Not Just the Tudors

Seymour, Dudley and Parr are all well-known Tudor names. But often, behind the more famous men in those families, there were women who had a much greater influence than has previously been acknowledg…

How did an enslaved East African man become Japan’s first foreign samurai, and the only ever samurai of African descent? How did Yasuke catch the attention of Japan’s most powerful warlord Oda Nobuna…

Artemisia Gentileschi was the most celebrated female painter of the 17th century, as famous in her lifetime as Reubens or Van Dyke. But the events of her life were as savage as the events depicted in…

How meaningful can a gift - especially of a book - be? In the fickle world of the Tudor court, the strategic gifting of books was a common practice, bound up in relationships of power, politics and p…

In the sixteenth century, religious beliefs underwent a dramatic change. As differences between the late medieval Roman Catholic Church and the nature of Luther's Protestantism spread across Western …

The name Ivan the Terrible is synonymous with brutality and ruthlessness. While Western scholars insist that the first crowned Tsar of all Russia did create a policy of mass repression and execution,…

From the mid-15th century to the mid-16th century, there were 10 Queens Consort of England, from Margaret of Anjou to Katherine Parr. For each of these Queens, jewellery was a way she could signify h…

As Queen Elizabeth I lays dying, King James VI of Scotland is waiting to accede to the throne of England. But who will thrive and who will fall under the new King? Will it be the scholar Francis Baco…

In the summer of 1579, Francis Drake had to land in a ‘fair and good bay’ on the western coast of the New World when his ship - The Golden Hind - needed repairs. A sign was put up, naming it Nova Alb…

What do you get when you bring together five top historians to debate depictions of Thomas More on film and TV? History with the gloves off - our third special episode of Not Just the Tudors Lates! T…

The most admired and influential composer during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, William Byrd died exactly 400 years ago on 4 July 1623. Byrd’s music ranks among the most unique and…

When we think of Shakespeare, we mostly think of language. But what about gesture and other forms of nonverbal communication - from thumb-biting in Romeo and Juliet to Pistol giving “the fig of Spain…

Today we think of fairies on the stage and in stories as often cute, ultra-feminine and unthreatening. But in Early Modern literature, fairies were supernatural often gender-fluid beings - just think…

In this third special episode of Not Just the Tudors celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb investigates the nature of theatre-…

Every spring and summer of her 44 year reign, Queen Elizabeth I insisted that her court go "on progress" — royal visits to towns and aristocratic homes. These trips provided the only direct contact m…

Experts at Hever Castle - the childhood home of Anne Boleyn - have made an extraordinary discovery. They’ve established that an ornate 1527 prayer book — kept in a Cambridge library for more than 350…

Shakespeare’s First Folio — the first book to contain 36 of his plays, 18 of which had not been in print before — was published in 1623.

In the second of her special series marking its 400th anniversa…

In 1567, a sailor named David Ingram sailed from Plymouth with 400 others on a slaving expedition. The ensuing events read like a fantastic adventure story: shipwrecked in a hurricane off Mexico, a b…

Three powerful Renaissance queens all lived together at the French court for many years. They were bound together through blood and marriage, alliance and friendship — bonds that were tested when the…

Four hundred years ago in 1623, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays was printed. Known as the First Folio, the book was integral to establishing Shakespeare's posthumous reputation jus…