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Tudor England: A History

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Thankfully, predictably, even Wooding can’t escape the reigns or doesn’t want to – we move steadily from Henry VII, the usurper who founded the dynasty, to his son Henry VIII, to the teen-king Edward VI and his successors Mary I and the great Elizabeth I. But it’s only when you watch how steadily Wooding poles away from personalities and toward larger societal and political forces that you realize just how refreshing such an approach can be when it’s done with this much verve and lightly-worn erudition. BOGAEV: We were just talking about Jane Anger on this show, and that’s who I’m thinking of as you speak. But yes, London is extraordinary by European standards, generally. London is quite extraordinary. It is of course a capital and it’s a port. But it does have a kind of unique identity, I think. Scene One: 17 November 1558, London. In the early morning, Mary I lies dying at St James Palace. By evening, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, has also died – a momentous day for Catholicism in England.

WOODING: Well, that’s a fascinating question. I think the scholarship that surrounds that play suggests that they were prepared to take her great speech as tongue-in-cheek. I think they thought that Shakespeare was having some fun with this whole debate about the role of women and whether a wife should be submissive or not. Felicity Heal, ‘Food gifts, the household and the politics of exchange in early modern England’, P&P 199 (2008), 41–70.BOGAEV: One major point that you make that has so much resonance with Shakespeare is, you say you can’t understand Tudor England without knowing about the land and the woods and the towns and the cities. That the landscape around Tudor men and women was full of meaning. What did Tudors believe about the landscape of their country that makes it so ripe with significance? 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. Our learned guide on this journey is Lucy Wooding. Wooding is Langford fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford. She is an expert on Reformation England, its politics, religion and culture and the author of a study of King Henry VIII. I am of course fully aware that this was a period of bitter religious and political division- which indeed representations were often designed to temper, if not deny. But short of a full political narrative (as well as my subject) I didn?t see how these could be related and I took them as given and well known.

J ust before Whitsunday in the summer of 1549, a fight broke out in the playground of a school in Bodmin. When the dust had settled and questions were asked, the authorities discovered that the children had divided into two gangs, or rather ‘two factions, the one whereof they called the old religion, the other the new’. In this, the children revealed themselves to be remarkably acute commentators on wider social developments. Not long after, on 9 June (Whitsunday itself), the government of Edward VI imposed the Book of Common Prayer on every parish church in England. The time-hallowed Latin mass was replaced with an English text. The West Country exploded with what’s known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, one of the greatest popular risings of the 16th century. ‘If there was a single point in time that separated the old world and the new,’ writes Lucy Wooding in her magnificent new survey of Tudor England, this was it. Selling the Tudor Monarchy is a huge achievement. It is not without its problems, but it is also an important, thought-provoking and richly rewarding book which should be required reading for every early modern scholar. Its eagerness to engage with the central questions of historical method, its passionate insistence on an interdisciplinary approach, its vast scope and its grand ideas are a great addition to the scholarship of the Tudor period. It will be even more interesting to see Sharpe take the same approach to the 17th century, which is arguably in even greater need of this treatment than the Tudor era. We look forward to the next two volumes. So, you know, you could be the son of a… I mean, like Shakespeare, you could be the son of a glover or you know, somebody else in trade. And you could still get an extraordinary education. Lucy Wooding’s Tudor England: A History is a beautifully written account of the society, culture, and beliefs of the Tudor period. Along the way, she punctures many of the stubborn myths that clinging to the period and its headlining figures. The Times of London called it, “A classic in the making.”

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I do think one thing that set them apart though, is that even the wealthy in Tudor society quite often had a really powerful sense of social responsibility towards the poor. Something which I think, well, I think perhaps compares favorably with attitudes today. Memento: The reliquary known as the ‘tablet de Bourbon’, made by one of the great Parisian goldsmiths and acquired as part of a ransom during the Hundred Years War. Worn by Mary I in the portrait by Hans Eworth. People/Social 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.

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