It seems that I have things *mostly* back to normal, so here’s this week’s news round-up!
* 2015 Anne Boleyn Files Tudor Places Calendar Now Available – The 2015 version of Claire’s excellent calendar, once again filled with gorgeous images from submissions to the photo contest. (And no, I’m not getting anything for endorsing it, I’ve just really liked the past ones!)
I only had one news story this week but it’s a pretty important one so I wanted to mention it:
* King Richard lll to be reinterred in March 2015 – The date of the service in which Richard lll will be finally laid to rest will be Thursday 26th March 2015. This is one of three services which will remember the life and death of the only Monarch of England without a marked grave. The mortal remains of Richard lll will be received into the care of the Cathedral on the evening of 22nd March, will lie in repose for 3 days and will be reburied on the morning of Thursday 26th. The following days, Friday 27th and Saturday 28th March, will mark the end of the journey with the reveal of the tomb and a service to mark the completion of the reinterment, and events which will look to the future having laid the King to rest.
And I wanted to put up a note in case any of you have had trouble accessing the blog over the past week or so. WordPress is occasionally a little wonky on this site (which I’m pretty sure is an issue with my hosting provider and isn’t the fault of WordPress) and last week it was very slow or down completely on and off. My host did some upgrades too, which might have been part of that. I think everything is behaving normally again for site visitors but you may still experience some slowness or connection time outs. In those cases, just try again later and hopefully it will be back up. There seem to still be issues on the Dashboard site of things (where I write posts and approve comments, etc.) so I don’t think all of the bugs have been worked out yet. Fingers crossed that it gets sorted since it would be a bit of a pain to move the site!
* How Does It Feel? – Understanding the emotional lives of people in the past is one of the most difficult challenges facing the historian, argues Suzannah Lipscomb. – I thought this was interesting in light of the “feelings” questions I’ve gotten on the Q&A blog over the years.
* Top 10 Tudor podcasts – and a round-up of past Tudor-related podcasts you might have missed
Just for fun:
* Could you become a citizen of Elizabethan England? – Another entertaining quiz from BBC History Extra (I always do their weekly quiz – to date I think I have gotten a perfect score on only one occasion)
And finally:
I only recently found the Society of Antiquaries You Tube channel and I’ve embedded one of their recent videos of a short informal gallery talk about Tudor portrait sets. There are more at the channel including a few about their portrait of Richard III.
Only a few stories this week, but I really felt I should get a post up since I haven’t had one in a few weeks and there won’t be one next weekend since I’ll be traveling for work!
The story that lit up my news alerts the most this past week was the announcement that a team of researchers working on the DNA of Richard III are going to map the king’s complete genome:
Another popular story last week was the auction of another supposed flag from the Battle of Bosworth (see here for a link to another from past September):
In “Tudors on TV” news – Suzannah Lipscomb’s newest program, a two-part documentary on Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s relationship, starts Thursday on Channel 5 in the UK:
* The December issue of BBC History Magazine is out and features an article by Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski on animal accidents in Tudor England (another interesting product of their research into coroner’s reports).
Quite a hodge-podge of things today, including three things that you can help out with!
* Foose noted in the comments a couple of weeks ago that actor Nigel Davenport passed away on October 25th. He was Norfolk in the 1966 “A Man for All Seasons” and Bothwell in the 1971 “Mary Queen of Scots”.
* If you’ve ever downloaded documents from Archive.org please consider sending them a small donation after their scanning facility was damaged by fire last week. The archive has scanned many old books with primary sources and are a valuable resource to Tudor history fans and researchers alike.
You can see the online archive here: Rediscovering Rycote. There are some great resources at the site, including a nice palaeography tutorial. Yes, my quest to get better at reading Tudor handwriting still continues…
* And more from the Elizabeth I and Her People exhibition at the NPG:
The National Portrait Gallery’s You Tube channel has several videos related to the exhibition. I’ve embedded one below, but be sure to check out the others at the channel.
* The mysteries of the Princes in the Tower – Leanda de Lisle is featured in the first half of the October 3rd History Extra podcast discussing the fate of the Princes
And a couple of follow-up stories related to Kenilworth Castle:
* Kenilworth Castle moat flood plans put on hold – I thought I had previously mentioned the discussions about re-flooding the mere at Kenilworth but I couldn’t find a post about it. Well, it looks like the plans are on hold for now anyway.