Every year, thousands of visitors to England follow in the footsteps of the Tudors, a dynasty of monarchs who reigned from the defeat of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 until the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. The top fifty most popular British tourist attractions in 2015 included the Tower of London, where two of King Henry VIII’s six wives – Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard – were beheaded, Greenwich, the birthplace of Henry VIII and his daughters Mary I and Elizabeth I and the British Library, which houses key documents from Henry VIII’s reign, displayed in the 2009 exhibition Henry VIII: Man and Monarch.

Although King Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I are two of the most famous monarchs in English history, knowledge of their lives and reigns varies among visitors to their palaces, birthplaces and collections. There are visitors passionate about the Tudor history who consult comprehensive guides to Tudor sites, such as In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn, to ensure that they absorb as much knowledge about these famous Kings and Queens as possible.

There are visitors who have encountered the Tudors through popular culture such as the The Tudors TV series or historical novels such as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and know a mixture of fact and legend about them. Then, there are visitors who know the names of Tudor monarchs and little else, unsure about the number of Henry VIII’s wives or the influence of all those advisers named Thomas. In The Tudor Tutor: Your Cheeky Guide to the Dynasty, Barb Alexander provides an entertaining and informative introduction to the Tudor Dynasty that should be required in-flight reading for any tourist bound for England’s Tudor trail of historic sites.

One of the great strengths of The Tudor Tutor: Your Cheeky Guide to the Dynasty is the vivid descriptions of Henry VIII’s wives (or Henry’s half dozen as they are described in the book). For those with only a passing knowledge of sixteenth century England, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr blend together or are reduced to unhelpful stereotypes. (In Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII, historian David Starkey summarized these simplistic portrayals as “the saint, the schemer, the doormat, the dim fat girl, the sexy teenager and the bluestocking”).

Alexander challenges the stereotypes by giving the reader a sense of the nuanced personalities of all six queens. Catherine of Aragon was pious but she was also a “hands-on queen” who served as Henry VIII’s regent while he was fighting wars in France. Katherine Howard’s time as queen ended in a royal scandal but she was also generous and charitable, providing the elderly Countess of Salisbury with warm clothes when the Countess was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Alexander does an excellent job of explaining the complicated religious politics of the time to those who may be unfamiliar with the full history, matching each wife of Henry VIII to her faith. (Anne Boleyn is entertainingly described as “reformation curious.”) The book is richly illustrated with art by Lisa Graves, giving a sense of fashions of sixteenth century England.

The welcome page asks readers to “Please leave your desire for indoor plumbing, antibiotics and good dental care behind” and a little more information about the day to day lives of Tudor courtiers amidst the religion and politics would have made the book even more engaging for readers new to the time period. Nevertheless, The Tudor Tutor: Your Cheeky Guide to the Dynasty will ensure that more visitors arrive at the Tower of London, Greenwich and Hampton Court knowing the key details about the lives and reigns of England’s Tudor monarchs.

Next week:  Agincourt (Great Battles Series) by Anne Curry

The Tudor court was a place of lavish feasts. In a single year, the royal cooks prepared 8,200 sheep, 2,330 deer, 53 wild boar and thousands of birds and fish. King Henry VIII’s waistline expanded from thirty-two inches at age 30 to fifty-four inches at age 55.  In The Tudor Kitchen: What the Tudors Ate & Drank, Terry Breverton, author of numerous works of Tudor and Welsh history including Jasper Tudor: Dynasty Maker, Owain Glyndwr: The Story of the Last Prince of Wales and The Welsh: The Biography, explains Tudor farming and feasting then provides hundreds of annotated and modernized recipes for anyone interested in cooking Tudor dishes in their own kitchens.

Breverton takes a wide approach to the Tudor period, discussing dishes from England’s first cookbook, The Forme of Cury, a Roll of Ancient English Cookery: Compiled, about AD 1390, by the Master-Cooks of King Richard II to the English Civil Wars of the 1640s. This period saw an expansion in the range of available dishes as England expanded its trade relationships throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. The popular image of Tudor cooking is enormous roast meats turning on spits but Breverton includes recipes that demonstrate that the Tudor elite enjoyed a wider range of foods than English people of the mid twentieth century, including macaroni and cheese and chickpeas with garlic. Breverton also challenges the myth that people in Tudor times ate few vegetables. Surviving account books emphasize meat purchases because vegetables were grown at home. New vegetables from the Americas were incorporated into Tudor cooking over the course of the sixteenth century with beans and sweet potatoes favored over potatoes and tomatoes.

The recipe section provides a sense of how dishes evolved over time and new foods were incorporated into the Tudor diet. For example, The Forme of Cury included an early recipe for macaroni and cheese including instructions on rolling the dough for fresh pasta then “cast hym on boiling water and seeþ it wele. Take chese and grate it, and butter imelte.”  A book from 1595 reminded the reader that both Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins enjoyed “A cheap, fresh and lasting victual, called by the name of Macaroni amongst the Italians, and not unlike (save only in form) to the Cus-cus (couscous) in Barbary.” By 1769, there were a variety of pasta recipes in cookbooks including “To Dress Macaroni with Permasent [Parmesan] Cheese.”

