The Queen's Post: The Form, Function, and Power of Early Tudor Queens' Correspondence

Project Information

THEQUEENSPOST

Grant agreement ID: 101064348

DOI

10.3030/101064348

Project closed

EC signature date 6 July 2022

Start date 3 October 2022

End date 2 October 2024

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 199 694,40

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - THEQUEENSPOST (The Queen's Post: The Form, Function, and Power of Early Tudor Queens' Correspondence)

Reporting period: 2022-10-03 to 2024-10-02

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

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.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

This project has provided the first macro-analysis of all extant correspondence of nine early Tudor queens. To do so, I have searched archival catalogues and created a database of all surviving letters for nine early Tudor queens, written in the vernacular languages of English and Scots. This database is the first of its kind and provides an important resource for scholars wishing to locate and investigate the letters of these nine early Tudor queens. This database will be published as an appendix to a future Open Access article.

The second main achievement of this project has been the development of a corpus of early Tudor queens’ correspondence. I have located, transcribed, and analysed the material form of the correspondence of eight early Tudor queens. These letters have been transcribed diplomatically (preserving the original spelling, deletions, additions, lineation, and abbreviations) to create a digital corpus (a digital collection of texts used for linguistic analysis). Visits to six archives in the United Kingdom were arranged to verify the letter transcriptions, and to conduct an analysis of the material features of the extant correspondence.

Another main achievement of this project has been to examine the linguistic and material strategies employed by early Tudor queens to exert royal power and persuasion in their correspondence. I have achieved this using an interdisciplinary methodology, using methods from linguistics, archival studies, material culture, and the digital humanities. Through offering the first large-scale analysis of early Tudor queens’ correspondence, I have developed a detailed understanding of the strategies, models, and functions of epistolary communication at work across a network of early Tudor queens (on both a macro- and micro-level).

The results of this research have thus far been disseminated via three conference papers, two invited talks, and a podcast episode. The publication of two articles, a chapter in an edited collection, a biographical encyclopedia entry, and a forthcoming scholarly edition, have drawn attention to the project and early Tudor queens' correspondence. The organisation of a two-day hybrid symposium at University College Dublin (29-30 May 2024) brought together a range of interdisciplinary scholars to present papers on new directions in the study of epistolary materiality, from antiquity to the present day. This was the first conference of its kind and has stimulated important conversations and collaborations in the study of letter-writing materiality.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Through offering the first large-scale analysis of early Tudor queens’ correspondence, this project has offered a detailed evaluation of the power that early Tudor queens held in politics and diplomacy across Europe in the early modern period. This provides an important corrective to previous studies of early modern politics and diplomacy in which women are often relegated to the footnotes. Instead, this study underscores that royal women played an important and central role in these domains. Such results highlight that in order to gain a full understanding of the nature, agents, and networks of early modern politics and diplomacy, it is essential to include the study of royal women and their correspondence.

This project has also developed the first standalone corpus of early Tudor queens’ correspondence. This dataset will supplement other sociolinguistic datasets in which royal women are underrepresented, helping to address gender imbalances in current corpora and, in turn, facilitating further exploration of women’s voices and sociolinguistic practices of the past. This will be enabled by making the dataset available via the Oxford Text Archive.

Finally, this project has provided the first interdisciplinary analysis of the form, function, and power of early Tudor queens correspondence. The results of this analysis will transform how we understand royal women’s linguistic practice, education, and power in the early modern period, as well as advancing wider understanding of women’s voices and letter-writing practices in the past. The results of this analysis are currently being developed for publication.

Credit: From The British Library archive. Source: Cotton Nero C X fol. 2