Early modern time travels
In the midst of the great global challenges of the present, sometimes pondering the past offers welcome relief, if not its own controversy. And so, when Eleanor Rycroft (@EarlyModernista) asked: “What’s your favourite year of the 16th or 17th century and why?”, Twitter keenly went time travelling.
Greg Walker (@gregmw4), who has written widely on Tudor literary culture, was quick off the mark, writing: “1529... The year in which it all kicked off – and [John] Heywood wrote three plays about it all.”
Soon afterwards, Andrea Zuvich (@17thCenturyLady), whose Twitter handle clearly demonstrates a strong early modern bias, declared that her favourite year was 1677 due to the “fabulous fashion, good music, good theatre” and the royal wedding of William of Orange and Princess Mary.
Some suggestions were perhaps unsurprising, with Linda Porter (@DrLinda Porter1) pointing to the birth of the English republic in 1649, and other historians, such as Janice Liedl (@jliedl), picking 1536 due to the simple fact that it was marked by so much “Tudor messiness”.
However, some less well-known political events were highlighted by the likes of Birgitte Breemerkamp (@The_Birg), who chose 1566, when Elizabeth I reflected on womanhood in her ‘petticoat speech’ to parliament, while Derek
Crosby (@DerekMCrosby) selected 1549, the year of Robert Kett’s rebellion against the enclosure policies of Edward VI.
Elsewhere, Rebecca Mason (@rmason717) opted for 1607, explaining her choice rather succinctly: “Flight of the earls in Ireland. Prelude to shit really hitting the fan in Ulster.”
On the more unusual end of the spectrum, Andy Millen (@Ronniesoak) made a persuasive case for 1598, because it was when the bizarrely named “Unless-Jesus-ChristHad-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-BeenDamned Barebone was born”. In a similar vein, Paul Belford (@PaulBelford) said he was torn between 1610, when privateer
Sir George Somers “died from a surfeit of pork” after being shipwrecked on Bermuda, and 1615, “when Sir Basil Brooke acquired a patent for steelmaking and built the first steelworks in England at Coalbrookdale”.
However, it only seems fair to give the Twitter user purporting to be the painter Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) the final word: “1628. I was in Spain, hanging out with Velazquez, copying Titians. Warm weather, good food. Excellent year!” Well, who can argue with that?
Some historians picked 1536 due to the simple fact it was marked by so much ‘Tudor messiness’
A depiction of the shipwreck that left Sir George Somers stranded on Bermuda, where he established a colony and died in 1610