Updates to previous books that are already out in the UK – Suzannah Lipscomb‘s A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England will be out in hardback in the US on April 24th. It’s already available on Kindle in the US (and it’s already in my hands thanks to Suzannah and her publisher – review coming after I finish Winter King!). That same day A.N. Wilson’s The Elizabethans is due out in the US in hardback and Kindle.
Another title in Macmillan’s Queenship and Power series (click the link for all of the titles in the series) – Retha Warnicke’s Wicked Women of Tudor England is due on April 10 in the US and UK:
Just in time for Shakespeare birthday celebration time, I, Iago by Nicole Galland, a novel based on the famous character from Othello, is due out on April 24th in the US and UK:
Alison Weir will be giving a talk about her upcoming book A Dangerous Inheritance at the Mary Rose Museum on April 4th. Although the book isn’t due out for a few months, they will have copies on hand for her to sign. More details at the Mary Rose Museum website.
Exhibitions
Sudeley Castle is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of Katherine Parr for the next six months, starting April 1st when they open for the 2012 season. They also announced last week that the Duchess of Cornwall will be patron for the celebrations. Click on the logo for more information:
And finally:
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich will be presenting – Royal River: Power, Pageantry and the Thames an exhibition that will run from April 27, 2012 to September 9, 2012.
Warnicke’s collection of “wicked women” comprises Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, Anne Stanhope Seymour (the duchess of Somerset), Lettice Knollys, and two wives of Sir Thomas More, the elusive Jane and the more generally recognized Alice.
I’m kind of surprised she didn’t include Jane Parker Boleyn – although maybe she’s covered with Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard?
Warnicke discusses the selection process for her subjects in the introduction: “Their supposed flouting of patriarchal conventions may not seem serious enough to warrant the wicked characterization. They were not murderers or abusers of children … Nevertheless, contemporaries described women as wicked who were disobedient to their husbands …” She doesn’t explain specifically why she may have excluded someone like Jane Parker Boleyn (who shows up only incidentally in the chapters on Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, although some of Lady Rochford’s behavior could certainly be construed as disobedient to her husband’s wishes) but she has previously written short articles as well as longer works on most of the women, uncovering new evidence in the process, which probably shaped her selection. I’ve often wished that Warnicke would issue a collection of all her articles, and this book seems like a partial fulfillment.
Also, “[the six women] had at least four qualities in common. First, besides being of gentle birth, they married men of higher social rank … Second, their husbands possessed considerable political power or influence … They shared a third quality: their husbands played major roles in emerging Christian divisions.” And finally, “Some researchers are interested in their lives partly because enough information or misinformation about each has survived for, at least, a mini-biography.”
Warnicke’s goal is to “[correct] earlier gender biases … to move representations of them away from traditional denunciations and draw them closer to the actual reality of their lives.”