This year, I’m not offering my old faithfuls, the Six Wives of Henry VIII and the Life & Times of Elizabeth I. I’ve had great fun teaching them over the last few years but felt that I, and potential students, needed a change. Instead of the biographical Tudor courses, I’m offering a more historical one: The Tudors. This course amalgamates elements of both the older courses but is focused much more on the historical factors such as religious change and cultural life. It starts on 27th September and runs for 10 weeks, 6.30-8.30pm on Mondays.

In January, I’m teaching my favourite course again: Harlots, Harpies & Harridans! I’m delighted it’s back on the programme as it was great fun to teach last time round. It’ll be on Monday evenings at the same time as The Tudors was. It will cover lots of the women that I talk about on this blog and more besides.

As well as teaching, I have some learning planned for this coming year too. I have exam results on Wednesday morning for a professional qualification. If I have passed (and I desperately hope I have!) I will be finished that for good and focussing on history, writing and bookbinding properly again. Therefore, I’ve lined up a couple of things:

Starting in about 3 weeks, I’ll be attending Glasgow Met’s bookbinding course. I went to their introductory course in the third term (April-July) and really enjoyed it. This course is at a higher level and carries some SQA credits (which means if I pass, I think I can claim to be a qualified bookbinder!). Glasgow Met has the most amazing bookbinding department with all sorts of fantastic equipment. It’s a huge shame they are no longer offering the HNC in bookbinding since there’s obviously demand: their evening bookbinding courses are regularly sold out and have waiting lists. Perhaps they’ll change their mind?

In April, I’m going to an Open Studies course as a student. I’ve booked my place on a fiction course as I’ve been doing some work on, and getting rather excited about, a novel I’ve been brewing for a year or two but made little progress on. My writerly ambitions very much lie in non-fiction but this idea has been taking shape and it’s at the stage that I really want to read it so I figured it may be about time I wrote it. I am fairly sure that even if I finish it, only a handful of my closest friends will be subjected to reading it. It’s set in Renaissance France (but you guessed that) so even the research is fun.

I’m teaching 2 courses this year:

The Tudors (replacing my Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I courses). This is more history-based compared to the others which are largely biographical. I’m looking forward to it.

More excitingly though, my Infamous Women course is running again. This was huge fun to teach a couple of years ago and I’m thrilled it’s on again in January.

Lucrezia Borgia

Henri 4 charts the life of Henri IV of France from 1563, his childhood in Pau, to his death in 1610. It’s a big life to fit into two and a half hours and as a result some parts feel rushed. Despite having a decent grounding in the history of the time and Henri’s life, I sometimes found it difficult to get a sense of time passing. The four years he spent effectively imprisoned in the Louvre after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre seemed like a few days.

The film itself will unavoidably be compared to Patrice Chéreau’s fabulous La Reine Margot (1994) which covers much of the same historical territory. Indeed, there are a few scenes in Baier’s film which are clearly heavily influenced by Chéreau. However, Henri IV is not a film about the massacre, or a love story as Chéreau’s film is. Margot, Catherine de’ Medici and the court itself are relegated to the background so that Henri can take his place centre stage.

Henri himself is well cast with Frenchman Julien Boisselier in the role. Boisselier does a fantastic job of capturing the spirit of Henri and his willingness to engage with all his subjects rather than living solely in the bubble of the court. He is charming, witty and hugely entertaining.

Margot, on the other hand, is rather two-dimensional: she spends almost all her scenes either being beaten or threatened by her family, or having sex. That is pretty much it. The character struck me as being a (rather unimaginative) man’s idea of the embodiment of sexy. Her eye make-up was heavy khol, dramatically streaming down her face at points. The addition of fingerless gloves and she would not have looked out of place in a sub-par goth music video. I was disappointed in Baier’s Margot- she lacked any of the depth of Isabelle Adjani in Chéreau’s film which was a real shame. Catherine de’ Medici was not quite so bad, though I still vastly prefer Virna Lisi’s tour de force which won her the Best Actress award at Cannes. It was a hard act to follow.

