Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547, but the time needed to have his body lavishly embalmed and his funeral procession planned meant that the king was not actually buried in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor until almost three weeks later. On 14 February the king’s funeral procession began its journey from Whitehall, where the… Read more Bluff King Hal is Laid to Rest
King Edward VI of England was born on 12 October 1537 to the great rejoicing of the populace and profound relief of his father, Henry VIII. Few children have been welcomed into the world with the eagerness in which an entire nation awaited the birth of Edward VI. The pregnancy of Jane Seymour, the third… Read more Happy Birthday to Edward VI!
Amy Licence and I invite proposals for papers to be included in a multidisciplinary edited volume entitled Envisioning the Tudor Woman: Historical and Modern Representations of Women from the Tudor Era. Please submit a proposal before July 1 2015; the final deadline for complete essays will be December 1, 2015. Papers must be between 4000… Read more Submissions for Envisioning the Tudor Woman
Doctors were expensive and hard to come by for the average person in the Tudor era. Most of the nitty-gritty healthcare and healing came from women. Armed only with herbs and folklore, women – especially older married women — acted as de facto nurse practioners for their communities. These skills were taught via informal apprenticeship… Read more Ollie Petite Morgan Blakely, Wise Woman
This post is for the lovely lady who admins the Tudor Fan Page on Facebook, who wanted to give her readers a quick & dirty summation of the theory that Henry VIII’s blood was positive for the Kell antigen and that he subsequently developed McLeod syndrome. Most people don’t know it, but red blood cells… Read more Hello Tudor Fan Page!
Although the general public remembers Henry VIII as a tart-chasing tartar, many modern historians such as Lacey Baldwin Smith have defended the king as a rather “prudish” man with more wives than mistresses. In her new book, The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women’s Stories, Amy Licence disagrees. She argues that… Read more The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women’s Stories
There is a new documentary in town called Fed Up and it attacks “the conventional wisdom of why we gain weight and how to lose it, Fed Up unearths a dirty secret of the American food industry-far more of us get sick from what we eat than anyone has previously realized.” Moreover, it stars that… Read more How Sweet It’s Not
Tudor medical practitioners firmly believed in the “doctrine of signatures”, which was the idea that God had give each plant or food with medicinal value a special look that would correspond with what it does to aid or restore health. This, along with astrology, is often used as a good example of just how silly… Read more You are what you eat
I confess! It is true. My favorite historical information to read are works containing details of how the bourgeois, or middle-class, people in England lived rather than the royalty. The lives of the nobility and gentry always seem too fantastical to be relatable to me, and they were only about 5% of the population. I… Read more The Magnificence of the Mundane