Breverton also includes the favourite recipes of key figures at the Tudor court: Henry VIII enjoyed globe artichokes while his third wife Jane Seymour had a weakness for Cornish pasties. The workings of the Hampton Court Palace kitchens, which are open to the public today, receive less attention in Breverton’s book as there is already a detailed study of the preparation of food and drink at Hampton Court, All the King’s Cooks: The Tudor Kitchens of King Henry VIII at Hampton Court Palace by Peter Brears.

Of course, not everyone in Tudor times was feasting like Henry VIII and his courtiers at Hampton Court Palace. The sixteenth century was time of growing income inequality as the landed gentry grew wealthier by enclosing land to graze sheep, evicting farm labourers from their cottages. The dissolution of the monasteries removed a source of food and shelter for the poor. In the opening chapters on Tudor farming, Breverton explains how agricultural practices changed over the sixteenth century and farm labourers often struggled to find steady work and put food on the table. The recipe section includes instructions on how to make the vegetable pottages and coarse breads that were the daily diet of most people in Tudor times.

The Tudor Kitchen: What the Tudors Ate & Drank is an entertaining and educational introduction to sixteenth century English cuisine. The book will appeal to anyone interested in daily life in the sixteenth century England, especially those interested in recreating the meals and beverages of King Henry VIII’s court.

Next Week: The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America by F. H. Buckley

Most biographies of Elizabeth I describe her life from birth in 1533 to death in 1603, covering the events of her path to the throne and reign in chronological order. In Elizabeth I and Her Circle, Susan Doran, a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, co-editor of The Elizabethan World and Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, and author of Mary Queen of Scots: An Illustrated Life and numerous books on Tudor England, instead devotes a chapter to each of the key relationships in the Queen’s life. Through analysis of Elizabeth I’s connections to her relatives, courtiers and councilors, Doran explodes the myths about the Queen’s character and reign, revealing the that England’s most famous ruler was a more complicated person than past biographers – and popular culture – have assumed.

Doran begins by reversing long standing assumptions about Elizabeth’s views of her parents, King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Henry VIII is often described as a role model for his daughter and a person she idealized (For an example, listen to the recent BBC Great Lives episode on Elizabeth I) while the disgraced and beheaded Anne Boleyn was quietly forgotten. While Elizabeth I included Henry VIII in her public image to reinforce her legitimacy as queen, Doran argues convincingly that her surviving writings hint that she viewed her father as an intimidating and unpredictable figure during her childhood. Elizabeth displayed little grief when Henry died in 1547. In contrast, Elizabeth surrounded herself with Boleyn cousins during her reign, particularly the numerous members of the Carey and Knollys families, the descendants of Anne Boleyn’s sister, Mary.

In many biographies of Elizabeth I, the Queen’s relationships with her Tudor cousins are reduced to decades of conflict with Mary, Queen of Scots and outrage over the secret marriage of Lady Catherine Grey (sister of the famous 9 Days Queen, Lady Jane Grey). These selected episodes convey the impression that Elizabeth’s primary emotion toward her female cousins was jealousy, declaring Catherine’s sons illegitimate and comparing her own childlessness to Mary giving birth to a healthy son (the future James I). Elizabeth had far more relatives with a claim to her throne and more complicated dealings with her family than a narrow focus on Mary and Catherine would suggest.

Doran traces the careers of the entire Suffolk line (descendants of Henry VIII’s youngest sister), revealing that the Queen enjoyed decades of friendship with her cousin Margaret Clifford, the mother of numerous sons, which belies the assumption that she was inherently hostile to her female royal cousins and their progeny. Elizabeth even enjoyed a brief period of good relations with Mary, Queen of Scots. Doran provides evidence that Elizabeth’s decision to reject the legitimacy of Catherine’s marriage was partly motivated by a desire to reassure Mary about her place in the succession. The only close royal relative who does not receive substantial analysis in Doran’s book is Arbella Stuart, a curious omission considering that Elizabeth actually met her in person, in contrast to Mary and James.

Key chapters at the centre of the book are devoted to Elizabeth I’s “favourites,” Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Doran dismisses the speculation, which has existed since the sixteenth century and persists in films and historical novels today, that Elizabeth had affairs with these courtiers. Instead, the book discusses the political role of these men and takes them seriously as influential figures at the Queen’s court. The Earl of Essex, who is often dismissed as a vain and empty headed youth, in fact earned an MA from Cambridge at the age of sixteen and displayed a consistent desire to serve the Queen on the battlefield. The women in Elizabeth I’s circle have already received extensive analysis in the recent books The Queen’s Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth’s Court by Anna Whitelock and Elizabeth’s Women by Tracy Borman but Doran provides some fresh insights and challenges the longstanding view that the Queen was inherently hostile to the marriages of her ladies-in-waiting.

Elizabeth I and Her Circle is essential reading for anyone interested in Queen Elizabeth I, her court and the wider Tudor dynasty in the sixteenth century. Doran strips away centuries of mythology surrounding Elizabeth I, revealing the interplay between her personal relations with family, courtiers and counselors and the political decisions she made as Queen. In her dealings with her circle, Elizabeth placed her interests as Queen above any personal rivalries or attachments. The Queen’s most lasting relationship was with England and her subjects.

Next Week: Becoming a Romanov: Grand Duchess Elena of Russia and Her World (1807-1873) by Marin Soroka and Charles A. Ruud.