Anna was the 'last woman standing' of Henry VIII's wives - and the only one buried in Westminster Abbey. How did she manage it? Anna, Duchess of Cleves: The King's 'Beloved Sister' looks at Anna from a new perspective, as a woman from the Holy Roman Empire and not as a woman living almost by accident in England. Starting with what Anna's life as a child and young woman was like, the author describes the climate of the Cleves court, and the achievements of Anna's siblings. It looks at the politi...
2020 brings readers the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower-the ship that took the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World. It is a foundational event in American history, but it began as an English story, which pioneered the idea of religious freedom. The illegal underground movement of Protestant separatists from Elizabeth I's Church of England is a story of subterfuge and danger, arrests and interrogations, prison and executions. It starts with Queen Mary's attempts to burn Protestanti...
The Corsini Letters
by Philip Beale, Adrian Almond, and Mike Scott-Archer
During the late 1980s, a collection of sixteenth-century merchant letters appeared for sale. Over four sales at Christie's, the letters, all addressed to the Corsini firm of London merchants, were scattered to the four corners of the earth. Thankfully, copies were made of each of the letters, which gave an insight into Tudor life both in Britain and abroad, and these were placed in the Guildhall Library, London. Comprising some 3,600 letters and other documents, the Corsini letters form the lar...
Urban Society and Monastic Lordship in Reading, 1350-1600
by Joe Chick
The power of the medieval Church stretched far beyond the religious sphere. Bishops and monasteries held lordship over vast areas of the realm, often wielding political and judicial powers beyond those of secular lords. Early twentieth-century scholarship tended to view towns with monastic lords as highly distinctive, characterised by robust lordship and violent town-abbey relations, and though subsequent studies have done much to modify this view of relationships between towns and their monasti...
Gruesome but not gratuitous, this decidedly darker take on the Tudors, from 1485 to 1603, covers some forty-five events' from the Tudor reign, taking in everything from the death of Richard III to the botched execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and a whole host of horrors in between. Particular attention is paid to the various gruesome ways in which the Tudors despatched their various villains and lawbreakers, from simple beheadings, to burnings and of course the dreaded hanging, drawing and quar...
A Brief History of the Wars of the Roses (Brief Histories) (Brief History of)
by Mr Desmond Seward
During the fifteenth century England was split in a bloody conflict between the Houses of York and Lancaster over who should claim the crown. The civil wars consumed the whole nation in a series of battles that eventually saw the Tudor dynasty take power. In A Brief History of the Wars of the Roses, Desmond Seward tells the story of this complex and dangerous period of history through the lives of five men and women who experienced the conflict first hand. In a gripping narrative the personal tr...
In her highly praised The Six Wives of Henry VIII and its sequel, Children of England, Alison Weir examined the private lives of the early Tudor kings and queens, and chronicled the childhood and youth of one of England's most successful monarchs, Elizabeth I. This book begins as the young Elizabeth ascends the throne in the wake of her sister Mary's disastrous reign. Elizabeth is portrayed as both a woman and a queen, an extraordinary phenomenon in a patriarchal age. Alison Weir writes of Eliza...
Many singers today perform Elizabethan and Jacobean lute-songs. Robert Toft offers the first help for singers in understanding the principles which governed song performance and composition in the early seventeenth century. He shows how these historical principles may be used to move and delight modern audiences. The main purpose of early seventeenth-century singing was to persuade listeners using a style of utterance that had two principal parts - to sing eloquently and to act aptly. Toft disc...
Elizabeth I's Final Years outlines the interwoven relationships and rivalries between politicians and courtiers surrounding England's omnipotent queen in the years following the death in 1588 of the Earl of Leicester. Elizabeth now surrounded herself with magnetically attractive younger men with the courtly graces to provide her with what Alison Weir has called an eroticised political relationship'. With these favourites' holding sway at court, they saw personal bravery in the tiltyard or on...
(ኢ)ዩቶፕያ
by ዶ/ር መስከረም ለቺሣ
Collins Big Cat supports every primary child on their reading journey from phonics to fluency. Top authors and illustrators have created fiction and non-fiction books that children love to read. Book banded for guided and independent reading, there are reading notes in the back, comprehensive teaching and assessment support and ebooks available. "Roll double six or double three, let's learn about your history." Join Aniyah, EJ and Olivia as they play their Ludi board game and...
Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was executed on 19 May 1536. Her sister Mary, rumoured mistress to the monarch, lived on and survived the king’s wrath. But this is not the end of the tale of the Boleyns and the British Royal family – their stories have remained entwined for almost 500 years, through countless wars, crises and triumphs. In this book, Amanda Harvey Purse delves into the archives to tell the remarkable story of a number of individuals who form part of the Boleyn bloodl...
LONDON: a settlement founded by the Romans, occupied by the Saxons, conquered by the Danes and ruled by the Normans. This changeful place became a medieval maze of alleys and courtyards, later to be chequered with grand estates of Georgian splendour. It swelled with industry and became the centre of the largest empire in history. And having risen from the rubble of the Blitz, it is now one of the greatest cities in the world.From the prehistoric occupants of the Thames Valley to the preoccupied...
Anne Boleyn's unconventional beauty inspired poets - and she so entranced Henry VIII with her wit, allure and style that he was prepared to set aside his wife of over twenty years and risk his immortal soul. Her sister had already been the king's mistress, but the other Boleyn girl followed a different path. For years the lovers waited; did they really remain chaste? Did Anne love Henry, or was she a calculating femme fatale? Eventually replacing the long-suffering Catherine of Aragon, Anne enj...
The Tudor period remains a source of timeless fascination, with endless novels, TV programmes and films depicting the period in myriad ways. And yet our image of the Tudor era remains overwhelmingly white. This ground-breaking and provocative new book seeks to redress the balance: revealing not only how black presence in Tudor England was far greater than has previously been recognised, but that Tudor conceptions of race were far more complex than we have been led to believe. Onyeka Nubia's...
The Power of Scripture (Studies in British and Imperial History, #8)
by Andreas Pecar
In England, from the Reformation era to the outbreak of the Civil War, religious authority contributed to popular political discourse in ways that significantly shaped the legitimacy of the monarchy as a form of rule as well as the monarch's ability to act politically. The Power of Scripture casts aside parochial conceptualizations of that authority's origins and explores the far-reaching consequences of political biblicism. It shows how arguments, narratives, and norms taken from Biblical scr...
Told for the very first time, this is the shocking and extraordinary story of the most-conniving and manipulative Tudor family you've never heard of - the dashing and daring Dudleys . . .'Exciting and immersive. An immensely entertaining history, capturing in full Tudor brilliance the cut-throat glamour of the English throne and the most audacious family to play its game' SUNDAY TIMES'Breathes new life into an old and familiar Tudor story . . . It's delightful, a joy to read' THE TIMES, 'BOOK OF...
This book reconsiders the evidence for what we know (or think we know) about early modern performance conditions. This study encourages a new recognition and treatment of certain aspects of the plays as evidence – and demonstrates the significance of the implications of that new information. This book is also an assessment of the competing narratives about the processes involved in early modern performance: about the status of manuscript playbooks, about the parts that players memorized, about...
England, 1509. Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, is dead; his successor, the seventeen-year-old Henry VIII, offers hope of renewal and reconciliation after the corruption and repression of the last years of his father's reign. The kingdom Henry inherits is not the familiar Tudor England of Protestantism and playwrights. It is still more than two decades away from the English Reformation, and ancient traditions persist: boy bishops, pilgrimages, Corpus Christi pageants, the jewel-decked shri...