Category: Tudor History news and events

How can a month simultaneously seem as though it flew by in a flash but also lasted a thousand years? Because that’s what January 2026 felt like.

Books

I’ve got a couple of new books this month, although one is a book that I missed last month!

A new book about Anne of Cleves, Accounting for Anne: The Tudor Queen Who Could Have Been by James Taffe came out last month in both the US and UK.

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

And Bloody, Brilliant Tudors: 100 Tales of Gowns, Gossip and Gory Ends will be out in the UK and US on February 19.

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

Exhibition

Hever Castle is hosting a new exhibition, Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn which “brings together the largest ever gathering of portraits believed to depict Anne Boleyn, including a ground-breaking newly identified contemporary image unveiled for the first time.” The exhibition will run from February 11, 2026 to January 2, 2027 and is included with admission to the castle.

Welcome to August, the month that *should* mark the end of summer, but I live in a Texas and summer can stretch all the way into October some years. (I can’t complain too much this year though, we’ve caught a bit of a break over some of the recent summer hellscapes we’ve had.)

Books

This month we have a couple of books coming out in the US that were previously released in the UK – first up is Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens, the companion to the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (see below), which will be released in the US on August 20.

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And Courting the Virgin Queen: Queen Elizabeth I And Her Suitors by Carol Ann Lloyd will come out in the US at the end of August.

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

And in new books this month, The Tragic Life of Lady Jane Grey by Beverley Adams will be out at the end of August in the UK and the end of October in the fall.

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

Continuing Exhibits

The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens opened on June 20 and runs through September 8. Click through for more information on the many related events the gallery will be hosting!

About the exhibition:

Tudor paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger and contemporary photography by Hiroshi Sugimoto meet in the National Portrait Gallery’s first exhibition of historic portraiture since reopening, presenting a study of the lives and afterlives of the six women who married Henry VIII.

Six Lives will chronicle the representation of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr throughout history and popular culture in the centuries since they lived. As a frequent source of fascination, the stories of the six women has repeatedly inspired writers and artists of all kinds to attempt to uncover the ‘truth’ of their lives: their characters, their appearance and their relationships. From historic paintings, drawings and ephemera, to contemporary photography, costume and film, the exhibition draws upon a wealth of factual and fictional materials to present the life, legacy and portrayal of six women who forever changed the landscape of English history.

Hello June! When, in theory, things are supposed to slow down in my department at work, but in reality we all try to catch up on all the non-time-dependent things that we don’t get to through the rest of the academic year.

Books

First up in books is the US release of Tudor and Stuart Royal Gardens: Displays of Majesty by David Jacques, which was released in April in the UK.

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

And in new books this month, first we have Linda Porter’s The Thistle and The Rose about the life of Margaret Tudor. Margaret is one of my Tudor interests and I’m glad to see more work on her. The book is due out on June 20 in both the UK and the US (on Kindle):

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

The companion book for the upcoming National Portrait Gallery exhibit (see below), Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIIIs Queens will also be out on June 20 in the UK and later in the summer in the US:

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

And finally, Courting the Virgin Queen: Queen Elizabeth I And Her Suitors by Carol Ann Lloyd will be out at the end of June in UK and the end of August in the US:

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

New Exhibits

As mentioned above, the National Portrait Gallery have an upcoming exhibition, Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens that will open on June 20 and will run through September 8. Click through for more information on the many related events the gallery will be hosting!

About the exhibition:

Tudor paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger and contemporary photography by Hiroshi Sugimoto meet in the National Portrait Gallery’s first exhibition of historic portraiture since reopening, presenting a study of the lives and afterlives of the six women who married Henry VIII.

Six Lives will chronicle the representation of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr throughout history and popular culture in the centuries since they lived. As a frequent source of fascination, the stories of the six women has repeatedly inspired writers and artists of all kinds to attempt to uncover the ‘truth’ of their lives: their characters, their appearance and their relationships. From historic paintings, drawings and ephemera, to contemporary photography, costume and film, the exhibition draws upon a wealth of factual and fictional materials to present the life, legacy and portrayal of six women who forever changed the landscape of English history.

Sorry this is a little late, I worked three late nights and Saturday the week before last and I just didn’t have the energy to do much last Sunday. We’re in the middle of our typical spring semester busy stretch at work, but this time with the build-up to the coming total solar eclipse tossed on top of it all!

Books

J. Stephan Edwards has revised his earlier work on the portraits of Lady Jane Grey and a new edition of his book is now out with the title Portraits of Lady Jane Grey Dudley, England’s ‘Nine Days Queen’. (Also note two upcoming talks by Dr. Edwards in the “Events” section below!)

Purchase at Amazon UK

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Melita Thomas’ ambitious 1000 Tudor People is due out in print in the UK at the end of March and is available on Kindle in the US.

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

And Susan Doran has a new work out, examining the transition from the end of the Tudors into the Stuart Age: From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I. It will be out at the end of March in the UK and in the summer in the US.

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

Events

As mentioned above, Dr. J. Stephan Edwards will be giving a talk at the Society of Antiquaries in London entitled Searching for a Portrait of Jane Grey Dudley, England’s ‘Nine-Days Queen’ of 1553 on April 4 at 1:00 p.m. (London time). The talk will be live streamed and archived on the Society’s YouTube channel, where you can also find many past lectures.

Dr. Edwards will give a second talk that day on Queen Jane’s Proclamation of Accession of 1553 and Gendering of the English Monarchy and you can see that talk as a live stream as well. Click on the title for more information!

Continuing Exhibitions

Holbein at the Tudor Court opened at The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace on November 10, 2023 and will run through April 23, 2024.

Hello February! I’m hoping the 2024 version of this month is a lot better than some of the more recent ones (extreme cold snaps, ice/snow storms, and power outages – multiple years, finally getting Covid – last year… etc.)

