The Royal Studies Podcast RSN

In this episode, Ellie Woodacre interviews Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on his new book The Cleopatras. The Forgotten Queens of Egypt, published by Wildfire/Basic Books in May 2024. We discuss the need for this book which looks at all seven of the Cleopatras who were dynamic and fascinating co-rulers of Ptolemaic Egypt. We also discuss the particular dynamics of Ptolemaic rulership and the ways in which it brought together elements of Macedonian and Egyptian ideas of rule. In addition, we talk about how these women were 'goddess queens' who were worshipped both in their own time and after their death and how they used this quasi-divine status to enhance their power.

Guest Bio: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff University. His research concentrates, in the main, on the Persian empire, the ancient Near East, and the Hellenistic world. He also works on gender and reception history. Lloyd has published extensively, often with a focus on monarchy and court society. Recent books include King and Court in Ancient Persia (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), The Hellenistic Court (Classical Press of Wales, 2016), Persians: the Age of the Great Kings (Wildfire/Basic Books, 2022), Kleopatra Thea and Kleopatra III. Sister-Queens in the High-Hellenistic Period (Routledge, 2022), and Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther: Achaemenid Court Culture in the Hebrew Bible (I.B. Tauris, 2023). 

In this episode on Egyptian kingship we are speaking to Dr Caleb R. Hamilton (Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga, Kāi Tahu). Caleb is the Pouārahi, Principal Advisor Environmental Outcomes for Houkura, the Independent Māori Statutory Board. He was previously an Aporei Mātai (Principal Anaylst) at Te Puni Kōkiri and was Pou Matua Taonga Tuku Iho (Principal Advisor, Heritage) at the Department of Conservation.
Caleb currently holds an Research Associate position with Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. He earned his PhD in archaeology and Egyptology from Monash University and his MA, BA Hons and LLB from Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. He has published on the Early Dynastic period, early Egyptian kingship, and the Western Desert and will soon produce new work on mummified human remains in Aotearoa as well as finalising his PhD into a manuscript for publication.
Find out more about Caleb and his research at his academia.edu page.

In this episode, we have a roundtable with the lead editor and three contributors to the new collection, Notions of Privacy at Early Modern European Courts: Reassessing the Public and Private Divide, 1400-1800 (AUP, 2024). We discuss whether the term 'privacy' is problematic in terms of early modern court life and what expectations monarchs themselves might have had of privacy. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the link above--the book is freely available in Open Access thanks to the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Guest Bios:

Dustin M. Neighbors is the project coordinator and a postdoctoral researcher for the EU-Horizon project, Colour4CRAFTS,  at the University of Helsinki. His main areas of research are monarchy and court culture, with an emphasis on the performativity of gender, political and material culture, cultural practices and history (i.e., hunting) within sixteenth- and seventeenth century Northern Europe, and the employment of digital research methods.

Dries Raeymaekers is Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). He specializes in the political culture of the early modern period, with particular attention for the history of monarchy, dynastic history, and the history of the court in Western Europe. He has published widely on princely favourites, ladies-in-waiting, and the 'politics of access' at early modern courts, including One Foot in the Palace: the Habsburg Court of Brussels and the Politics of Access in the Reign of Albert and Isabella, 1598-1621 (Leuven UP, 2013),  A Constellation of Courts: The Households of Habsburg Europe, 1555-1665 (Leuven UP, 2014) and The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1450-1750 (Brill, 2016).

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger is Professor Emerita of Early Modern History at the University of Muenster. Since 2018, she has been Rector of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. Her main areas of research include: the political culture of the Holy Roman Empire; social and political symbols, metaphors, rituals, and procedures of the early modern period; and the history of ideas.
Oskar J. Rojewski is an assistant professor at the University of Silesia and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Privacy Studies of the University of Copenhagen and the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He studies fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish art and European court rituals, particularly the status of artists, their migration, networks, and relationships with sovereigns.

This episode features a new book series 'Monarchy, History and Culture' at AUP. The series seeks to publish studies on monarchy, both individual and comparative, from the ancient world to the French Revolution. In this episode, we interview two of the series editors to discuss what kind of work they are hoping to feature and tips for authors who would like to publish their work in the new series.
Guest Bios:
Erika Gaffney is an acquisitions editor for the AUP. She is also the Founder of the Art Herstory project, to recover the lives and works of historic women artists. Follow Erika on Twitter,  Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky and/or Academia.edu.
Aidan Norrie is Lecturer in History and Literature and the Programme Leader of the BA (Hons) English and History Studies degree at the University Campus North Lincolnshire. They are the Managing Editor of The London Journal, the author of Elizabeth I and the Old Testament: Biblical Analogies and Providential Rule (2023), and the co-editor of the English Consorts collection (2022) and Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe (2019).

