anyth...
Plague, Prayer and Running Away: How Tudor Londoners Survived the Epidemics
London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it,...
Did Elizabeth I Actually Order Mary Queen of Scots' Execution?
Someone in the comments asked me to do a deep dive on whether Elizabeth I actually gave the order for Mary Queen of Scots' execution. And the closer I...
She Never Said Her Mother's Name. But She Never Took Off the Ring.
Today is May 19th. On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on Tower Green. And in a royal nursery somewhere in Hertfordshire, a two-year-old gir...
What If Edward VI Had Backed Down? The Deathbed Decision That Changed England
Edward VI gets overlooked. He's usually just the boy between Henry and the interesting women. But here's what people miss: Edward didn't just die and...
Henry VIII, Constantine, and the Art of the Very Confident Lie
Henry VIII wasn't content to just be King of England. He needed you to know he was descended from Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who legaliz...
1509: The Year Everyone Thought It Was All Beginning
In 1509, England went from a dying paranoid king to a golden coronation to a deadly plague in about eight months. This is a Year in the Life episode,...
The Life of a Tudor Con Artist (They Had Job Titles)
In 1591, a Cambridge-educated writer named Robert Greene published a pamphlet exposing London's professional con artists. He named their roles, descri...
What If Anne Boleyn Had Lived? Cromwell's Three Choices and Where They Led
It's April 1536 and Thomas Cromwell has gone home sick. Except he's not sick. He's deciding what to do about Anne Boleyn.
In this What If...
Henry VII's Impossible Choice: Execute an Innocent Man or Lose Everything
In 1499, Henry VII had two men in the Tower of London. One claimed to be his wife's long-lost brother. The other was an innocent young man who had bee...
Tudor Medicine and the Mind: Melancholy, Music, and What Help Actually Looked Like
What happened in Tudor England when someone's mind turned against them? There was no therapist, no diagnosis, no prescription. But there was a whole s...
What If Lady Jane Grey Had Refused the Crown?
Jane Grey wasn't just a pawn. She was a fierce Protestant intellectual who made a real choice when the crown landed at her feet in 1553. What if she'd...
The Dairymaid: Tudor England's Most Underestimated Woman
Someone left a comment asking about Tudor dairymaids, and I went down a rabbit hole I did not expect. The dairymaid looks like a background character...
How Did Tudors Survive Without Coffee? (The Answer Is Weirder Than You Think)
You've probably heard that Tudor people never drank water, that ale was the default drink for everyone including children, because the water would kil...
The Tudor Uber Driver Who Floated Tudor London
Before bridges, before coaches, before passable roads, if you needed to get anywhere in Tudor London you needed him. The Thames waterman was licensed,...
The Most Important Woman in Tudor England You've Never Heard Of
Before hospitals, painkillers, or germ theory, the Tudor midwife was the most powerful person in the room. Licensed by the Bishop, sworn to secrecy, s...
What If Mary Queen of Scots Had Run? A Tudor Thought Experiment
Scotland in the 1560s was chaotic even by Tudor standards. In this thought experiment episode, we ask: what if Mary Queen of Scots had fled to France...
The Medieval Women Who Ran Businesses, Won Lawsuits, and Refused to Be Pushed Out
History says medieval women were powerless. Some of them knew exactly where the power was and went and got it.
In this episode I'm lookin...
Why Tudor England Refused to Eat Tomatoes For 200 Years
The story of how a respected Elizabethan botanist looked at a tomato, applied perfectly logical medical reasoning, and concluded that English people s...
What It Was Actually Like to Work in Henry VIII's Kitchen
Henry VIII's kitchens at Hampton Court occupied 55 rooms, employed 200 men, and burned six tons of wood every single day. This episode spends 24 hours...
In Tudor England, Your Dreams Were Everyone's Business
In Tudor England, a dream wasn't private. It was medical evidence, potential divine communication, and possibly a message from Satan. This video explo...
They Hung Babies On Walls: A Day Inside the Tudor Royal Nursery
The Tudor royal nursery wasn't a cozy domestic space. It was a department of state, with its own hierarchy, its own politics, and sworn oaths of loyal...
She Tested It. They Ignored It. The Women Who Invented Knowledge Before Science Had a Name.
In the late 1400s, two women were doing something radical: generating knowledge and insisting it counted. Margery Kempe was building an evidence base...
24 Hours in the Life of a Tudor Lady in Waiting (She Asked for Gambling Money. Her Mom Said Practice Your Lute.)
What did a Tudor lady in waiting actually do all day? We're spending 24 hours with Anne Basset at Greenwich Palace in 1538, hour by hour from 5am to m...
Did the Tudors DO April Fools?
It's April 1st, and I'm not going to trick you. Instead, let's ask a genuine question: did the Tudors even DO April Fools' Day?
The answe...
Three Queens Who Refused to Behave (And Why History Punished Them For It)
History has a word for queens who had opinions and refused to be managed. Today we're looking at three of them across three centuries - Eleanor of Aqu...
Same Choice. Opposite Directions. Two Tudor Women in Exile.
In the 1550s, Tudor England created exiles going both ways. When Mary I came to the throne, Protestants fled. When Elizabeth came to the throne, Catho...
How to Survive a Tudor King (A Case Study in Almost Getting It Right)
Thomas Cranmer spent twenty-five years mastering the art of Tudor survival. He was useful, he was careful, he understood exactly how to stay on the ri...
What If Katherine Parr Had Refused Thomas Seymour?
Katherine Parr survived Henry VIII -- no small feat -- only to die in childbirth at 36 after rushing into a marriage with Thomas Seymour, the charming...
Henry VIII Dissolved This Abbey. They Refused to Leave for 500 Years.
Syon Abbey was founded in 1415 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. The community refused to scatter. They waited, came back under Mary, went into exi...
What If Anne of Cleves Had Refused the Annulment?
Anne of Cleves is always called the lucky one. She survived Henry VIII, kept her head, and walked away with Hever Castle and a generous income. But in...
The Women Henry VIII Forgot: England's Nuns After the Dissolution
When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, roughly 2,000 nuns lost everything overnight. Their homes, their communities, their vocations, and in many...
The Medieval Women Who Refused to Be Nuns or Wives (And Got Away With It for 800 Years)
The last Beguine died in 2013. Her name was Marcella Pattyn, she was 92 years old, and she was the final link in an 800-year chain of women who refuse...
Who Actually Paid for the Gloriana Myth? (The Hidden Cost of Tudor Image-Making)
Everyone knows the image: the pearls, the sieve, the impossible gown. Elizabeth I as Gloriana, timeless and untouchable.
But someone paid...
Tudor Women Had No Financial Rights. So Why Are Their Names All Over the Account Books?
Under Tudor law, a married woman didn't legally exist as a financial person. Everything she owned became her husband's the moment she married. She cou...