Henri’s women are not all Margots though. Gabrielle d’Estrées, his long term mistress, is portrayed with a quiet determination and intelligence (and no gratuitous eye-liner). It would have been nice to see a little more of her character development but what we do get is almost enough to redeem the Playboy version of Margot.

Henri 4 is, however, more historically accurate than La Reine Margot. While the latter was based on the nineteenth century novel by Dumas, the former is based on the post-war novels of Heinrich Mann who, according to Baier, wrote them after he had fled Nazi Germany because he felt that Henri IV was the opposite of Hitler- a leader who strove for peace, toleration and improved living conditions for his people. Indeed, there is a lovely scene in the film where a poor woman offers the king some chicken stew, reflecting his statement that all Frenchmen should be able to have “une poule dans son pot” (a chicken in his pot) at least once a week.

The film was produced on a shoe-string budget. As Baier put it in the Q&A, it was a high budget for Germany, but not high for anywhere else. This shows occasionally- Paris is clearly an indoor set- but only occasionally. The battle scenes in particular are remarkable. The actors had cameras attached to them during filming and the impact is far more realistic, gruesome fighting that the dainty set pieces which are far easier to produce. Baier said that wanted to show his audience how terrible such fighting was: he has succeeded.

Baier, who was an interesting speaker with fantastic English, said that his film was about being human in an inhuman time and how things have perhaps not evolved as much as we like to think they have since then. His vision of sixteenth century France is gloriously and grimly accurate and he resists the temptation to labour the analogy to contemporary religious conflict, treating it with a a sufficiently light hand to make the point, and no more. The film is all the stronger for the lack of lecture.

If you are lucky enough to get the chance to see this in a cinema, take it. It’s worth it for the battle scenes alone. I will be getting a copy on dvd as soon as I possibly can.

Aside from that, I am planning another trip to the Tower. I will sit through the Yeoman Warden’s iffy history once again in order to do my little pilgrimage to the graves of Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey. I wish you could spend a little time there alone but sadly not.

I am also planning a trip to the National Gallery to see the Delaroche exhibition which centres on his spectacular Execution of Lady Jane Grey.

Since I will be in the vicinity, I might pay a visit to Kensington Palace as I have never been before and the Enchanted Palace exhibition looks fun.

Then, when I get back to Edinburgh, Stranger Than Fiction, our new non-fiction writers’ group has its first meeting on the 474th anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s execution. I am hoping this proves to be a good omen! Art for the site and posters is by my co-organiser Sharon- more of her work at her blog, The Sapient Pig.

In other news- big website revamp is being planned.

There have been numerous new books published in the last few years about the Tudors, Anne Boleyn in particular. With the popularity of the US t.v. show, a lot of authors seem to have leapt on the bandwagon and churned out a biography, few saying anything that hasn’t been said before (and better). Many of them have dug out old myths, discredited for years by more able historians, and regurgitated them for audiences who don’t know the field well enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Some make grand, if misleading, promises to break new ground on the subject (for example, Alison Weir’s recent The Lady In The Tower may well be the first book focused solely on Anne Boleyn’s downfall; it is not, however, the first book to tackle it, or by far the best).

Bernard’s book is different. For one thing, the man’s actually studied history (which puts him in a minority for historical biographers, your history graduate author grumbles). For another, he’s genuinely got something controversial to say.

Bernard is unique among Anne’s recent biographers (the good and the less so) because not only does he claim that it was Henry, not Anne, who insisted on their long celibacy, but that the charges of adultery she faced in 1536 were not a vicious fabrication, the result of court faction, but were, at least in part, true.

He has written about this in the past, though in less detail. Part of his theory, as I understand it, relies on his interpretation of remarks in Henry’s love letters to Anne. Bernard believes that a line in which Henry tells his love that he hopes to soon be her lover physically as well as emotionally (I paraphrase) indicates that it is he who has decreed that there will be no premarital sex between the two of them and that this line is intended to pacify (the insatiable?) Anne with a promise that his injunction will soon be lifted.

To me this reads more as a frustrated lover trying to wheedle and persuade his mistress that their marriage is all but a done deal so what harm could there be to granting him those final favours?

