Podcast
Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors
Hosted by Heather Teysko · EN
Renaissance England was a bustling and exciting place...new religion! break with rome! wars with Scotland! And France! And Spain! The birth of the modern world! In this weekly podcast I'll explore one aspect of life in 16th century England that will give you a deeper understanding of this most exciting time.
75episodes
Episodes
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Constable of the Tower, Then Its Prisoner: The Wild Life of Eleanor de Clare
1w ago00:25:04Tap to summarizeWant to test the new Tudor Scrolls app? Email me at heather@englandcast.com. She was the granddaughter of a king, married off at thirteen to settle a debt, and somehow ended up as the only woman to ever run the Tower of London. And then, a few months later, she was a prisoner inside the same walls she used to command. But this isn't just one woman's unbelievable life. Eleanor had two sisters, and once you line all three of them up next to each other, you stop seeing bad luck and start seeing a pattern. This is the story of what actually happened to rich women in medieval England, and why the question at the center of Eleanor's life never really went away. Come for the Tower, stay for the part where two different men show up claiming they married her at the same time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →The Forgotten Welfare State: How the Dissolution of Monasteries Devastated the Poor and Sick
2w ago00:20:06Tap to summarizeBefore Henry VIII, if you were sick, old, or starving in England, there was a place you could go. Monasteries ran almshouses, hospitals, free lodging for travelers, even schools for poor kids, all as a normal, unglamorous part of just existing. Then in about a decade, almost all of it was gone. In this episode I dig into the side of the Dissolution of the Monasteries that usually gets skipped over in favor of Henry and Anne Boleyn and the break with Rome, what actually happened to the people who relied on that system, how long it took England to build anything to replace it (spoiler: over sixty years), and why the gap in between is a story worth sitting with. Newsletter sign up link: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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What If Mary Queen of Scots Was Never Executed?
2w ago00:20:18Tap to summarizeMary, Queen of Scots was executed on February 8th, 1587, on the strength of a decoded letter and a forged postscript that Elizabeth's spymaster slipped into her own secret code. But what if that letter never got decoded at all? In this episode I pull that one thread and follow it all the way out. No execution means no closure for Elizabeth, a murkier justification for the Spanish Armada, and a genuinely messier road to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the moment that eventually gives us the United Kingdom as we know it. One coded letter in a beer barrel, and everything after it tips sideways.This is part of my ongoing What If series, where I take real Tudor history and nudge it just slightly off its actual path to see what breaks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The Invention of You: How the Renaissance Discovered the Self
2w ago00:21:59Tap to summarize📬 Free newsletter (Tudor news, vocab, treasures, behind the scenes): https://englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up We talk about the Renaissance as the time people rediscovered the ancient world. But they were also discovering themselves, for the first time. For most of human history, nobody really knew what they looked like. Then a mirror, a chimney, a printing press, and a blank book arrived within about 150 years of each other, and together they invented something brand new: the interior life. The private self. In this episode: Venetian glass mirrors that once cost as much as a naval ship, the rise of private heated rooms, the explosion of diary keeping, and why Hamlet might be the most "online" character in literary history. 🔔 Subscribe for more Tudor and medieval history Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Before Samuel Pepys, There Was This Devon Farmer Buying Velvet Shoes
2w ago00:15:03Tap to summarizeA Devon farmer records buying velvet shoes and 30 gold buttons. A London astrologer hides his affairs in Latin. Shakespeare puts a soliloquy on stage and an audience recognizes something true about themselves. Something was happening in late Tudor England, and it changed how human beings understood their inner lives forever. In this video we trace the invention of the personal diary, from medieval spiritual confession to the first people who just wrote things down because their life felt worth recording. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Body for Body: The People Who Ran the Tower of London
3w ago00:18:21Tap to summarizeDid you know the very first person ever imprisoned in the Tower of London also became the first person to escape from it? He got his guards drunk, abseiled out of a window on a rope smuggled in via a wine barrel, realized the rope was twenty feet too short, dropped anyway, and sailed to Normandy with his elderly mother. And the Constable responsible for him lost the job's hereditary rights immediately. This is the story of the people who ran the Tower of London for nearly a thousand years, from that first catastrophic escape all the way to the Duke of Wellington draining the moat and fuming about tourists. It is a wild ride. Tower Menagerie episode: https://youtu.be/cG1E0LkhzkgNewsletter signup: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The Emperor Who Dropped Mary Tudor For a Better Dowry (And Changed History Forever)
3w ago00:21:14Tap to summarizeIn 1525, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V broke off his engagement to the young Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and married his cousin Isabella of Portugal instead. The reason? Isabella came with a dowry of 900,000 ducats, and Charles needed the money more than he needed the alliance. That one financial decision may have changed everything. In this alternate history, we ask: what if Charles had waited and married Mary? What happens to the English Reformation? To Catherine of Aragon? To Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, and the Spanish Armada? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The Black Tudors History Forgot
3w ago00:23:29Tap to summarize**Note - I gave Cattalena's death date wrong - it's 1625 and I said 1525! So sorry!!! *** When I picture Tudor England, I used to picture... white people. Portraits. Ruffs. Henry VIII being grumpy. And then I read Miranda Kaufmann's book Black Tudors. Because it turns out there were around 200 free Africans living in England during the Tudor period (probably more, but that's what we know for sure). Working, raising families, going to church, getting buried with full rites. And we almost completely forgot about them. In this episode we're looking at the stories of John Blanke, Jacques Francis, Reasonable Blackman, and Cattelena of Almondsbury. And then I want to talk about something that I've been thinking about: scientific racism, the Enlightenment, Darwin, eugenics, and the strange human pattern of taking progress and using it to build a hierarchy. Miranda Kaufmann's Black Tudors: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Tudors-Miranda-Kaufmann-audiobook/dp/B076ZS1K75/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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What If Tyndale Had Never Translated the Bible? The Man Who Invented English (and Died For It)
4w ago00:27:16Tap to summarizeWhat if one man had never existed? William Tyndale was a scholar, a fugitive, and a martyr who died in 1536 strangled at the stake for committing what his government considered a capital crime: translating the Bible into English. But in doing it, he accidentally invented a huge chunk of the English language. "The powers that be." "Let there be light." "The salt of the earth." "Eat, drink, and be merry." All Tyndale. The King James Bible is 90% his words. Shakespeare grew up reading him. And Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists of the 20th century, called the Tyndale/King James synthesis timeless. This episode covers the history of the Bible in English before Tyndale, what he actually did and why it was so dangerous, the words and phrases he gave us that we still use today, and the What If: what would English, Shakespeare, the Reformation, and our whole cultural inheritance look like if he had never done it? Also, the comparison of the Beatitudes comes directly from the book Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer where he spoke about the comparison and showed how well they lined up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →Answering the Internet's Most Googled Questions About the Tudors
4w ago00:22:45Tap to summarizeDid the Tudors steal the throne? Did they brush their teeth? Did they smell? I typed "did the Tudors" into Google and answered every single autocomplete suggestion with actual history. Some answers are surprising, some are horrifying, and at least one involves people deliberately blackening their teeth to look rich. Tudor history is wild and I love it here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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