New Books

A few new Tudor-related books are due out in February and even though I don’t keep up with actually *reading* a lot of Tudor history books these days, I’m looking forward to some of these for even I do get back to history reading.

First up is a new work from Nicola Tallis on the early life of Elizabeth I, which will be released on February 29 in both the UK and the US, under slightly different titles:

Young Elizabeth: Princess, Prisoner, Queen – Purchase at Amazon UK

Young Elizabeth: Elizabeth I and Her Perilous Path to the Crown – Purchase at Amazon US

Next up is Women’s Lives in the Tudor Era by Any McElroy, which will be out in the UK at the end of February and in April in the US:

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

And finally, Kateryn Parr: Henry VIII’s Sixth Queen bu Laura Adkins will also be out at the end of February in the UK and in April in the US:

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

Continuing Exhibitions

Holbein at the Tudor Court opened at The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace on November 10, 2023 and will run through April 23, 2024.

Happy New Year!

I’d love to say that one of my resolutions this year is to work more on this site, but that seems unlikely for at least the first third (or thereabouts) of the year. I’m going to be incredibly busy at work since we have all of the usual spring chaos, but now with a total solar eclipse on top of it. This is the one time that being an astronomy department visiting scholars coordinator and a public outreach coordinator is the perfect storm of TOO MUCH. But I do expect to be able to keep up with the monthly round-ups and the Picture of the Week (with the possible exception of the weekend before the solar eclipse on April 8). Who knows, once that is all finished, maybe I’ll even get back to doing some news posts again one of these days!

Also, it seems that Amazon is going to stop offering the method I use to make links to individual books with cover images, so I might have to investigate some other options or change how I do these posts in the future. It’s also quite likely that all of my old book links will break soon, so that’s fun… I guess I can add it to the list of things that need to be fixed, alongside things that broke when my webhost migrated to new servers last year. Apparently they announced these changes a month ago, but I only just now discovered it when I went to do this month’s post, so I must have missed an email. (Which is weird considering I’m still getting a bunch of their other messages about another feature that they are retiring, even though I’ve never used it.)

Anyway, enough complaining… on to this month’s round-up!

Books

Kind of a light round-up to start 2024, but there are a number of things coming in future months that I’m looking forward to!

I have a couple of books that have already been released in the UK that will be out in the US this month. First up, How to Survive in Tudor England by Toni Mount, which was released in the UK in the fall and will be out at the end of January in the US:

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

And the exhibition catalog for Holbein at the Tudor Court will be out on January 12 in the US after an earlier release in the UK:

Purchase at Amazon UK

Purchase at Amazon US

Continuing Exhibitions

Holbein at the Tudor Court opened at The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace on November 10, 2023 and will run through April 23, 2024.

Welcome to the final month of 2023! When we were suffering through that horrible summer I never thought we’d get to the cooler months of the year.

Books

This month we’ve got a few books that have be previously been released in the UK that will be out this month in the US.

First up is Gareth Russell’s The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court, which was released in the UK in the summer and will be out on December 5 in the US:

Next up is The Great Survivor at the Tudor Court: The Life and Times of Lord William Paget (US title) by Alex Anglesey, 8th Marquess of Anglesey, which will be released on December 12 in the US after an October release in the UK.

And one that I missed last month (even though I posted about the exhibit that it’s part of!) is the book Holbein at the Tudor Court, a companion to the exhibition currently on at Buckingham Palace. This one is on my wish list since there’s no way I’ll make it over to see the exhibit itself. It was released in early November in the UK and will be out in January in the US.

And finally, another one that I missed last month that was released at the end of November in both the UK and US, but is still quite seasonally appropriate – Christmas With The Tudors by James Taffe:

That’s it for books in December since I don’t have any new releases for this month on my tracking sheet. (Say it with me…. ‘that probably means I’m missing some books!’)

Continuing Exhibitions

Holbein at the Tudor Court opened at The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace on November 10, 2023 and will run through April 23, 2024.

It finally feels like autumn here in central Texas now, which makes me very, very happy. 🙂

Books

One book that I missed a couple of months ago was Crime and Punishment in Tudor England: From Alchemists to Zealots by April Taylor and it is now out in both the UK and US:

And How to Dress Like a Tudor Hardcover by Judith Arnopp is another book that was already out in the UK that may be coming out in November in the US… I have two different dates, but since I don’t have much for November I thought I’d go ahead and post it this month.

Continuing a trend… How to Survive in Tudor England by Toni Mount was released at the end of October in the UK, but I missed it since there wasn’t a release date noted when I was looking it up for last month’s book round-up. It will be out at the end of December in the US.

New Exhibition

Holbein at the Tudor Court opens at The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace on November 10, 2023 and will run through April 23, 2024.

About the exhibition from the website:

Explore the art of the image-maker of the Tudor court in this exciting new exhibition.

Hans Holbein was one of the most talented artists of the 16th century.  From his arrival in England in search of work he rose to royal favour, chosen to paint the portraits of Henry VIII, his family and leading figures, among them Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More. By his death, Holbein’s work was as admired by his contemporaries as it is today. His portraits inspired the next generation of artists in their depictions of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

This exhibition showcases one of the most important surviving collections of his work, and includes drawings, paintings, miniatures and book illustrations. Celebrating Holbein’s artistic skill, it explores the career of the artist and the lives of those who commissioned portraits from him, bringing us face-to-face with some of the most famous people of 16th-century England.

Continuing Exhibitions

Hever Castle has a new exhibition that debuted when it reopened for the year on February 8 – Catherine & Anne: Queens, Rivals, Mothers. Admission to the exhibition is included with tickets to the castle. There is also a companion book available which can also be purchased from the online shop.