Bernard suggests that Henry’s uncharacteristic moderation is due to his determination that his children with Anne will be of definite legitimacy and so refuses to sleep with her in order to avoid any inconvenient illegitimate pregnancies wrecking his plans. I’d almost buy this if Henry hadn’t made some provisions for their illegitimate children when he promoted Anne to Marquess of Pemboke: in the letters patent, it is stated that Anne’s children will inherit the lands and title but the clause “lawfully begotten” is notable by its absence. By 1532 he is considering the possibility that he may not have “lawfully begotten,” that is legitimate, children with her.

I haven’t delved into Bernard’s new book yet so have summarised his arguments in his book The King’s Reformation. He will have to come up with some pretty good evidence to convince me of his claims as Eric Ives has done a thorough job of demonstrating the improbability of Anne’s guilt. I will certainly be posting about this when I can get stuck into this book. It’s the first Anne Boleyn book I’ve looked forward to for a long time.

Book 1 for the Short Oxford Histories project arrived today. It was a welcome distraction from the horrible weather (pouring rain and snow in Scotland at the moment), leaking roof and the cold that has overstayed its welcome.

I’m excited about starting and now wondering if I should stick to my arbitrary starting date of Thursday or take advantage of some train travel I’ll be undertaking for work tomorrow and the couple of hours of good reading time it will provide. Perhaps 31st March is a more auspicious start date than 1st April anyway.

really want to go through and refresh my knowledge of all the history I did at uni. This means the Dark Age of Greece to the 1950s. I have, therefore, made a plan to achieve this by reading all the relevant Short Oxford Histories: SOH of Europe, the British Isles, France and Italy. I’ve now got a list of 33 books. There’s a series on Germany too but I’m leaving that one for the time being- Italy on got in by virtue of it being so important for the Renaissance and thus the Early Modern period.

I was thinking of adding in another few non-SOH as I go, like the one above; Alexander the Great by the same author as I love Alexander the Great; Caesar: Life of A Colossus, maybe Antony and Cleopatra by the same author if Caesar is any good; and possibly a good biography of Augustus. However, I think that will distract more than anything so I might not put them on the “official” list.

The SOHs list:

1. Classical Greece 500-323 BCE, Robin Osborne
2. Roman Europe 1000BC- AD 400, Edward Bispham
3. The Roman Era: The British Isles: 55 BC – AD 410, Peter Salway (BI)
4. After Rome: C.400-c.800, Thomas Charles-Edwards (BI)
5. The Early Middle Ages 400-1000 AD, Rosamond McKitterick
6. Italy in the Early Middle Ages: 476-1000, Cristina La Rocca (It)
7. From the Vikings to the Normans, Wendy Davies (BI)
8. France in the Central Middle Ages 900-1200, Marcus Bull (Fr)
9. The Central Middle Ages 950-1320, Daniel Power
10. Italy in the Central Middle Ages, David Abulafia (It)
11. The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: 1066- c. 1280, Barbara Harvey (BI)
12. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, Ralph Griffiths (BI)
13. France in the Later Middle Ages 1200-1500, David Potter (Fr)
14. Italy in the Age of the Renaissance: 1300-1550, John M. Najemy (It)
15. The Sixteenth Century, Euan Cameron
16. The Sixteenth Century: 1485-1603, Patrick Collinson (BI)
17. Renaissance and Reformation France: 1500-1648, Mack P. Holt (Fr)
18. Early Modern Italy: 1550-1796, John A. Marino (It)
19. The Seventeenth Century: Europe 1598-1715, Joseph Bergin
20. The Seventeenth Century: 1603-1688,Jenny Wormald (BI)
21. Old Regime France 1648-1788, William Doyle (Fr)
22. The Eighteenth Century: 1688-1815, Paul Langford (BI)
23. The Eighteenth Century: Europe 1688-1815, T. C. W. Blanning
24. Revolutionary France: 1788-1880, Malcolm Crook (Fr)
25. The Nineteenth Century: Europe 1789-1914, T. C. W. Blanning
26. Italy in the Nineteenth Century: 1796-1900, , John A. Davies (It)
27. The Nineteenth Century: The British Isles 1815-1901, Colin Matthew (BI)
28. Europe 1900-1945, Julian Jackson
29. Liberal and Fascist Italy, Adrian Lyttleton
30. The British Isles 1901-1951, Keith Robbins (BI)
31. Modern France: 1880-2002, James McMillan (Fr)
32. Europe Since 1945, Mary Fulbrook
33. The British Isles Since 1945, Kathleen Burk (BI)

NB: BI indicates SOH of the British Isles; Fr = SOH of France; It = SOH of Italy; otherwise SOH of Europe. Bold are titles I already own.

