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Sir – or Saint – Thomas More (1478–1535) was a man of conscience, a lawyer, statesman, and Renaissance humanist: a man for all seasons.a He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, about the political system of an imaginary, ideal island nation, ruled by reason – in contrast to unruly contemporary European politics. [...]he opposed Henry's separation from the Catholic Church (1532–1534); would not acknowledge Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England and the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon; and, after refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, he was arrested in 1534, convicted of treason and beheaded. Thomas More Studies Conference, 5 November 2005 (thomasmorestudies.org). b ‘Tom o' Bedlam’ was used in early modern Britain to describe beggars and vagrants who had or feigned mental illness.

The sources influencing Shakespeare’s representation of racialized queens continue to shape popular media representations of queenship. In this article, I argue that Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman influenced Shakespeare’s representation of Katherine of Aragon’s idealized whiteness in All is True (Henry VIII). Moreover, I show how Vives and Shakespeare in turn influence Starz’s 2019 The Spanish Princess. Firstly, I how Vives represents the domestic space of the royal household a form of racial enclosure intended to manage the paradoxical confluence of the queen’s biological reproductivity and the social circulation of her image. Katherine’s patronage of Vives demonstrates her agency in cultivating her cult of queenship through gendered and racially charged notions of kinship, conduct, and labor. These tropes elevate the racial purity of the queen through and at the expense of lower class and enslaved peoples whose work is often rendered invisible. I also argue that Vives and Shakespeare’s praise of Katherine’s exemplary kinship, conduct and labor function as compensatory mechanisms that serve to reify Katherine’s whiteness even as her marriage to Henry VIII is failing. While Starz’s The Spanish Princess recasts Katherine of Aragon’s story through the contemporary lens of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, it nevertheless borrows from Shakespeare and Vives’ construction of queenly whiteness at the expense of racial others.

In the annals of English history, the Tudor Dynasty is one of the most captivating eras. Within this dynastic tapestry, few women figures have left as indelible mark as Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of King Henry VIII, and the Virgin Queen---Elizabeth I. One that steps into the sphere of marriage and reproduction, facing the conflict of showing political talent and being the beloved wife of King Henry VIII. The other, a consistent formal dominant of England, remained a virgin throughout her life. Although they had slightly different monarchical roles, they faced similar challenges to the power structure in medieval Tudor. Thus, it is valuable to examine their roles by reconsidering the relations between gender, power, and monarchy. Also, examining how they survive and resist while maximizing their autonomy of power could provide a novel insight into the collaboration of the study of gender history and sociology. This essay attempts historical sociology to scrutinize the role of their queenship in the centre of the patriarchal and monarchical domain of the House of Tudors. There is a notable surge in applying Michel Foucault’s approach to theories of power in gender study by feminists. One of the aims of this research is to fill the vacancy of application of Foucault’s theories into medieval history as well. It aims to investigate the category of gender and its symbolism concerning queenship in the historical period. Most importantly, to redefine, reclaim, and re-evaluate the meanings and values of women figures throughout the traditional historiographical pattern of queenship, which the male chronological historians have largely created at the time. It is found that the two queenships sprouse comprehensive sociological meanings of a parallel considerdation of gender, power and body in such particular political spectrum of monarchial field.

This essay juxtaposes Catherine of Aragon’s self-created reputation during the height of her influence as queen consort (1509–1525) with her representation in literary works written over fifty years after her death. I consider how Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII, and Richard Johnson’s “The Story of Ill May-Day” preserve Catherine’s reputation for being Henry VIII’s pious, loyal, deferential wife and an intercessor for English citizens; yet these later authors are far less faithful to Catherine’s measured tone, unsubordinated syntax, and familiar diction in her writings. Catherine’s fictional avatar, Queen Katherine, speaks, instead, with subordinated syntax, elaborate rhetorical figures, and aggressive language whenever she intercedes for male commoners. The resulting, somewhat contradictory, representation of Queen Katherine speaks to an implicit contract by which later authors perpetuate Catherine of Aragon’s reputation for being a loyal, decorous, maternal queen consort, even as their character, Queen Katherine, engages readers and audience with sensationalist speeches that speak to rhetorical and cultural fantasies in which a queen consort moves beyond the boundaries of decorum to save vulnerable English citizens.

