In light of the fantastic experience I had at Kings and Queens 3, I come away with an even greater appreciation for the act of research and the necessity of sharing said research with others. I was inspired by the many fantastic papers I heard and would like to work on some more projects of my own in the near future.
First project? I will continue the work I presented at the conference. I still have a few more masques of Anna’s to analyze and I have even more ideas thanks to comments and questions at the panel to inform my current work. I’ll work on adding in ideas from Samuel Daniel’s work, “Tethys Festival or The Queen’s Wake” and then the final Anna-produced masque, “Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly.” I’ll continue to focus on the political use of the masques as well as a literary analysis in terms of how Anna used them to self-fashion her own public image.
I was also particularly inspired by the work presented by Estelle Paranque, “Jezabel d’Angleterre”: Queen Elizabeth I through French eyes” and how she used French sources to chart and analyze the reaction of the royalty and aristocracy to Elizabeth’s rise and reign. I think it may be particularly interesting to analyze the French (or others) reaction to Anne Boleyn’s meteoric rise and catastrophic fall. The French perspective would be, I think, the richest to focus upon because of Anne’s early ties to the French royalty. This will also make me work on learning French, which, after this conference, I’ve learned is a necessity. This site is one that Estelle said she used quite a bit, and I hope it’ll aid me in my research: Gallica.
Another particularly inspirational paper, for my research, was “Scotland’s Royal Children: 1371-1528″ by Amy Hayes. She worked on researching the lives of the children of monarchs who were not expected to inherit the throne. This was difficult research for her as there is scant documentary evidence available. It doesn’t seem to exist. What I would like to do, though, is look for threads on the curriculum taught to these children and to piece together the educational programme established for the royal broods. England will be far easier than either Scotland or Ireland, and I’d also like to add in the Danish royal family. There are not that many (read: basically none) sources in English on the Danish royal family, but with the work I’ve done on Anna of Denmark, I would really like to see what I can do to piece together her early childhood and that of her siblings. One key way to understand the reigns of monarchs is to understand what was taught to them as children. I’d like to do that with Anna and her siblings to start off with and then move on to other royal broods.
This is in addition to studying for the GRE (again… ugh) and getting applications in line for graduate programs!