The Royal Studies Podcast

In this episode, hosted by Susannah Lyon-Whaley, we have a roundtable highlighting recent research on royal mistresses and the important part they played in the French and English monarchies. 

Guest Biographies:

Tracy Adams is a professor in European Languages and Literatures at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has also taught at the University of Maryland, the University of Miami, and the University of Lyon III. She was a Eurias Senior Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies 2011-2012, an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions Distinguished International Visiting Fellow in 2014 and a fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek fellowship in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, in 2016. She is the author of Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance (2005), The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (2010), Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France (2014), Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy (2022), and Reflections on Extracting Elite Women’s Stories from Medieval and Early Modern French Narrative Sources (2023). With Christine Adams, she co-authored The Creation of the French Royal Mistress from Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry (2020). With Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier, she is co-editor of the volume The Waxing of the Middle Ages (2023).  

Christine Adams is professor of European history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She publishes primarily in French gender and family history (17th–19th centuries). Author of A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) and Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Illinois Press, 2010), her most recent book, with Tracy Adams, is The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). Adams was a 2020–2021 fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and a spring 2021 Andrew W. Mellon long-term fellow at the Newberry Library, where she worked on her current book project on The Merveilleuses and their Impact on the French Social Imaginary, 1794–1799 and Beyond. She also writes frequently on current events, including politics, education, gender, and reproductive rights.

Mirabelle is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Auckland. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the visual representation of Maria Fitzherbert (1756-1837), through the lenses of celebrity culture, erotic capital, and female reputation. Maria was the mistress, and illegal wife, of King George IV of England (1762-1830). Mirabelle completed her Master of Arts with First Class Honours in Art History in 2021. Her thesis examined the relationship between portraiture, gender, and sexuality at the Restoration Court, focusing on two of the royal mistresses of Charles II (1630-1685), Louise de Kéroualle (1649-1734) and Barbara Villiers (1640-1709). In 2019 she received her BA(Hons) with First Class Honours in Art History. Upon completion of her Bachelor of Arts degree, double majoring in Art History and Classical Studies, she was awarded the Louise Perkins Prize as the top graduating student in Art History. 

Further reading:

 Tracy Adams. Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy: History, Gallantry, and National Identity. ARC Humanities Press, 2022.
https://www.arc-humanities.org/9781641893527/agnes-sorel-and-the-french-monarchy/ 

 Tracy Adams and Christine Adams. The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry. Penn State University Press, 2020.

We are back with Part 2 of our feature on 'Young Queens', featuring Dr Nicola Tallis and her new book, Young Elizabeth! In this interview we discuss how important it is to examine Elizabeth's childhood in order to understand the great queen that she became. As a point of connection with the interview with Leah Chang on her Young Queens book, we discuss some of those same challenges that young royal women faced and new ways to approach well-known queens like Elizabeth I.

Guest Bio:
Nicola graduated from Bath Spa University with a first class BA Hons. degree in History in 2011, and from Royal Holloway College, University of London in 2013 with an MA in Public History. She did her PhD at the University of Winchester--her thesis titled ‘All the Queen’s Jewels, 1445-1548’, examined the jewellery collections of the queens of the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudor queens, and the role of jewels during this period (see links below to the book she published based on her doctoral research).

Nicola has had a varied career in the history and heritage sector working with Hampton Court Palace, the National Trust and as the curator at Sudeley Castle. Additionally, since 2013 she has been one of the resident historians for Alison Weir Tours. Nicola has written for a number of history magazines, including BBC History Magazine, History Revealed and Explore. She's also made numerous television and radio appearances, including Frankie Boyle’s Farewell to the Monarchy (Channel 4), Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC), The Gunpowder Plot (Channel 5), and The Vikings (Channel 5).

