The Royal Studies Podcast

This month we discuss the latest Royal Studies Journal Special Issue 9.1 June 2022 with special editor Dustin M. Neighbors, University of Helsinki:
"Beyond the Public/Private Divide: New Perspectives on Sexuality, Rituals, Hospitality, and Diplomacy within Royal Space".
Dr Neighbors is a recently appointed as postdoctoral researcher for The History Lab project at Aalto University, and a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki. He also serves as the administrative officer, digital content manager and coordinator of the digital seminar series for the Royal Studies Network.
He began his undergraduate studies in the southern USA and earned his BA in History and Sociology from Georgia State University. He received his MA in Early Modern History from the University of East Anglia in 2012 and immediately began his doctoral research at the University of York.
Dr Neighbors doctoral thesis, titled “‘With my rulinge’: Agency, Queenship, and Political Culture through Royal Progresses during the Reign of Elizabeth I”, focused on royal progresses as fundamental instruments used to negotiate power between the ruler and the ruled, and craft spectacles of authority, particularly through ceremony, ritual, recreational activities, and visual displays both in public and private spaces.

​His current research builds on the negotiation of power and the intersection of politics and culture that were central themes of his doctoral research. At the Centre for Privacy Studies, he examined the private and public nature of early modern German courts through the cultural activities, spectacles, and royal progresses (itinerant monarchies). Dustin's current research aims to highlight how the cultural activities and practices, primarily hunting, straddled the boundaries of the public/private divide, and shaped female agency, facilitated royal/electoral authority, influenced European political culture, and affected foreign relations.

​He previously served as a postdoctoral research assistant with Historic Royal Palaces researching the royal progresses of Henry VIII. His research was the basis for the successful AHRC Network Grant for “Henry VIII on Tour: Tudor Palaces and Royal Progresses.” Additionally, he served as Chief Layout Editor for the Royal Studies Journal for four years.
You can contact Dr Neighbors via the Royal Studies Network and via Twitter @Historyboy30
Access the latest Royal Studies Journal Special Issue here: https://www.rsj.winchester.ac.uk/24/volume/9/issue/1/

Website: https://www.rsj.winchester.ac.uk/about/
Twitter: @royalstjournal
Facebook: @Royal Studies Journal

This episode, we are joined by Dr Valerie Schutte for a conversation about her forthcoming Royal Studies Journal Cluster, due for publication next month.
Valerie Schutte has published widely on royal Tudor women, book dedications, and queenship. She has published two monographs: Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion (2015) and Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Tudor and the Gift Book Exchange (2021). She has also edited or co-edited seven volumes on Mary I, Shakespeare, and queenship. Her most recent edited collection - Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Remaking of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I - was published in Palgrave Macmillan's Queenship and Power series in September 2023. Other recent publications include: "Defending the Faith: Johann Slotan and Queen Mary I" in the Journal of the Early Book Society and "Anne of Cleves: Bound for England" in Royal Journeys in Early Modern Europe: Progresses, Palaces and Panache, edited by Anthony Musson and J.P.D. Cooper. Valerie is currently editing two other volumes, one on Tudor monarchs and myths, and the other on Mary I and humanism. She is also writing a cultural biography of Anne of Cleves. Valerie also has a forthcoming essay on 500 years of reprints of Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christian Woman, that will be published this winter in the Journal of the Early Book Society.
For more on Dr Schutte's research, follow her on Instagram and at her website.
The Winter 2023 RSJ Cluster (in issue 10.2 to be released in December 2023) contains the following articles:

• The Sexualization Of a “Noble and Vertuous Quene”: Elizabeth of York, 1466-1503: William B. Robison
• Questioning an Honest Queen: The Scrutiny Around Queen Catherine of Aragon's Virginity: Emma Luisa Cahill Marrón
• “This Dolorous Chance”: Contemporary Views on Catherine of Aragon’s Pregnancy Losses: Caroline Armbruster
• Visualising Sexuality and Maternity in the Royal Entries of Mary Tudor (1514) and Anne Boleyn (1533): Charlotte Samways
• Sexuality and Grace, Grazia : What made Anne Boleyn so special?: Tracy Adams
• Bodies in Competition: Italian Descriptions of Sexuality, Fertility, and Beauty in the King’s Great Matter: Samantha Perez
• Diplomatic Presentations of Queen Mary I’s 1555 Pregnancy: Ailish Girling & Valerie Schutte

In this episode we are joined by Nikki Clark and Caroline Dunn to speak about their work on the role of ladies-in-waiting in the medieval and early modern English court. We’ll hear their reflections on how the role changed over time and what life was like for these women as well as their thoughts about Queen Camilla’s decision to eliminate this position in favour of the new post of ‘companions’.

