Women's Studies Group 1558 – 1837
Women's and gender studies in the early modern period and long eighteenth century
We have an upcoming Zoom seminar on Thursday 6th November, 2025. ZOOM 18:45 FOR 19.00 – 20.00 (GMT).
The papers to be presented are:
Valerie Schutte: Queen Mary I of England and portrait medals in print.
Conor Byrne: Representations of the executions of British Queens in early modern images.
Yihong Zhu: Women at night: readers, writers, pleasure-seekers, and night-walkers in eighteenth-century London.
All members are invited to attend. The Zoom link will be sent via the members list.
WSG Member Organizes July 1st, 2025 Hybrid Conference: “Collective Biographies Across Disciplines and Ages”
The Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837 is pleased to announce an upcoming one-day hybrid conference, “Collective Biographies Across Disciplines and Ages,” taking place on 1 July 2025, in person at the Università degli Studi di Cagliari (Faculty of Humanities, Via San Giorgio 12, Aula 6 and Aula Magna) and online via Microsoft Teams. This international event is organized by WSG member Dr. Maria Grazia Dongu, and it brings together an international group of scholars across disciplines.
About the Conference
This conference explores the literary, historical, and artistic dimensions of collective biography, narratives that center shared experience, social connection, and cultural memory. Presenters will consider how collective biographies function as both historical sources and narrative strategies, across genres as varied as Shakespearean drama, Quaker life writing, detective fiction, and eighteenth-century art. Drawing on approaches from literary studies, historiography, and biography theory, the conference reflects on how individual and group identities are shaped through storytelling.
The Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837 is proud to support this event, which features presentations by a number of our members and provides the opportunity to strengthen scholarly networks internationally and across disciplines.
Conference Schedule – 1 July 2025
9:30 am – Brief Introduction: On Collective Biographies by Maria Grazia Dongu (Università di Cagliari)
10:00 am – Competing to Tell Lives in Shakespeare’s Richard III by Maria Grazia Dongu (Università di Cagliari)
10:30 am – A Case Study of Early Quaker Biographies by Judith Roads (Independent Scholar)
11:00 am – Indizi tra le righe: l’Irlanda che cambia nelle detective story (Clues Between the Lines: Ireland’s Changing Face in Detective Stories) Luciano Cau (Università di Cagliari)
11:30 am – Break
12:00 pm – Anne of Cleves in Collective Biographies by Valerie Schutte (Independent Scholar)
12:30 pm – The Collective Biographies of 18th-Century Art: Harnessing the Power of Storytelling to Re-Read Martin’s “Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido Belle” (1779) by Karen Lipsedge (Kingston University)
1:00 pm – Vita collettiva e autorialità: La famiglia Manzoni (Collective Life and Authorship: The Manzoni Family) by Fabio Vasarri (University of Florence)
13:30 pm – Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII through Chronicles and Shakespeare’s plays by Valeria Steri, Alessandra Carta, and Elena Melis (Università di Cagliari)
The day will conclude with a roundtable discussion among speakers and attendees.
Hybrid Attendance – All Are Welcome
This is a hybrid event, and attendees are warmly invited to join either in person or virtually.
To receive the Microsoft Teams link for online attendance, please contact Dr. Maria Grazia Dongu at dongu@unica.it.
The Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837 is proud to support Dr. Maria Grazia Dongu in organizing this exciting interdisciplinary event. We celebrate her leadership and the vibrant international scholarly exchange this conference promises to foster across disciplinary boundaries.
Zoom starting at 7.00 pm, finishing at 8.00 pm GMT. Waiting room will open at 6.45pm.
Please join us for our special seminar with distinguished Professor Emerita Merry Wiesner-Hanks who will discuss her book Women and the Reformations. She will speak for 30 minutes, leaving 30 minutes for questions.
If you have not already registered for the event, please contact Valerie Schutte.
WSG member and historian Valerie Schutte is co-editing an exciting new two-volume collection with Jessica S. Hower and William B. Robison that explores how the Tudor period has been adapted across various media and forms. This timely collection comes as Tudor-themed adaptations continue to captivate audiences, from the National Portrait Gallery’s recent Six Lives exhibition to new screen productions like Firebrand and Shardlake.
