Tudor Ladies-in-Waiting

How did a woman rise to power, and keep it, in the fiercely male-dominated Habsburg Empire?From her distrust of the Enlightenment to her religious intolerance, and from family strategy to imperial power, Maria Theresa was a remarkable ruler driven by discipline, faith, dynastic a ...  Show more

How did England’s earliest travellers to India try to win favour in a Mughal golden age that scarcely noticed them?Professor Suzannah Lipscomb speaks with Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami about Tudor and early Stuart England’s turn to global trade after Elizabeth I’s break with Catholic Europ ...  Show more

We've been fascinated by royalty for hundreds of years, but what do we know about their sex lives? Quite a lot, it turns out.

Today we're revisiting an episode Kate recorded with bestselling author Eleanor Herman to find out about what it took to not just be a mistre ...

The Tudor era is all about the women. Once you get past Henry VIII and his six wives, three successive Queens got a chance to warm the throne of England. But being a Queen in a man’s world wasn’t easy. Unfortunately these reigning women were pitched against each other in deadly s ...  Show more

The Tudor era is all about the women. Once you get past Henry VIII and his six wives, three successive Queens got a chance to warm the throne of England. But being a Queen in a man’s world wasn’t easy. Unfortunately these reigning women were pitched against each other in deadly s ...  Show more

Throughout history, it's mostly been queer men who were persecuted under the historical sodomy laws, but the Tudor period saw a spike in women being tried under it.

Why was this? And why was it mostly happening in what is modern day Belgium and Netherlands?