THEQUEENSPOST · The Queen's Post: The Form, Function, and Power of Early Tudor Queens' Correspondence
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-10-03 → 2024-10-02
- EU contribution
- €199,694
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The Queen's Post: The Form, Function, and Power of Early Tudor Queens' Correspondence
Across Europe, national archives, state paper collections, and other private manuscript repositories are filled with letters by medieval and early modern queens. These archives reveal that early Tudor queens such as Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England (d.1536) and Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (d.1541), played an active role in important diplomatic and political matters across Europe in the 16th century through the medium of letter-writing. However, to date, such royal women have largely been dismissed in political and diplomatic narratives of the period, and no large-scale study of the properties, purpose, and impact of early Tudor queens' correspondence has ever been undertaken. The Queens Post project has addressed this research gap and provided the first large-scale analysis of the form, function, and power of the letters of nine important queens in the early Tudor period. Using an innovative, interdisciplinary methodology – employing methods from linguistics, literary studies, archival studies, material culture, gender studies, and diplomatic history – this project has examined how early Tudor queens designed their correspondence to exert royal power and persuasion in early modern Europe. This has provided an important reassessment of royal women’s power and influence in early modern politics and diplomacy. In addition, this project has helped to transform how we understand royal women’s linguistic practice, education, and epistolary style, and in turn advance wider understanding of women’s voices and letter-writing practices in the past.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The Queens' Post project provides the first large-scale analysis of the form, function, and power of early Tudor queens' correspondence. This project investigates the letters of nine important early Tudor queens, including the wife of Henry VII (d.1509), Elizabeth of York (d.1603), Henry VII's daughters Margaret Tudor (d. 1541) and Mary Tudor Brandon (d.1533), and the wives of Henry VIII (d.1547): Katherine of Aragon (d. 1536), Anne Boleyn (c.1536), Jane Seymour (d.1537), Katherine Howard (d.1542), Anne of Cleeves (d.1557), and Katherine Parr (d.1548). Using an innovative, interdisciplinary methodology - employing methods from linguistics, literary studies, archival studies, material culture, gender studies, and diplomatic history - The Queens' Post will advance our understanding of the nature and power of royal women's voices and writings of the past, and reconsider the power and position queens held in early modern politics and diplomacy. The results of this project will have distinctive scientific and societal impact which will be disseminated via a range of outputs aimed at both academic and non-academic audiences. This includes a project monograph, an edited collection, a symposia, a podcast, and various other outreach activities. The project will also provide a significant methodological contribution to letter-writing studies, by developing a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary framework of analysis to investigate the language, materiality, and delivery of historical correspondence across a network of writers.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101064348
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e515460d29&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5154612e1&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union