How were women viewed in the Tudor period?

The Tudors – Women and Politics, 1485-1603

In this course, we think about the importance of women in politics in the Tudor period (1485-1603). In the first module, we think about how women were viewed in the Tudor period, including both the religious and medical ‘explanations’ for their inferiority to men, and the importance of texts such as Juan Luis Vives’ ‘The Education of a Christian Woman’ in dictating how women should behave. After that, in the second module, we think about the extent to which royal women were able to exercise political power and influence in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, before turning in the third module to consider the impact of the monarch’s (female) gender in the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. In the fourth module, we explore the various ways that noblewomen could exercise political influence at the court, before turning in the fifth to think about the extent that women were involved in the Reformation. Finally, in the sixth module, we consider the role that women played in protests and rebellions, including the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Rising of the North, as well as in smaller-scale acts of dissent.

How were women viewed in the Tudor period?

In this module, we think about how women were viewed in the Tudor period, focusing in particular on: (i) the religious justifications for women’s inferior status to men; (ii) the medical justifications for women’s inferior status to men; (iii) the inferior legal status of women in this period; (iv) the importance of texts such as Juan Luis Vives ‘The Education of a Christian Woman’ in understanding how women were taught to behave – and how they in fact behaved; and (v) the development of the historical debate about women and politics in the medieval and early modern period.