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History of the Women of England

History of the Women of England

By: Natalie Bennett
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A national narrative history, with each episode built around the life of an individual woman.

This is the half of history that many accounts leave out: teachers and traders, artists and entertainers, philanthropists and politicians, soldiers and scientists, mothers, maids and martyrs.

They built the country we have today, yet when we wander around our cities, towns and villages, they seldom appear on the plinths and the plaques.

These women very nearly invisible - although lots of very ordinary men - from unexceptional to outright disasters - find their names up in lights..

This podcast aims to do a little to balance that, aided by the huge advances in women's history in academia in recent decades. Yet rarely do those stories escape the pages of journals and monographs.

There are no queens covered, and only a few aristocrats. This is, so far as is possible, a history of the women of England across the social scale.

Starting in Tudor times, although hoping to go back to "the beginning" one day.

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Natalie Bennett Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Episode 3: Queen Mary's martyrs

    Episode 3: Queen Mary's martyrs
    Sep 21 2020
    At 7am on January 27, 1556, five men and two women were taken from Newgate Prison. They were walked the few hundred metres along Giltspur Street to Smithfield, the old “smooth field” that was used for the great annual St Bartholomew’s Fair, and a regular Friday cattle and horse market.The seven prisoners were tied to four stakes with iron chains, which would hold their bodies upright even when their legs would no longer support them. The stakes were set in a giant pile of lumber and brushwood. More wood was packed around them. They stood then, while a sermon was read. The victims then said their last words. The whole ceremonial preparation had taken two hours.Then the fire was lit; it was the first mass religious martyrdom in London.The two women were Isobel Foster and Joan Warne. Isobel was a matron of about 55, from Carlisle originally. She'd been born comfortably into what was to be called the Catholic fold, and probably lived most of her life there. Joan was a maid of 19, who'd sharply told the Bishop of London how his theology was wrong.Both of them could have saved their lives with a single word.But their bravery - with that of Anne Askew, played a significant part in making England Protestant.The rest, as they say, is history.The castSome of the other women martyrs in this taleAnne Askew, reform martyr and author, from the circle of Catherine Parr, last wife of Henry VIIILollard Joan Broughton, the mother of the wife of a mayor of London, aged over 80 when martyred at Smithfield in 1494Katherine Knight, aged widow, and Alice Snoth, a maid, burned at Canterbury as Queen Mary dying in 1558Cicley Ormes, reformer, martyred at Norwich, 1557Other key charactersQueen Mary, eldest daughter of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII, determined to keep England in the Catholic foldElizabeth, future Queen and daughter of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, NicomedianRose Hickman, 85-year-old autobiographer, reformer and exileElizabeth Crawford,died aged 19 in London in 1617, Catholic recusant denied a burial serviceBook of the WeekThe Emperor's Babe: a novel, by Bernadine Evaristo(Probably the review that led me to buy the book.)Woman of the WeekCamilla Erculiani, 16th-century Italian philosopher and apothecary, author of Letters on Natural Philosophy, which contains a theory about human overconsumption and growth destroying the planet. Not quite Gaia theory, but not far off it. She faced the Inquisition in Rome for it, but didn't suffer a martyr's fate.References and further reading(If you're going to buy one, please use an independent bookseller - Hive is a good one in the UK, not the Great Parasite that is Amazon!)London and the Reformation, Susan Brigden (stunningly brilliant, colourful and original. Where many of the anecdotes outside the main characters are drawn from)Foxe's Book of Martyrs, John FoxeC. Cross, “Great reasoners in scripture: the activities of women Lollards 1380-1530” in D. Baker (ed) Medieval WomenM. Dowling and J. Shakespeare, “Religion and Politics in mid Tudor England through the eyes of an English Protestant Woman: the recollections of Rose Hickman,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Vol LV, No 131, May 1982 E. Macek “The emergence of a feminine spirituality in The Book of Martyrs, Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol XIX, No 1, 1988,Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, M.P. Hannay (ed) Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation, R.M. WarnickeChronicle from Aldgate: Life and Death in Shakespeare’s London, R.G. Forbes,For the women of the week:After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe, Lydia BarnettDaughters of alchemy : women and scientific culture in early modern Italy Meredith K. Ray.(And the New Books Network has interviewed both authors: Lydia Barnett and Meredith Ray) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    50 mins
  • Episode 2: Lady Alice More

    Episode 2: Lady Alice More
    Sep 12 2020

    Born around 1474, during the reign of Henry VII, and married first to a Merchant of the Staple, a traditional and lucrative wool trader, in her second marriage to Sir (later Saint) Thomas More put Lady Alice at the centre of Renaissance learning.