Find out more about Nicola and her publications:

• Nicola's website
• Crown of Blood: Lady Jane Grey
• Uncrowned Queen: Margaret Beaufort
• Elizabeth’s Rival: Lettice Knollys
• All the Queen’s Jewels
• Young Elizabeth

We open 2024 with a two-part feature on Young Queens, featuring two new books which look at young royal women in 16th century Europe. Our first interview is with Leah Redmond Chang, author of Young Queens (Bloomsbury, 2023).  In this episode we talk about the three women featured in her book (Catherine de Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary Queen of Scots), why it's important to look at 'young queens' and the particular challenges they faced as young women and royal brides.

Guest Bio: Leah Redmond Chang is a former Associate Professor of French and Director of the French Literature Programme at George Washington University, and was most recently a Senior Research Associate at University College London. 

 She is the author of two previous books: Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France and Portraits of the Queen Mother: Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters, winner of the Josephine Roberts Award from the International Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.  Find out more about Leah at her website.

Keep your eyes out for Part 2 in our Young Queens feature, an interview with Nicola Tallis about her new book, Young Elizabeth, coming soon!

This episode features Dr James Taffe speaking with Dr Johanna Strong about his latest publication, Christmas with the Tudors, out now! They discuss the book more generally as well as Christmas traditions of the Twelve Days of Christmas, gifts, and the role of queens in celebrations.

To buy Christmas with the Tudors, head to Amazon UK, Amazon USA, Amazon Australia, or Amazon Canada (to name but a few!).

If you know of any other references to Tudor Christmas celebrations, James would love to hear from you! You can find him on Twitter here.

This episode, we are joined by Dr Valerie Schutte for a conversation about her forthcoming Royal Studies Journal Cluster, due for publication next month.

Valerie Schutte has published widely on royal Tudor women, book dedications, and queenship. She has published two monographs: Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion (2015) and Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Tudor and the Gift Book Exchange (2021). She has also edited or co-edited seven volumes on Mary I, Shakespeare, and queenship. Her most recent edited collection - Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Remaking of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I - was published in Palgrave Macmillan's Queenship and Power series in September 2023. Other recent publications include: "Defending the Faith: Johann Slotan and Queen Mary I" in the Journal of the Early Book Society and "Anne of Cleves: Bound for England" in Royal Journeys in Early Modern Europe: Progresses, Palaces and Panache, edited by Anthony Musson and J.P.D. Cooper. Valerie is currently editing two other volumes, one on Tudor monarchs and myths, and the other on Mary I and humanism. She is also writing a cultural biography of Anne of Cleves. Valerie also has a forthcoming essay on 500 years of reprints of Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christian Woman, that will be published this winter in the Journal of the Early Book Society.

For more on Dr Schutte's research, follow her on Instagram and at her website.

The Winter 2023 RSJ Cluster (in issue 10.2 to be released in December 2023) contains the following articles:

• The Sexualization Of a “Noble and Vertuous Quene”: Elizabeth of York, 1466-1503: William B. Robison 
• Questioning an Honest Queen: The Scrutiny Around Queen Catherine of Aragon's Virginity: Emma Luisa Cahill Marrón 
• “This Dolorous Chance”: Contemporary Views on Catherine of Aragon’s Pregnancy Losses: Caroline Armbruster 
• Visualising Sexuality and Maternity in the Royal Entries of Mary Tudor (1514) and Anne Boleyn (1533): Charlotte Samways 
• Sexuality and Grace, Grazia: What made Anne Boleyn so special?: Tracy Adams 
• Bodies in Competition: Italian Descriptions of Sexuality, Fertility, and Beauty in the King’s Great Matter: Samantha Perez
• Diplomatic Presentations of Queen Mary I’s 1555 Pregnancy: Ailish Girling & Valerie Schutte 

Later Stuart Queens, 1660–1735: Religion, Political Culture, and Patronage (edited by Eilish Gregory and Michael Questier) is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Queenship and Power series and seeks to re-insert queens into the mainstream of Stuart and early Georgian studies. It will be published in December 2023.

