Tudor England's Foreign Queens

Not Just the Tudors

Not Just the Tudors’ special month-long look at Queenship continues with an exploration of the popular perception of those foreign Queens who came to England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Catherine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves, Anne of Denmark, Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza have all become part of our national fabric, and yet when they arrived on English shores to be wed, they were very much foreigners. The strong sense of difference that surrounded them even featured in the plays that were written and performed for the thriving theatre culture of the time.

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Mira 'Assaf Kafantaris, a specialist in early modern literature, about the works of literature that explored ideas of queenship and cultural mixing, which proliferated from the late 1500s onwards.

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