Today’s episode celebrates the publication of Floral Culture and the Tudor and Stuart Courts, ed. Susannah Lyon-Whaley (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).
These interdisciplinary essays engage with flowers as real, artificial, and represented objects across the Tudor and Stuart courts in gardens, literature, painting, interior furnishing, garments, and as jewels, medicine, and food. If the rose operated as a particularly English lingua franca of royal power across two dynasties, this volume sheds light on an array of wild and garden flowers to offer an immersive picture of how the Tudor and Stuart courts lived and functioned, styled and displayed themselves through flowers. 
 
Speaker Biographies:
Eleri Lynn is a fashion and textiles historian and curator. 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).
Maria Hayward is professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton. She works on material culture at the Tudor and Stuart courts. Her books include Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (2009), and Stuart Style: Monarchy, Dress and the Scottish Male Elite (2021). 
Beverly Lemire is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair, University of Alberta, Canada and a Member of the Order of Canada. She publishes widely on the gendered and racialised history of fashion, global trade, and material culture (c. 1600–1840) from British, European, colonial, and comparative perspectives. She is co-editor with Christopher Breward and Giorgio Riello of the two-volume Cambridge Global History of Fashion (2023):
Susan M. Cogan is an Associate Professor of History at Utah State University. Her research focuses on social, religious, and environmental history of late-medieval and early modern England. Her publications include Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence (Amsterdam, 2021) and articles on gardens, architecture, antiquarianism, and gender.
 
A Floral Recipe to Try at Home:
 ‘A Second Course Dish in the Beginning of the Spring’ aka a floral recipe for ‘dough balls’ or ‘doughnuts’ from William Rabisha, The Whole Body of Cookery (London: 1661), 205.
Take of Primrose-leaves two handfuls, and boyl them, and scruise the water from them, and mince them small, three Pippins, season it with Cinamon, put to it half a handful of dry floure, and the yolks of eight eggs, only two whites of the same, mingle this together, adding a little Sugar, Cream, and Rose-water, your stuff must be thick that it run not abroad, your pan being hot with clarified Butter, drop them in by less then spoonfuls, and fry them on both sides as crisp as you can, dish them, and scrape on Sugar.

In this episode, hosted by Susannah Lyon-Whaley, we have a roundtable highlighting recent research on royal mistresses and the important part they played in the French and English monarchies. 

Guest Biographies:
Tracy Adams is a professor in European Languages and Literatures at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has also taught at the University of Maryland, the University of Miami, and the University of Lyon III. She was a Eurias Senior Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies 2011-2012, an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions Distinguished International Visiting Fellow in 2014 and a fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek fellowship in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, in 2016. She is the author of Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance (2005), The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (2010), Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France (2014), Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy (2022), and Reflections on Extracting Elite Women’s Stories from Medieval and Early Modern French Narrative Sources (2023). With Christine Adams, she co-authored The Creation of the French Royal Mistress from Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry (2020). With Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier, she is co-editor of the volume The Waxing of the Middle Ages (2023).  
Christine Adams is professor of European history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She publishes primarily in French gender and family history (17th–19th centuries). Author of A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) and Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Illinois Press, 2010), her most recent book, with Tracy Adams, is The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). Adams was a 2020–2021 fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and a spring 2021 Andrew W. Mellon long-term fellow at the Newberry Library, where she worked on her current book project on The Merveilleuses and their Impact on the French Social Imaginary, 1794–1799 and Beyond. She also writes frequently on current events, including politics, education, gender, and reproductive rights.
Mirabelle is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Auckland. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the visual representation of Maria Fitzherbert (1756-1837), through the lenses of celebrity culture, erotic capital, and female reputation. Maria was the mistress, and illegal wife, of King George IV of England (1762-1830). Mirabelle completed her Master of Arts with First Class Honours in Art History in 2021. Her thesis examined the relationship between portraiture, gender, and sexuality at the Restoration Court, focusing on two of the royal mistresses of Charles II (1630-1685), Louise de Kéroualle (1649-1734) and Barbara Villiers (1640-1709). In 2019 she received her BA(Hons) with First Class Honours in Art History. Upon completion of her Bachelor of Arts degree, double majoring in Art History and Classical Studies, she was awarded the Louise Perkins Prize as the top graduating student in Art History. 
Further reading:
 Tracy Adams. Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy: History, Gallantry, and National Identity. ARC Humanities Press, 2022.
https://www.arc-humanities.org/9781641893527/agnes-sorel-and-the-french-monarchy/ 
 Tracy Adams and Christine Adams. The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry. Penn State University Press, 2020.