Today we are speaking with Dr. Eilish Gregory about the release of this volume. Eilish is the Little Company of Mary Fellow in the History of Catholicism at the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University. Her research mainly focuses on early modern religion, politics, and culture, particularly on Catholicism in early modern Britain. Her monograph Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642-1660 (Boydell) was published in 2021 and she has written articles and book chapters on Queen Catherine of Braganza. 

Make sure you check out Eilish’s article in Parliamentary History on Catherine of Braganza and the Popish Plot: Gregory, Eilish. ‘Catherine of Braganza during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis: Anti‐Catholicism in the Houses of Commons and Lords, 1678–81.’ Parliamentary History 42, no. 2 (2023): 195-212.

This podcast shines a spotlight on three items of dress in the V&A collections with a courtly or royal theme. Susan North, Curator of Fashion 1550-1800 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, speaks about their style, materials, where and when they would have been worn, and caring for them.

In this podcast, we discuss: A resplendently embroidered mantua, 1740-1745,  A shimmering, spangled waistcoat, 1775-1780,  A floral court suit, 1790-1800

Susan is the Curator of Fashion before 1800 at the Victoria and Albert Museum and contributor of a chapter on flowers in the dress and jewellery of men and women in the upcoming book Floral Culture and the Tudor and Stuart Courts, edited by Susannah Lyon-Whaley (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). 

Her other publications include 18th-Century Fashion in Detail and  Sweet and clean?: Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Sarah A. Bendall is a material culture and gender historian at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU. Her first book, Shaping Femininity, was published with Bloomsbury in 2021. It was shortlisted for the Society of Renaissance Studies (UK) biannual book prize in 2022 and awarded highly commended. She is co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Making Historical Dress Network with Dr Serena Dyer (De Montfort University) examining recreating dress. She’s also examining the widespread use of whaling products in fashion between the years 1500-1800.

Her second book, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens, which she is talking about today, uncovers the lives and work of the women who made, sold, managed and cared for the clothing of the Stuart queens between the years 1603 and 1714.

Check out her website: https://sarahabendall.com/, where you will find blog posts and tutorials that feature her research and experimental reconstructions!

Dr. Erin Griffey is a specialist in early modern visual and material culture at the University of Auckland and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She has published widely on court culture, especially the early seventeenth-century British queen Henrietta Maria and the Stuart court. She has written On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence (Yale University Press, 2015) and her forthcoming work includes chapters on beauty in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of Beauty. She won the Renaissance Studies Article Prize for her article 'The Rose and Lily Queen: Henrietta Maria's Fair Face and the Power of Beauty at the Stuart Court' (2022). She is writing a book titled Facing Decay: Beauty, Wrinkles and Anti-Aging in Early Modern Europe, (Penn State University Press, forthcoming) and she is also collaborating with colleagues in Chemistry on the Beautiful Chemistry Project in recreating a selection of early modern cosmetic recipes in the lab.

 
Erin’s work:

 You can find out more about Erin and her team’s recreation of recipes at https://www.beautifulchemistryproject.com/

 For her article on Henrietta Maria and beauty: Griffey, E. (2021). ‘“The Rose and Lily Queen”: Henrietta Maria’s fair face and the power of beauty at the Stuart court.’ Renaissance Studies, 35(5), 811-836.

For a general introduction to beauty at court, see Griffey, E. (2022). ‘Beauty.’ In Erin Griffey (ed.), Early Modern Court Culture. Routledge.

Keep an eye out for Erin’s forthcoming work on beauty:

 Griffey, E. (forthcoming). ‘Beautiful Experiments: Reading and Reconstructing Early Modern Cosmetic Recipes.’ In Sara Bendall and Serena Dyer (eds.), Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe: The Body, Gender and Material Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

 Griffey, E. (forthcoming). ‘Art and Beauty and ‘Ideas of Beauty’. In Sarah Toulalan (ed.), A Cultural History of Beauty. Bloomsbury.