Although we have about seventy extant letters written by Catherine of Aragon—most of them in her hand—there has been virtually no treatment of this queen consort's epistolary voice. This neglect may stem from a scholarly tendency to privilege women letter writers with a reputation for transgression or independence over those, like Catherine, with a reputation for modesty and deference. Such perspectives overlook how Catherine—like many early modern women letter writers—actively and assertively scripted her reputation for modesty and conjugal loyalty. This essay considers how Catherine, over a period of thirty-five years, learned to move from writing expressive and original, but largely ineffective, letters to using the nuanced dialogic possibilities within letter-writing conventions so as to shape constructive epistolary networks. Her ability to skillfully navigate such networks allowed her to enlist powerful male allies whose active interventions forced Henry VIII to delay the annulment of his marriage to Catherine by five years. And Catherine's rhetorical self-presentation as Henry's pious, loyal, deferential wife was so successful that it has dominated our cultural memory for the last five hundred years—despite active efforts by Henry and his allies to portray her as Henry's foreign, treacherous, and illegitimate spouse.

A handful of articles and book chapters have been written on Arthur, and these focus mainly on his education and poems associated with his birth and death. What these studies show is that Arthur embodied, as the product of his parents’ marriage, the joining of the houses of Lancaster and York and the end of the Wars of the Roses. Yet much of the prince’s life remains unknown because as a child he was given his own household in Wales in preparation for his kingship and was not at court where events in which he participated would have been recorded. This essay seeks to expand upon the current histories of Arthur by examining books associated with the first Tudor prince. Like the ceremonials and other royal images propagated by Henry VII to legitimate Arthur’s royalty, books related to Arthur also represented his future sovereignty. It is the purpose of this essay to explore the books related to Arthur, including those with his writing in them, made for him, known to be owned by him, and dedicated to him, to show how they were used to represent his future sovereignty.

According to several distinguished historians Katherine of Aragon could have averted the Henrician reformation by accepting Cardinal Campeggio's suggestion that she take vows of religion and enter a nunnery, thus facilitating her husband's remarriage. Here it is argued that, even if Katherine had agreed, the fulfilment of such a project would pose serious problems. Once he recognised the enormity of what the legate intended, Henry rapidly lost interest: his craving for an undisputed succession could hardly have been satisfied by adding a second potentially contentious papal bull to that which had allowed his first marriage.

New Year's was the most common time for offering gifts to the monarch, and with Anne and Henry's marriage taking place immediately after New Year's of 1540 and being annulled prior to the following New Year, there would have been no celebratory occasion to present Anne with books during her marriage.7 Anne never had the opportunity to develop her patronage of English books, nor was she one who would receive books and pass them to others to spread literacy, learning, and religious doctrine. [...]there is no evidence indicating that books were given to Anne after her marriage, so if any were, they were not recorded or were given to her privately. Diverse orationi was printed in 1561 and 1569; it was also printed with a variant title in 1562, 1575, and 1584-Delle orationi volgarmente scritte da molti huomini illustri de tempi nostril-and as Delle orazioni in 1741.74 In all six editions, Sansovino included Oratione dAnna reina d'Inghilterra, or Anna reina per lo ripudio suo as it was titled in the tabula, finally correctly attributed to Anne of Cleves, even though it was well known by that time that Anne had nothing to do with the text. Besides the title's naming Anne correctly as the wife of Henry, Sansovino added an introductory paragraph for the text and removed all mention of Luxembourg as the actual author of the text, perhaps to give it more authority as having come straight from Anne. [...]in L'oraison et remonstrance, Anne's name was invoked for nearly two centuries as a Continental attempt to belittle Henry's authority and religious changes, publicizing his faults as a husband and ultimately indicating his faults as a monarch. Anne was the perfect queen to write about because she was the only one whose marriage to Henry ended amicably (besides Katherine Parr), and she was his last surviving wife, living until 1557.

While a more accurate appraisal of Mary Tudor’s life and reign is underway, historians of literature continue either to ignore or to misinterpret surviving representations of Princess Mary. To begin correcting this failure, the article analyzes a complex 1525 verse portrait of Mary, setting that text within its contemporary political contexts. Analysis of William Newman’s unpublished manuscript poem, “My ladie princesse doughter to king harry the VIII,” recovers an intriguing characterization of the first Tudor princess in the period immediately prior to Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and frustrates attempts to understand the first Tudor queen as a lifelong loser destined to failure by her own limited abilities. Newman’s long poem represents the princess as uniquely qualified and admirably prepared to rule England as Henry’s heir.