Gunpowder Plotter Sends Royal Sex Letters to Pope!

Centre for Anglican History and Theology Lecture: “Stop Press! Gunpowder Plotter Sends Royal Sex Letters to Pope!”: The Politics of Archives in the Long Reformation

5th Annual Lecture in Ecclesiastical History by Professor Michael Questier (University of Durham)

Thursday 14 May at 6pm in the Chapel of Canterbury Christ Church University, followed by drinks

Abstract
My starting point is the famous collection of love letters from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn now held at the Vatican. They raise a more general point: what secrets do the archives still hold for us about the English Reformation? Even if we can discover, in those archives, things that we formerly did not know, is that likely to tell us anything of more general historical significance about the principal political episodes that constitute our narrative of change of religion in England in and after the sixteenth century?

This lecture tries to address these questions by reference to related sets of documents spread across several different archives and libraries. The further claim will be that if we attempt to dig down into the way that, in the pre-modern era, our predecessors looked at historical manuscripts, we can see how scholar-activists in previous generations attempted to do something similar, and that our own efforts in this regard are part of much longer chains of historical thought.