I am a university student doing my dissertation on different aspects of Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr. I have decided to do one section of this on the importance of their households, but am having problems finding comprehensive information on this. Does anyone know where to find this information as it would be a great help to me?
Thanks.
Are you in the UK?
ReplyDeleteFor Katherine Parr, I recommend Dakota L Hamilton’s work, including her PhD thesis (‘The Household of Queen Katherine. Parr’, PhD diss, University of Oxford, 1992). Her article, 'The Learned Councils of the Tudor Queen Consorts', in Charles Carlton, Robert L. Woods, Mary L. Robertson and Joseph S. Block (eds.), State, sovereigns & society in early modern England, may also prove helpful. Biographies on the figures in question will also provide information on their households, namely Eric Ives’s work on Anne Boleyn and Susan James's work on Katherine Parr. I also recommend Jeri McIntosh’s work on the pre-accession households of Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. Though you are not focusing on these figures, her work is useful to anyone examining royal households at this time, and there are brief discussions of various persons who served the queens you are interested in.
ReplyDeleteAs KB asks, are you located in the UK? If so, a trip to the National Archives is a must for household expenditure records. There are also items of interest in the British Library – incidentally last week I was reading one household list detailing those in Parr’s household, which would be relevant to your work (if memory serves the reference was, BL Cotton Vespasian C.XIV).