Amy Robsart, Lady Dudley: The Death that Launched a Thousand Rumors
12/02/19 • 79 min
Death Series. Episode #3 of 4. Today, as a part of our Death series, we are digging into a particular death, one that scandalized the Elizabethan court, provided fodder for decades of court intrigue and propaganda by Catholic exiles, and launched a literary genre of embellished folklore embraced by many, Jacobean players, and novelist Walter Scott among them. That’s right, Tudorphiles rejoice because 15 luckless men had been summoned by the Berkshire coroner to investigate the suspicious death of Lady Amy Dudley, née Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, the childhood friend, purported soulmate, and undisputed favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.
Find transcripts and show notes here: https://digpodcast.org/2019/12/01/amy-robsart-lady-dudley/
Up Next in our Death Series: La Petite Mort
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Death Series. Episode #3 of 4. Today, as a part of our Death series, we are digging into a particular death, one that scandalized the Elizabethan court, provided fodder for decades of court intrigue and propaganda by Catholic exiles, and launched a literary genre of embellished folklore embraced by many, Jacobean players, and novelist Walter Scott among them. That’s right, Tudorphiles rejoice because 15 luckless men had been summoned by the Berkshire coroner to investigate the suspicious death of Lady Amy Dudley, née Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, the childhood friend, purported soulmate, and undisputed favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.
Find transcripts and show notes here: https://digpodcast.org/2019/12/01/amy-robsart-lady-dudley/
Up Next in our Death Series: La Petite Mort
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Previous Episode
The Black Death: Dancing with Death in the Medieval World
Death Series. Episode #2 of 4. The Black Death raged across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia in the mid 14th century. Families were thrown into chaos, the Catholic church faced dissension in its ranks, and townships struggled to provide services and control infection. The sheer ubiquity of death even fostered an artistic genre: the danse macabre, which reminded young and old, rich and poor, healthy and sick alike that all would be made equal in death. For this episode in our Death series, what better topic than the Black Death itself?
Coming up in our Death series:
The Death of Amy Robsart, Lady Dudley
"La Petite Mort"
Select Bibliography:
Ole Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2004)
Joseph P. Byrne, The Black Death (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004)
For the complete Bibliography and a transcript, visit digpodcast.org
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Next Episode
La Petite Mort: Investigating the History of Orgasm, aka The Little Death
Death Series, Episode #4 of 4. If you were fluent in French and mingling at a French dinner party and your snooty acquaintance Genevieve likened the champagne she was sipping to la petite mort, you would know that she meant that the champagne, with it’s bubbly joy filling your nose and head, was orgasmic. But... why would you know that? “La petite mort” translates to something approximating “the little death.” That isn’t the most obvious of analogies for the glorious eruption that is an orgasm. We wanted to know more about la petite mort, so this episode is an investigation of the history of language, sexology, and indeed, orgasming, from the ancient world to the modern. Let’s plunge...erhm, dig, in.
For the complete transcript and more episodes like this one, visit digpodcast.org.
Bibliography:
Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (Yale University Press, 2005).
Lizzie Crocker, “Virginia Johnson, The Woman Who Discovered The Elusive Multiple Orgasm,” The Daily Beast (1 Sep 2017)
Peter L Hays, “Sex, Death, and Pine Needles in ForWhom the Bells Tolls,” The Explicator, 69:1, 16-19
Max Kenneth, “The Philology of the Orgasm,” Nassau Weekly, February 9, 2005 (This is not actually very good, because it’s based on an assumption that the French word for orgasm is petite mort, but that’s not the common phrase in French)
Dara Lind, “9 Shakespeare innuendoes you should have been embarrassed to read in English class,” Vox, Apr 22, 2016
William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1966).
Robert Muchembled, Orgasm and the West: a history of pleasure from the sixteenth century to the present (Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2008).
Jean-Luc Nancy, Adèle Van Reeth, and Charlotte Mandell, Coming, (Fordham University Press, 2016)
Christopher Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama, (London: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1978).
Graham Robb, Balzac: A Biography, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company).
James Steintrager, The Autonomy of Pleasure : Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
“Benefits of love and sex,” National Health Service
Victor Hugo’s eulogy for Honoré de Balzac
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