The editors welcome submissions examining any aspect of Tudor adaptation, from historical novels and screen adaptations to museum exhibits and heritage sites. The collection aims to investigate how history is adapted for public audiences and what these adaptations reveal about both the Tudor period and the times in which they were created.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
Submission Guidelines:
Submit abstracts to all three co-editors:
This collection promises to be an essential resource for academics, students, and enthusiasts of Tudor history and its contemporary interpretations.
For the complete CFP and further details, please see the full CFP: Adapting the Tudors
Do not miss this opportunity to contribute to this significant collection—remember to submit your abstract by Friday, 31 January 2025.
An exhibition review by Valerie Schutte
The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England is a dynamic exhibition of Tudor artifacts currently touring the United States. On 14 May 2023, it wrapped up the second leg of its tour at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which was preceded by three months at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 10 October 2022 to 8 January 2023, to be followed by three months at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, from 24 June to 24 September 2023.
The accompanying exhibition catalogue is filled with full-page color images of every item, though not all are on display at all three museums. It also includes entries for items not on display at any of the exhibition stops because some of the loans were cut by the time the exhibition opened in October 2022, being delayed from its original autumn 2020 opening date.
As I saw the exhibition twice in Cleveland, I was unable to see many of the items related to Queen Mary I that were not displayed at this venue. These items included Hans Eworth’s 1554 portrait of her, as well as the cartoons for the panels donated by Philip and Mary for the Last Supper “King’s Window” at Sint-Janskerk, Gouda, though they are both beautifully represented in the catalogue. As a scholar of Mary I, I also have minor objections to the descriptions of some of the entries. For example, item number 27 is a 1557 copy of Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman on loan from the British Library. The catalogue description was written by Sarah Bochicchio, a PhD Candidate in art history at Yale University. While Bochicchio points out that Vives was a spiritual advisor to Catherine of Aragon and a director of Mary’s studies, she also writes that the text informed Mary and Elizabeth as inheritors of a gendered hierarchy of leadership. Furthermore, on the object label at the exhibition, Catherine of Aragon is not even mentioned, while the description highlights how both Mary and Elizabeth navigated a gendered duality during their queenships. While this is accurate, I am frustrated that such a powerful monument to Catherine and Mary must be discussed in terms of its importance to Elizabeth, thus fortifying the public perception of Elizabeth being a more important or worthy Tudor queen.
However, the more than 80 items on display in Cleveland showcased visual art as a formidable tool of monarchical power, from paintings and drawings to cups and bowls, and suits of armor to giant hanging tapestries. Various museums and private collections across Europe and the United States contributed displayed items. The Devonshire Collection at Hardwick Hall lent the “Sea Dog” table, a drawing table so called because of the sea dogs carved into its walnut legs, the Victoria and Albert Museum lent the Heneage Jewel, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna lent Hans Holbein’s painting of Jane Seymour, while the newly-crowned King Charles III lent a miniature of Henry VIII and drawings by Holbein from the Royal Collection. These are only a few of the museums and collectors who participated in fielding these artifacts.
While some of the displayed items are well known, such as the painting of Henry VIII from the workshop of Hans Holbein and both the Sieve and Rainbow portraits of Elizabeth, many are lessor known artifacts that still portrayed the magnificence of the Tudor court. These include the ewer and basin engraved with portrait medallions of the monarchs on loan by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the embroidered portrait of Elizabeth I in a garden loaned from a private collection.
Altogether the exhibition overwhelms its viewers with images of majesty, power, and Renaissance ideas of humanism and antique glory. The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England is not to be missed, as this variety of Tudor objects and artifacts is not likely to be showcased in the United States again anytime soon.
Valerie Schutte is a historian who specialises in books dedicated to Tudor queens. She has published two monographs and her seventh edited collection will be published later this year – Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-Making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I. She is editing a special issue of the Royal Studies Journal to be published in December 2023 on Tudor royal sexualities. Schutte is currently writing a cultural biography of Anne of Cleves and is working on several essays on Queen Mary I.
Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 