Interview with Philippa Woodcock
Living Like a king? The Entourage of Odet de Foix, Vicomte de Lautrec, Governor of Milan
RSJ Blog: Thanks for doing an interview with us! to begin, how did you get interested in history? especially the period you specialize in?
Philippa: Thank you, I’m flattered to be asked. It is entirely my mother’s fault that I became a historian. She read historical novels non-stop (Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond and Niccolo novels especially) and had the portraits of the six wives of Henry VIII above her bath (but not Henry VIII). Anne Boleyn was a clear favourite, but I always preferred Katherine Parr (ah, the admiral!)
RSJ Blog: Your latest article contribution to the RSNJ is fascinating. Is this a subject you’ve been studying for years?
Philippa: Thank you. The article is a bit of an aside to my PhD which I finished in 2006 and, to my shame have still to publish. I ended up studying French Milan thanks to my supervisor, Evelyn Welch, who advised me to work in very quiet archives – Milan, Mantua, Cremona etc – rather than Florence. When I started researching the de Foix family’s role in Milan, I realised that studying the governors would also give me an excuse to do research in Pau and Tarbes….
Each time I go to a new archive I always make a quick sweep of terms relating to French Milan before starting my other research. There’s a lot of unpublished material out there, even though Italian and French scholars have really revived interest in this period in the last twenty years.
RSJ Blog: What went into the research for this article?
Philippa: A long process and lots of travel! This article’s origins are in the Kings and Queens 3 conference in Winchester in July 2014. I remembered a contemporary Venetian observer remarking that Lautrec always maintained and fed a certain number of liveried servants and followers, so my contribution developed from that. Whilst teaching for Warwick in Venice I had the absolute luxury of being able to spend some time in the archivio di stato, where some references survive to the gifts given to Lautrec and his cronies by the Republic. I then gave the adapted paper at a researchconvegno, and was given some leads for future work from Italian scholars. Finally, when I submitted the article to the RSJ I got some really useful feedback about new research and publications that I had missed. This iterative editorial process is so important to ensure that work is representative of the state of scholarship, as well as including original archival research.
RSJ Blog: Was there anything that surprised you when conducting your research?
Philippa: I’m afraid that I get carried away in the archives and go off on tangents. I knew from Sanudo that Lautrec and Gritti had a difficult relationship, so I looked through the draft despatches of the Senate for 1515-20. I came across some lovely nuggets about provisions being made for Andrea Gritti to travel by litter on campaign, rather than horseback, owing to his age. This meets the idea of Venetian gerontocracy, but somehow goes against the idea of Gritti ‘man of action’. I was also interested to see how many references were made to the scars on Lautrec’s face which seemed to have affected his sinuses and made it necessary for him to frequently hawk up phlegm. He even adopted the panther as his emblem for it too had a ‘savage visage’.
RSJ Blog: Thanks again for letting us interview you! One last question: what are you working on next?
Philippa: Lots of things. I get distracted easily! I am working with my friend and former colleague, Matthias Range, to publish our post-doctoral work on Reformation rural religion, exploring the daily religious experience in isolated Catholic and Lutheran parishes. However, my main project (going slowly at present) concerns the experience of French mariners in the Venetian Stato da Mar. I have lots of juicy French complaints about the Venetians seizing French goods on rather flimsy pretexts. I aim to match this with Venetian enquiries into ‘misconduct’ and pre-consular diplomatic activity. I’ve looked at this in Paris, but I need to get down to Marseille. And one day, I will publish my PhD in some form or another….
Interview with Aidan Norris
“Courageous, Zealous, Learned, Wise, and Chaste” – Queen Elizabeth I’s Biblical Analogies After Her Death
RSJ Blog: Thanks for doing an interview with us! to begin, how did you get interested in history? especially the Tudor era?
Aidan: Thank-you for having me! I have been asked where my interest in history comes from many times, and the honest answer is that it has always just been there. Except for a six-month period in my late teens during which time I wanted to be an accountant (dark days indeed), I have always been interested in the past, and finding out how people in the past lived. I do sometimes, however, attribute my interest in history to an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine I watched as a kid, in which an abandoned castle is discovered on the Island of Sodor. I instinctively knew that the castle was both old and important, so I badgered my parents to get me books from the library all about castles – and it has only snowballed since then!
Elizabeth has always fascinated me. The idea that a woman could successfully rule a country at a time when women had virtually no political or economic rights made me want to know all I could about her. History at school – and even university – is often skewed towards famous men; so reading about Elizabeth (as well as her half-sister Mary I, and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots) allowed me to address this imbalance. I should also confess that Queenie from Blackadder added to the fascination.
RSJ Blog: Your latest article contribution to the RSJ is fascinating. Is this a subject you’ve been studying for years?
Aidan: That’s very kind of you. I first started thinking about Elizabeth’s biblical analogies during my undergraduate studies, when I first came across the account of Elizabeth’s Coronation Procession – The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage. In the fifth pageant, Elizabeth is exhorted to behave like Deborah the Judge, and Elizabeth herself is recorded to have prayed before the procession began in thanksgiving that she was preserved during Mary’s reign, as Daniel was from the lion’s den. What struck me about the references to these biblical figures is that almost everyone who heard them would have known about them, and understood the connection that was being made. Attendance at Church was all that was necessary to know the story of these major biblical figures, rather than the formal education one would require to understand what was meant by an allusion to Astraea or Diana. The fact that Elizabeth herself also used the analogy meant that they were clearly useful. From there, it was simply a matter of reading as much of the scholarship I could that analysed the phenomenon.
RSJ Blog: What went into the research for this article?
Aidan: Almost two years’ worth, to be honest! Not only did I have to find the analogies in the primary sources – thank-you EEBO! – I also had to research what the context for the analogy was, and what the analogy was being used for. This was more challenging than previous work because the late seventeenth century is beyond my usual area of research, so it took some time to get up to scratch with the history of the period and with the historiography.
RSJ Blog: Was there anything that surprised you when conducting your research?
Aidan: There were two main things about my research that surprised me. The first was the longevity of Elizabeth’s analogies. I really did not expect them to continue appearing for a century after she died, especially after the Civil War and the Commonwealth. It highlighted to me the importance of not letting your assumptions get in the way of your research, and also how potent the combined use of religion and politics was in the Early Modern period. The second thing that surprised me was how so few of the primary sources I was locating had previously been analysed in the scholarship. While the concept of the analogies, and the theory behind them, has been well studied, there appeared to be a limited focus on the actual sources themselves. Hopefully, with the advent of EEBO, and the increasing access to these original sources, the analogies themselves will come to the forefront of analysis.
RSJ Blog: What are you working on next?
Aidan: I am currently researching some of Elizabeth’s analogies that are less analysed in the current scholarship – particularly those to Daniel the Prophet and the widow Judith. My major project, however, is an analysis of the analogies that were used by both Mary and Elizabeth, with particular emphasis on how the different religious beliefs of the two queens influenced the way in which the analogies were employed, and the way in which gender was factored into the analogy.
Royal Studies Journal 