    That wasn't her skill set, but she managed the "school" that Sir Thomas's children and grandchildren attended, dealt with European intellectual star Erasmus (sharply), was a matriarch of the family through its rise and fall.


    The story of her life is also an explanation of how running a prosperous household in these times -- and for much of history - has been a serious professional job. I also look into what that entailed, from people to menagerie management, candlemaking to preserving.


    No one said "just a housewife" in Lady Alice's time, and they certainly would not have said it to her face.


    Book of the Week

    Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Jane Stevenson


    Woman of the Week

    Frenchwoman Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the world (And honoured with a Google home page graphic this year on the 280th anniversary of her birth.)


    This week's main dramatis personae


    Sir (later Saint) Thomas More - Lord High Chancellor to Henry VIII but refused to acknowledge the King as head of the church, which led to his execution, author of Utopia, declared the patron saint of statesmen and politicians in 2000.

    Margaret (Meg) More then Roper - writer and translator, oldest child of Sir Thomas

    Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch philosopher of wide European fame. His most famous work, The Praise of Folly, has been continuously in print since its publication in 1511. Associated with the Reformation, but he generally stayed out of doctrinal issues

    Hans Holbein the Younger - artist, including a portrait of the More family known from several versions


    References and further reading

    (If you're going to buy one, please use an independent bookseller - Hive is a good one in the UK, not the Great Parasite that is Amazon!)


    There's not really a good treatment of Lady Alice's life available.


    Utopia, Thomas More - really a good read

    And I have to mention Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall (fiction), part of her triology covering the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell.


    I also mention in the podcast C.J. Sansom's Shardlake series of historical crime fiction


    Jeanne Baret

    The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, Glynis Ridley

    (Children's book) The Secret of Jeanne Baret, Helen Strahinich

    Le travesti de l'etoile, Jeanne Baret, premiere femme a avoir fait le tour du monde, Verneret Hubert


    Japanese women

    Have to mention The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon, a wonderful diary/memoir detailing 11th-century court life. Just because I love it. Wonderfully acid wit; probably a nightmare of a character in real life.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    48 mins
  • Episode 1: Introduction

    Episode 1: Introduction
    Sep 6 2020
    Welcome to the first episode of the History of the Women of England, HOWE for short.Each podcast after this first will be a "life" of a women, her friends, relatives, rivals and colleagues, building up a picture of women's lives through the ages, starting in early modern times, although I'm hoping to cycle back to "the beginning" one day..But this is an introductory episode: I explain my motivation and approach, which is largely picking up the high volumes of research into women's history that sits in academia and seeking to make it more available.It's an explicitly feminist project - women are half of history, but in most accounts they have only bit parts. But it isn't - particularly - connected to my other life as a Green Party member of the House of Lords (although I may be unable to resist the occasional topical reference).This is, in some way, giving those women immortality, a chance to live on again in human memory. And offering models and ideas for the women of today, reassurance that women have ignored social restraints, busted through social norms, and led exciting, productive, transgressive lives in even the most apparently unpromising times.Each episode will also include two ventures outside English history.Book of the WeekIn this episode it is Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century by Jane Stevenson.Woman of the WeekIn this episode: Sarolt, Queen of the MagyarsThis week's dramatis personaeAemelia Lanyer - 16th-century poet (and author of my choice of poem about the countryside in 2015)Amy Kleeman and Myrtle Jenkyn - from 20th-century Australia, child on a Murray river paddleboat and farmer and housewife at Boree CreekGeorge Ballard, 18th-century author of Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain: Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writings Or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and SciencesGerda Lerner - pioneering 20th-century feminist historianGiovanni Boccaccio - 14th-century author of On Famous Women.Isabella Whitney - Elizabethan-era poet, was an inspiration for the project and subject of a future episodeMary Lady Broughton - 17th-century Keeper of the Gatehouse Prison in LondonMary Sidney - sometimes proposed as the "real Shakespeare", which I don't believe for a second, but an important writer in her own rightReferences and further reading(If you're going to buy one, please use an independent bookseller - Hive is a good one in the UK, not the Great Parasite that is Amazon!)The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England, Pamela Joseph Benson, 1992.The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, Norma Clarke, 2004.The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, Richard Fletcher, 1997New York Times Review of the Folger Shakespeare's Sister exhibitionAnd Our Foremothers: My Hopes as a Biographer, Journalist, and Blogger, by yours truly in the Third Space journal.Podcasts referencedHistory of EnglandHistory of RomeHistory of ByzantiumByzantium and Friends Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    32 mins
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