Making the Tudors

Public Event Series – Helen Hackett, Tara Hamling, Eleri Lynn

11 May 2023
5:00 – 7:00 pm
Part of Tudors Now!, a public event series convened by Christina Faraday
Paul Mellon Centre and Online

For many people Tudor art means portraits, but this session will show that there is far more to the period’s visual and material culture. This discussion with three leading scholars and curators will explore exciting recent scholarship on the decorative arts, including interior decoration, wood, plasterwork and textiles. It will foreground the interaction between images and issues such as religion, social status and gender. We will also consider the period’s beliefs about mental images and the role of the senses in communication, offering a deeper, theoretical basis for the analysis of Tudor art, rooted in the period’s theories about the mind.

About the speakers

Helen Hackett is a professor of English Literature at University College London (UCL), specialising in Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, women’s writing and feminist criticism. Helen has strong interests in intersections between literature, art and history in the early modern period, and in intercultural encounters. Her latest book, The Elizabethan Mind (Yale UP, 2022) explores competing and conflicting ideas about the mind in the late sixteenth century, and how these generated the extraordinary literary creativity of the period. Other publications include Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton UP, 2010), Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (2000) and Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995).
Tara Hamling is a reader in early modern studies in the Department of History, University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the visual arts and material culture of early modern England, with particular interests in religious imagery, decoration and the domestic context. She is author of Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (Yale University Press, 2010) and (with Catherine Richardson) A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700 (Yale University Press, 2017). Tara is one of the investigators on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded (AHRC) project, The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort: Writing and Material Culture 1560–1660.
Eleri Lynn is a fashion historian and author. She is currently Head of Exhibitions at National Museum Wales and a trustee of the Royal School of Needlework. Eleri was previously an assistant curator at the V&A and a curator of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Historic Royal Palaces.

She is the author of several monographs including Tudor Fashion (Yale University Press, 2017 – winner of the Historians of British Art Prize) and Tudor Textiles (Yale University Press, 2020). Eleri is the curator of several major exhibitions including The Lost Dress of Elizabeth I (Hampton Court Palace, 2019). She is regularly interviewed by the media, most recently for BBC Two’s Art That Made Us and BBC One’s Elizabeth: Fashioning a Monarch.