I’m not an especially fast reader but factoring in the fact that I need to keep on with the research for my book, I think 18 months is a reasonably achievable target. 78 weeks means just under 2.5 weeks per SOH book, which is quite doable. The first book has been ordered and is due to arrive by 31st March so I’ll start the project on 1st April (how auspicious).
If anyone feels generous (and it is my birthday in a few weeks), I’ve set up an Amazon Wishlist for all the titles as yet unpurchased here, with the date I’m due to start reading each title.

Despite intending to blog about this, I somehow suspect that unlike Belle du Jour, Julie Powell et al, I will not come home at any point to find 65 messages on the answering machine from literary agents and publishers desperate to see this project made into books and films. Lack of imagination, I call it.

I’ll blog any wicked women finds from the books and anything else that it particularly relevant or interesting as well as general things that arise from a project like this. Before I even start, there are a couple of things that spring to mind, in particular Spartan marriage practices, which I hope the first book covers.

]]> http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=67 0 http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=60 http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=60#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:44:18 +0000 Gillian http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=60 I often say that one of the reasons I feel so passionately about this project is that modern girls and young women lack good heroines. Cheryl Cole seems like a perfectly pleasant woman but is she really the best we can aspire to? A reality t.v. show pop start, married (though apparently not for much longer) to an unfaithful footballer. Is getting on the cover of a gossip magazine really the pinnacle of human achievement?

When I was about ten years old, I went through a phase of being rather obsessed with Joan of Arc. (Looking back, I accept I was probably something of an odd child.) I admired her bravery, her faith and her determination. I accepted, not without relief, that life was almost certainly not going to offer me the opportunity to lead an army against invading foreigners. I didn’t believe in her god but even at that age found other people’s faith fascinating (I went on to study religion, along with history, at university). I may not have exactly wanted to be like Joan of Arc, but I aspired to many of the qualities I saw in her.



Joan of Arc, c.1450-1500

Now I’m older and have a more nuanced view of what makes a person admirable, I see many of the infamous women I’m investigating as being brimful of the qualities I aspire to. No, these women weren’t always “good.” More often than not they refused to toe the line; frequently failed to do their wifely duties and often disregarded contemporary standards of acceptable behaviour, it’s true. Their faults, even including criminality, serve to make them more interesting people (Cheryl Cole’s conviction for common assault notwithstanding.)

Cleopatra refused to be a victim, even in defeat. Eleanor of Aquitaine sought out her own path through life, refusing to bow to other people’s demands. Anne Boleyn was offered a good opportunity, saw a way to make it great and took it, on her own terms. Catherine de’ Medicis was ruthless in the defence of her family. Anne Bonny and Mary Read both found escape from unsatisfying lives for the excitement and adventure of a life on the high seas.

I can’t help but think that those qualities are worth more than fame, wealth and great hair.

]]> http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=60 0 http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=48 http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=48#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:01:57 +0000 Gillian http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=48 I have been irritated by the sizeable gap in my list of infamous women. From the early Roman Empire (Messalina and Agrippina) there is a huge lacuna, in which Empress Wu floats about friendless, until Empress Matilda in the twelfth century. I couldn’t believe that the thousand between Nero’s mother and Saint Margaret’s granddaughter had produced only one woman whose reputation had been rendered into tatters by angry male historians.

I happened upon my most recent discovery’s name on a generally unremarkable blog. Our sources for her are limited and the information on the blog was brief and passing. Wikipedia, notoriously fallible but often a good first stopping point for the bibliography if nothing else, produced little more other than the name of her only major historian. In a happy coincidence, I found a copy of it in a second hand shop a short while later.