Dr Nicola Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Chichester. Her first book, Gender, Family, and Politics: The Howard Women, 1485-1558, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018, and she also writes for public audiences, with work featured in History Today and on the History Extra website. She has spoken about her research at events for Historic Royal Palaces, the National Archives, various schools, and academic institutions, and has recently appeared on television as part of the BBC's The Boleyns: A Scandalous Family, and More4's Royal Scandals. Before coming to Chichester, Nicola taught at the University of Winchester and Royal Holloway College, University of London. She has published widely on women’s roles, queenship, the Reformation, and Tudor politics.

Twitter: @NikkiClark86

Selected Publications:

Gender, Family, and Politics: The Howard Women, 1485-1558. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/gender-family-and-politics-9780198784814?cc=gb&lang=en&

“Queen Katherine Howard: Space and Promiscuity Pre- and Post-Marriage, 1536-1541”, Royal Studies Journal 6.2 (2019), 89-103. https://rsj.winchester.ac.uk/articles/10.21039/rsj.202

Dr Caroline Dunn is a scholar of medieval Europe with a particular focus on women’s roles and social networks in late medieval England. Her book, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery c. 1100-1500 (Cambridge, 2012) offers the first comprehensive overview of women’s experiences with ravishment, which ranged from forcible rape to consensual elopement and adultery, during the English Middle Ages. Professor Dunn’s current research explores the lady-in-waiting in medieval England. Examining these highborn serving women reveals the nuances of soft power, social influence, and economic resources wielded by women who lacked official authority within political institutions or patriarchal households. Dr. Dunn teaches upper level courses on medieval women, crusades and conquests, aristocratic society, and preindustrial food at Clemson University. She received the Dean’s award for teaching excellence in 2011 and the John B. and Thelma A. Gentry Award for teaching excellence in the Humanities in 2019. In 2016 Dr. Dunn co-organized the 5th annual Kings and Queens conference, introducing international scholars to Clemson University for the first time that the gathering was held outside of Europe. Dr Dunn was awarded the 2020 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship to recognize and advance her scholarship.

Twitter: @SCmedievalist

Selected Publications:

“Serving Isabella of France, From Queen Consort to Dowager Queen.” In Elite and Royal Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Theresa Earenfight. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

"All the Queen’s Ladies: Philippa of Hainault’s Female Attendants." Journal of Medieval Prosopography 31 (2016), 173-208.

Royal Women and Dynastic Loyalty. Edited by Caroline Dunn and Elizabeth Carney. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

This episode features an interview with the winner of the Royal Studies Journal 2023 Postgraduate/Early Career Scholar Article Prize. In this interview we'll be discussing her prizewinning article and the disastrous Medici/Habsburg marriage that inspired it!
Guest Bio: Adriana Concin is the Assistant Curator of Paintings and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She completed her doctoral studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2021 with a dissertation focused on the 1565 wedding of Francesco I de’ Medici and the Habsburg Archduchess Johanna of Austria and its wider cultural implications. She has been the recipient of several fellowships, including the Eva Schler fellowship at the Medici Archive Project in Florence and the Studia Rudolphina fellowship in Prague at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Adriana has also held the Ayesha Bulchandani graduate internship at the Frick Collection in New York. Her research interests lie in sixteenth-century collecting, cultural exchanges between Tuscany and the Holy Roman Empire, and female patronage networks. In addition to her prize winning article, she has also published on the frescoes of Habsburg cityscapes in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (Burlington Magazine, 2019).

Find out more about Adriana and her research here:

• Adriana's website on Habsburg Women
• Academia.edu page
• Codart profile
• Prize winning article: Sadly this article, published in Studia Rudolphina is not available digitally but you can follow this link to find out more about how to access it--in the 2020/21 issue.

In this episode, host Ellie Woodacre interviews Charlotte Boland, the curator of the Six Lives exhibition currently running at the National Portrait Gallery, London. In this interview we discuss the inspiration behind the exhibition, new approaches to the history of the Six Lives and the unusual and diverse selection of visual and material culture in the exhibition.
The exhibition is running until 8 September 2024--click here for more information or to book tickets.
If you are not in the UK or are listening to this episode after the exhibition has finished you can purchase the exhibition catalogue, which includes all of the material exhibited and features a range of articles from academics in the field on the Six Lives.
Guest Bio: Dr Charlotte Bolland is a Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery—she joined in 2011 as Project Curator for the Making Art in Tudor Britain project. Her role combines responsibility for the acquisition, research and interpretation of portraits dating from the sixteenth century, with co-ordination of research activity within the curatorial department. She has co-curated a number of exhibitions at the NPG, including The Real Tudors: Kings and Queens Rediscovered (2014) and The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt (2017).

Charlotte studied for her PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, in collaboration with The Royal Collection as part of an AHRC funded CDA—her doctoral thesis was entitled Italian Material Culture at the Tudor Court. It explored the many items that were owned by the Tudor monarchs that had been brought to England by Italian individuals, either through trade or as gifts.

Selected Publications:

C. Bolland and T. Cooper, The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt (National Portrait Gallery, 2017)

C. Bolland and T. Cooper, The Real Tudors: Kings and Queens Rediscovered (National Portrait Gallery, 2014)