Not Just the Tudors

Born in Exeter in 1547, the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard left to posterity some of the most famous and enduring images of Queen Elizabeth I. But who was this man? How did this brilliant artist rise to become the first English-born court painter but then fall to be imprisoned at the age of 70? In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks about the technicolour of Hilli...

How time passes - or how it is understood to pass - itself has a fascinating history. For the Tudors, the uneven hours of the Medieval reckoning were cast aside for an age of mechanical clocks and watches, albeit mainly for the elite. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb meets Dr. Christina Faraday, to explore how the Tudors told the time and how, with this cultural...

All this month on the History Hit family of podcasts, we've been marking LGBT+ History Month. To round off the month, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb investigates an extraordinary episode, long denied by scholars. In 1578, a same-sex community that gathered in a church, performing marriages between men, was discovered in Rome.  Professor Giuseppe Marcocci reveals his ground-breaking res...

How can women be reinstated into the narrative of history when their presence is only faintly attested to in the remaining sources? How can fiction help us in imagining their lives? Is it legitimate to write fictionalised versions of people who really lived? In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb addresses these and other questions with Dr. Miranda Malins, a novelist a...

In 1655, White Londoners began advertising in newspapers to retrieve enslaved people who had escaped. Groundbreaking research is bringing to light for the first time these stories of resistance by enslaved workers in Restoration London - including African children as young as eight - shedding light on the construction of a system of racial slavery, which has generally been regarded as happeni...

In the late 17th century, young women arrived in London to earn their own living, with mistresses setting up shops and supervising female apprentices. Recent groundbreaking research reveals the extent to which single women, wives and widows established themselves in trades guilds both alongside - and separate to - men.  In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talk...

In the early hours of 13 February 1692, in the rugged and beautiful mountains of Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands, some 30 members and associates of Clan MacDonald were massacred by the Scottish army. It was a political act, a consequence of the so-called "Glorious Revelation" of 1688-1689. But even by the standards of the time what happened at Glencoe was considered an atrocity and an act o...

Kateryn Parr - as she herself wrote her name - is often portrayed as a colourless, prudish figure, known mainly for surviving her marriage to King Henry VIII. But Parr's life reads like a Renaissance romance, filled with peril, jealous husbands, personal patronage of the arts, writing and translating. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Susan James, wh...

Around the same time as the Mayflower was landing at Cape Cod, on the other side of the world tourism was thriving in China, giving rise to a fascinating genre of travel writing. To mark the start of the Chinese New Year - the Year of the Tiger - Professor Suzannah Lipscomb explores the wonderfully rich prose and travel diaries of the period with Professor James Hargett. His research and tran...

Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, became King of England at the age of nine. All around him loomed powerful men who hoped to use him to further their own ends. Edward was the only Tudor monarch who was groomed to reign, and it was assumed he would become as commanding a figure as his father had been. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Professor Stephen Alford...

Antwerp during the Renaissance was as sensational as nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York. For half the sixteenth century, it was the place for breaking rules - religious, sexual and intellectual. But when Antwerp rebelled with the Dutch against the Spanish and lost, all of its glory was buried and its true history rewritten.  In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Profess...

475 years ago, on 28 January 1547, King Henry VIII died at the age of 55. Just hours before his passing, his last will and testament had been read, stamped, and sealed. Historians have disagreed ever since about its authenticity and validity, and the circumstances of its creation, making Henry's will one of English history's most contested documents,  In this explainer episode of Not Just the...

In the world of King Henry VIII, the paramount place to demonstrate physical strength and manly courage was the joust - and Henry excelled at it. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to historian Dr. Emma Levitt to find out more about what jousting was, why Henry liked it so much, how it was scored, what it cost - and the culture of honour, manhood and physica...

Kate Mosse is the multimillion-selling author of the Languedoc Trilogy - Labyrinth , Sepulchre and Citadel . With her new novel The City of Tears , the second in her series The Burning Chambers , just out in paperback, she tells the story of a family’s fight to stay together and survive against the backdrop of the French Wars of Religion and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572. In this...

No advisor was more important to King Henry VIII than Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. He captured Henry's attention with his brilliance and became his most trusted confidant. But when the King wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon, not even the eloquent Wolsey could convince the Pope to agree.  In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Wolsey's biographer Prof...

Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots were cousins who never met - but their fates were intertwined. As their nations were engulfed in religious turmoil and civil wars raged on the continent, these two powerful women struggled for control of the British Isles.   In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb goes to the British Library in London to meet curator Andre...

2022 marks the 530th anniversary of 1492 - the year in which Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille ended centuries of Muslim rule in Spain, expelled the country's Jews, and signed a contract with one Christopher Columbus who set set sail to find the Indies - and the rest is history. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Isabella's biographer Giles Tre...

One of the most famous paintings in London is The Laughing Cavalier of 1624 by Franz Hals, the great portrait artist of the Dutch Golden Age whose fame has been somewhat eclipsed by Vermeer and Rembrandt. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb heads off to the Wallace Collection in London to see The Laughing Cavalier - alongside an exquisite, small selection of H...

Happy New Year from Not Just the Tudors ! But what, looking back, can we look forward to in 2022? Our first episode of the year anticipates 12 months filled with fascinating historical exhibitions and important anniversaries - from the raising from the seabed of the Mary Rose 40 years ago in 1982 to the 500th anniversary since the first recorded circumnavigation of the globe, with many m...

For the Tudors, Christmas Day was not traditionally the date when gifts were given. The Twelve Days of Christmas begin on 25 December and end at Epiphany, 6 January - also known as Twelfth Night. In Tudor times, all 12 were feast days, but 1 January was the day when presents were unwrapped. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb dives into how Christmas and New Y...

In this special end of the year edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb takes a look back at 2021 and the major events and achievements that have changed the way we understand the Tudors - but not just the Tudors! Suzannah picks out her five favourite new books from the last 12 months, as well as surveying some of the extraordinary archaeological discoveries that have bro...

To this day, the presence of angels is synonymous with the Christmas story and the momentous events associated with the Nativity. For the Tudors and Stuarts, widespread belief in angels brought a touch of the miraculous to life, but so too did ghosts, although it was sometimes hard to distinguish them from angels - or demons. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscom...

In Iceland in the 17th century, witchcraft accusations, trials and convictions occurred later than in the rest of Europe. But also unusual was the fact that 91% of "witches" executed in Iceland were men. In a country where the weather and rural life was harsh - and traditional superstitions and folk medicine still held sway - the imposed Lutheran influence of Danish rule led to hysteria...

If you are planning your television viewing over the holidays, especially if you are looking forward to bingeing on the best Tudor dramas and classic film depictions of the era, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb has a few personal recommendations of movies and TV series for you to re-discover this festive season.  And in the second part of the podcast, she casts an eye over the 1998 Shekhar Ka...

Albrecht Dürer was the greatest German artist to come out of the Renaissance, whose high quality woodcuts revolutionised the potential of the medium. A spectacular exhibition at the National Gallery in London - the first major UK show of his work in nearly 20 years - charts Dürer's extensive travels to the Alps, Italy, Venice and the Netherlands, exploring how his journeys fuelled his curiosi...