Gregory of Tours wrote his History of the Franks in the sixth century. A churchman (later canonised), he is far from an objective source. Indeed, for centuries there was no notion of objectivity in history. Gregory focused much of his attention on Chilperic I and his nefarious activities (though written safely after the former’s demise at the hand of an assassin). However, Gregory couldn’t resist sharing some of the stories of Chilperic’s wicked wife, Fredegund.

Fredegund was born into a poor family and started her career as a servant. Catching Chilperic’s attention, she became his mistress and watched as her lover made other women his queens. His first wife, Audovera, he tired of and sent to a convent. He then married Galswintha whom, Gregory tells us, he loved dearly because she brought great treasures as her dowry. What a top chap, indeed. Galswintha was noble by birth and did not take kindly to her husband’s public affair with a servant and begged him to allow her to return to her father, the king of Hispania, and offering to leave behind all the valuables she had come with. Chilperic soothed her with kind words, and then had one of his servants strangle her in her bed.

With the path clear, Chilperic married Fredegund. She was as ruthless and ambitious as her husband and Gregory paints a picture of perfect female cruelty. Not only did she send assassins after her husbands half-brothers and rivals but she abandoned her own young son when he was ill, bewitched slaves into murdering their master and attempted to murder her own daughter in a fit of rage.

With only Gregory of Tours as a major source for her life, she remains a shadowy figure. The accusations are levied against her with no means of testing their veracity. She is certainly a person I will be doing more research on but one I am not sure I will be able to find much more about, or at least, not much that is more concrete than Gregory of Tours’ gossip.

As with so many of the women here, we are faced with the quandary of whether or not we believe anyone capable of such crimes, and why we have more trouble believing a woman capable of them.

]]> http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=48 0 http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=22 http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=22#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:55:27 +0000 Gillian http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/?p=22

Lady in Her Bath by Francois Clouet, 1570

This portrait by François Clouet (son of François Ier’s court painter, Jean Clouet) is housed in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA. Painted in 1570 or 1571, it was thought to depict Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II. This is mainly due to the painting being dated 1550, during Henri’s reign. In 1550, Diane was at the height of her power. Though Henri had other mistresses, her position was unassailable. The king always returned to her, his other dalliances quickly forgotten.

However, Diane died in 1566 and the later dating of the painting would suggest that she is not the subject. In 1570, the second of Henri’s three sons who would rule France was on the throne. François II, his eldest son had ruled for two and a half years before succumbing to an ear infection. In 1560, Charles-Maximillien acceded to the throne of France as Charles IX. It has therefore been suggested that the sitter for this portrait was the mistress of Charles.

Charles became king at ten years old and until his majority was declared in August 1563, Catherine de’ Medici, his mother, ruled as regent. On reaching his majority, the king and Queen Mother embarked upon a tour of France in order to show the king to his people. It is thought that the young king met his mistress on the return journey of that tour. This would place their meeting in the spring of 1565 when Charles was 15.



Marie Touchet

The court stopped at Blois in the Loire Valley and it was there or in nearby Orléans that Charles met Marie Touchet. Marie was the daughter of an Orléannais magistrate and became his lifelong mistress. Reports of Marie at court are universally sympathetic. They describe a beautiful young girl, with blonde hair and white shoulders. She was artless and held no personal ambition and was therefore accepted and indeed supported by the Queen Mother who saw in her no threat to her own hold over the king.

Charles married in 1570. He was dutiful and affectionate to his wife, Elizabeth of Austria but remained devoted to his mistress, with whom he had a son. Clouet also painted Elizabeth and this portrait is considered one of his finest. Elizabeth was said to be distraught when Charles died at only 23 years old. The couple had a daughter who did not long survive her father. Marie and her bastard, though, fared better. She married some years after Charles’s death and had two daughters, dying in Paris in 1638, almost 90 years old. Their son, also called Charles, became duc d’Angoulême and after being pardoned for his involvement in various conspiracies against HenriIV, died in 1650 aged 77.




Elizabeth of Austria by Francois Clouet

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