Eight Tudor historians. Two hours. Nothing to pay.
Every October a few hundred Tudor obsessives get together for three days of talks, music, feasting, and arguing about whether Anne Boleyn was guilty. Most people have never heard of it.
So this year I asked eight of our speakers to record a piece of their talk and let me give it away.
What’s actually in it
I’m not going to pretend I picked these at random. These are the ones where I read the proposal and thought “wait, WHAT.”
David Dishner on what actually happened to Henry VIII
Everyone reaches straight for the 1536 jousting fall. David puts five competing explanations on the table instead: genetic disease, hormones, psychiatric illness, childhood trauma, and repeated head injury. Then he asks the harder question, which is which of them actually explains the timing. He also brings ballistic gel to demonstrate the real forces involved in that fall, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a Tudor talk.
Tiffany Brown Hernandez on Dr. John Dee
Elizabeth’s astrologer, her alchemist, her code writer, and the man Ian Fleming borrowed 007 from. Tiffany describes herself as a John Dee nutter and runs a project called “99 Neat Things About Dee.” By the end you’ll be personally offended that he isn’t a household name.
Sarah Dell on Mary I's inquisition
Mary Tudor set up her own inquisition, borrowing a lot of the method and the questioning from the Spanish one that had already been running for centuries. Hers hit a wall of resistance and died when she did. Sarah wrote her thesis on why, and the answer turns out to be about legal machinery rather than the thing you would expect.
Emily K. Michael on the English language
If you turned up at the Tudor court tomorrow, could you actually understand anybody? Emily follows English from the Germanic grunt of Beowulf to Shakespeare, and shows you where German, French, and Latin left their fingerprints on words you used this morning.
Janet Wertman
Details coming soon.
Barbara Barnett on the Child Ballads
Before anyone wrote them down these were living songs moving between the court and the tavern, and they are almost entirely about murder, betrayal, and the supernatural. Barbara sings them. Then she shows you which British rock bands lifted them wholesale.
Terry Jones, filmed inside Agecroft Hall
Terry has been giving tours at Agecroft since 1978 and reads the jewellery in the portraits the way the rest of us read a text message. Her colleagues offered to film her inside the house, so you get the paintings and the woman who has spent forty-eight years with them in the same shot.
Denise Williams on the Pelican dress
She built Elizabeth I’s Pelican portrait dress by hand. It took her seven years. It’s on display at Agecroft Hall right now, and she’ll tell you what actually goes into making one, down to the blackwork on the chemise.
How the afternoon runs
One video every fifteen minutes, and I’ll be in the chat for all of it. Drop in and out as you like.
You’ve fallen down this hole before
It’s for you if you’ve ever ended up on Wikipedia at 1am reading about the Pilgrimage of Grace. If you’ve watched every documentary and you’re starting to notice they all use the same eight facts. If you have opinions about Mary I that you’ve learned not to share at parties.
It’s especially for you if you’ve never been to anything like this and you’re not sure you’d fit in. That’s the entire reason I’m doing it. Come and see what it’s like before you have to decide anything.
Questions you might have
Is this actually free?
Yes. No ticket, no card, no trial. At the end I’ll tell you about TudorCon in October, and you are completely welcome to ignore me.
Do I have to watch live?
No. Register and you get a private page with all six videos on it, and it stays up. Watching live is more fun because of the chat, but I’m not going to make you.
What if I can only catch part of it?
Also fine. Drop in, drop out. The replay page has everything.
What’s TudorCon?
Three days in Richmond, Virginia every October, at Agecroft Hall and Randolph-Macon College. Talks, live music, feasting, dancing, and a few hundred people who also can’t stop reading about the sixteenth century. There’s a streaming version called TudorCon From Home if Virginia isn’t happening for you. I’ll explain all of it on the 29th.
Who are you?
Heather Teysko. I’ve been making the Renaissance English History Podcast since 2009 because I cannot stop talking about this, and I started TudorCon in 2019 so I’d have somewhere to put it.
Come hang out on the 29th
Saturday 29 August, 1pm Eastern. Eight videos, fifteen minutes apart, and a chat full of people who are as delighted by this as you are. Pop your email in below and I’ll send you the link.
Free, and you can leave the list any time. I’m not going to be weird about it.