By virtue of being England’s first crowned queen regnant – a queen in her own right – Mary I set a precedent for English regnant queenship. She struggled to establish her reign amidst the religious, nationalist, and gendered contexts of sixteenth-century England. Focusing particularly at the moments of Mary’s marriage, her pregnancies, and her death, Johanna Strong will emphasise how the memory of Mary’s reign was transformed by Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and popular culture, which often depicted Mary as a political tyrant and a religious zealot, largely due to the political and religious instability found in these later monarchs’ own reigns.
Up Next in Season 1
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Remembering Remembrance: The Origins ...
On the 11th of November at 11am in 1918, the guns fell silent on the western front. Exactly a year later, commemorative events took place across what was then the British Empire to remember those who had fallen during the First World War – however, not all events were looked upon favourably by co...
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Wicked Witches and Honourable Men: Th...
In 1612, Lancashire witnessed what could arguably be the most notorious witch trial of early modern England. In 1613, court clerk Thomas Potts published a lengthy pamphlet outlining the events leading to and during these trials. It is a text full of suspicion, heresy, curses, and murder, and who ...
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Operation Margin: The Augsburg Raid
In April 1942 the Second World War hung in the balance. Nazi Germany had occupied most of Europe and its seemingly unstoppable armed forces were driving deeper and deeper into Russia and North Africa. To add to Allied worries, German U-Boats were threatening to cut off Britain’s supply lines in t...