 Griffey, E. (forthcoming). Facing Decay: Beauty, Wrinkles, and Anti-Aging in Early Modern Europe. Penn State University Press.

 Also check out:

 Burke, Jill. (2023). How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity. Profile Books.

Forthcoming exhibitions on beauty:

 In Love with Laura: A Mystery in Marble, Kunsthistoriches Museum:

https://www.tiqets.com/en/KHM-kunsthistorisches-museum-tickets-l141961/in-love-with-laura-a-mystery-in-marble-e46826/

 The Cult of Beauty, The Wellcome Collection:

https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/ZJ1zCxAAACMAczPA

In this episode, we interview Professor Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, the host of the upcoming Kings & Queens 13 conference in May 2024 at The American University of Paris. In this interview, Kathleen tells us all about the inspiration behind the theme "Gift-giving and Communication Networks". We also discuss the conference's commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the death of Queen Claude de France (1499-1524) and why this important but all too often sidelined queen deserves far greater attention.

Find out more about the plans for Kings & Queens 13 on the conference webpage--the call for papers is currently open with a deadline of 31 October 2023. 

Nota bene from our guest:

• Louise de Savoie was mother of the king, never queen nor queen mother.
• Louis XII and Anne of Brittany supported Guillaume Briçonnet and Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples in their reform of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1513.
• Claude’s daughter Madeleine de France became queen of Scotland when she was sixteen and died there the year of her marriage (1537). Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples wrote a Vocabulaire du Psaultier to teach Latin to Madeleine and her brother Charles, which he published in 1529.
• Claude’s last child, Marguerite de France, became duchess of Savoy in 1559. Jean Héritier (Michel de l'Hôpital) credits Renée de France and her niece Marguerite de France with the erection of the tomb of the former chancellor at Champmotteux after his death in 1573.

Professor Wilson-Chevalier's Work on Claude de France:

“Claude de France and the Spaces of Agency of a Marginalized Queen”, in Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563. Ed. Susan Broomhall. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 139-172.

“From Dissent to Heresy. Queen Claude of France and Her Entourage: Images of Religious Complaint and Evangelical Reform”, in Representing Heresy in Early Modern France. Ed. Lidia Radi and Gabriella Scarlatta Eschrich. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2017, pp. 93-129.

"Claude de France. La vertu de la littérature et l’imaginaire d’une princesse vertueuse”, Valeur des lettres à la Renaissance. Débats et reflécions sur la vertu de la littérature, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2016, pp. 43-81.

"Quelle “trinité royale” ? Reine, roi, régente et sœur de roi : Claude de France, François Ier, Louise de Savoie et Marguerite de Navarre", in La dame de cœur . Le patronage religieux des reines et des princesses XIIIe-XVIIe siècle. Ed. Murielle Gaude-Ferragu and Cécile Vincent-Cassy, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016, pp. 123-136

“Claude de France: Justice, Power & the Queen as Advocate for Her People”, in Textual and Visual Representations of Power & Justice in Medieval France. Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Anne D. Hedeman, and Bernard Ribémont. Ashgate, 2015, pp. 241-272.

“Claude de France:  In Her Mother’s Likeness, A Queen with Symbolic Clout?”, in The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne. Negotiating Convention in Books and Documents. Ed Cynthia Brown. Cambridge (U.K.): Boydell and Brewer, 2010, pp. 123-144.

Edited books:

Femmes à la cour de France Charges et fonctions (XVe-XIXe siècle). Ed. with Caroline zum Kolk. Villeneuve d’Ascq : Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2018.

Patronnes et mécènes en France à la Renaissance. Ed., with the collaboration of Eugénie Pascal. Saint-Étienne : Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne (with the participation of The American University of Paris), 2007.

Royaume de fémynie : Pouvoirs, contraintes, espaces de liberté des femmes, de la Renaissance à la Fronde. Ed. with Eliane Viennot. Paris : Honoré Champion, 1999.<