Joanne Paul, “Friendship, Kinship and Power: The House of Dudley in the Tudor Period”

Jeudi 1er décembre à 17h

In the Tudor period, power was acquired and maintained through the establishment not just of personal relationships with the monarch, but complex webs of alliances that made a dynasty – a ‘house’ – resilient against monarchical change. Many of these connections were formed with those whom would be thought of, by modern standards, distant family at best, but were decidedly considered ‘kin’ by Tudor standards. Expanding on the neo-revisionist studies of ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ in the early modern period, this talk will focus on the kinship connections formed by members of the Dudley family during the sixteenth century. It will argue that the functioning or failure of affective kinship ties played a significant part in the acquisition or loss of power to the House of Dudley in the Tudor period, drawing particular attention to affectionate male relationships, but also the ways in which the networks established by women were frequently essential to the re-establishment of the position of the family, following a breakdown in male kinship relationships. Drawing on research compiled for a public-history trade book, The House of Dudley, this talk will also experiment with methods of bridging (or eliminating, or exposing the fictionality of) the gap between ‘public’ and ‘academic’ histories.

Dr Joanne Paul is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, working on the intellectual, cultural and political histories of the Tudor and Renaissance periods. The House of Dudley (Penguin: Michael Joseph, 2022) is her third book and first trade book.