Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
In March 1527 Henry VIII and his wife Catherine of Aragon visited Cardinal Wolsey’s new foundation – Cardinal’s College – in Oxford. John Taverner, one of the most famous composers of his time, was commissioned to write an appropriately stunning piece of choral music that would wow the King and his Queen. Taverner turned out…
Mary Tudor (aka Mary I, aka Bloody Mary) is the Person of the Month over on the Tudor Times website. I did a podcast episode on her about a year and a half ago, and I wanted to revisit this much-maligned woman. So here, for your reading pleasure – some random facts about Mary I that…
A few weeks ago I was reading a book in the bathtub. This isn’t a new occurrence. Reading in the bathtub is one of my favorite luxuries. What happened during that particular bath, though, was kind of a big deal. I’ve been ruminating for a while on different projects I could start – because writing…
It’s been just over 20 years since I first became hooked on early English choral music through singing Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus in my high school chamber choir. I talk about that piece a lot – it sums up for me this struggle of humanity; how much do you conform vs being true to yourself. Byrd…
I’ve been on a bit of a Boat Craze over on the Renaissance English History Podcast for the past few months. I did an episode on the Rise of the Tudor Navy, the Iron Industry of the Weald (which helped propel the navy forward with the blast iron furnace that made artillery so much cheaper),…
One of the things I love about history is how the past keeps coming back to us. Hildegard of Bingen was a medieval German abbess who lived about 900 years ago. She was given to the church as a young girl, and rose to become a woman who ran a convent and negotiated with the Pope….
If you were looking for the hippest place to be in 11th century Europe, you wouldn’t go to Paris. Or London, which was an outpost badgered by centuries of Viking invasions, and was about to be conquered by the Normans. You wouldn’t go to Berlin, or Florence, or even Rome. Or Athens. Nope, if you…
For the past 8-ish months I’ve been on a Writing and Publishing Journey where I’ve been taking all the things I’ve seen in my time in LibraryLand, am mixing it with courses I’ve been doing on my own (like Tribe Writers from Jeff Goins) and am coming up with the unique Heather Self Publishing Experience….
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again – I find the best music via the Millennium of Music show, which is on both Sirius and NPR. I have a membership and can listen to old episodes (it’s the best $2.99/month I spend) and I was perusing episodes from a year ago, and…
This week I’ve been re-reading Alison Weir’s The Lost Tudor Princess, Alison Weir’s book about Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII’s niece via his sister Margaret, who married the King of Scotland. When her husband died, she married again for love, and had Margaret, who, because she was born on English soil became a legitimate heir of the perpetually…