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Six-part lecture series from Professor Susan Doran This hybrid lecture series given by Professor Susan Doran explores the fascinating lives and reigns of Tudor and Early Stuart queens. The period 1485-1642 saw two queens regnant and nine queens consort. With a focus on gender, this series will consider the power and agency of elite women in the Early Modern period. Professor Doran will examine each queen in turn, considering how their gender influenced their lives, roles, and historical legacies. In the first lecture, we will look at Elizabeth of York and examine how she fulfilled the role of queen consort. In the second lecture, we will consider the wives of Henry VIII with a focus on how Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Catherine Parr acted outside conventional gender roles. We then move on to Mary I to examine the challenges that confronted the first ever English queen regnant and her strategies for overcoming them. Elizabeth is the subject of the fourth lecture, and we will deal with how contemporaries, historians, and popular media have dealt with her gender. In the last two lectures, we shall see how the two early Stuarts – Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria – played the role of queen consort given that they were both foreign-born and Catholic. We shall also examine their significant patronage of the arts. Register for the whole series or individual lectures For this lecture series, you can register for the entire series by clicking 'Book Now' on this page or you can register for individual lectures via the links below. Please note: enrolments for the complete series will close at 23:59 GMT on 21 January 2027. Enrolments for each individual lecture will close two days before each lecture.

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