Today, we welcome a prolific author and history lover: C de Melo! I recently had the pleasure of working on the audiobook production de Melo’s The Apprentice (out today!), which is a dramatic adventure that takes place in the early 1600s, and is set in alluring, stunning Italian cities such as Florence, Siena, Rome, and Naples. The protagonist, ‘Carlo’,… Read on
Mistresses: Sex and Scandal at the Court of Charles II, written by historian Linda Porter and published by Picador in 2020, is the second book on the Stuarts of the seventeenth century by Dr Porter, the first being, Royal Renegades: The Children of Charles I and the English Civil Wars. Porter previously wrote several books on Tudor history,… Read on
Bestselling historian Linda Porter @DrLindaPorter1 writes about Frances Teresa Stuart: The ‘It’ Girl of the Restoration. #KeepItStuart
‘In his journals, George Fox wrote of an occasion when he joined a gathering of men and women of all faiths in a steeple house near his home in Leicester. The discussion of the Book of Peter inspired a woman to speak out and ask a question, what was birth. The priest bade her sit down for he would not permit her . . . or perhaps any woman . . . to speak in his church, though before Fox understood that the priest had given liberty to all who wished to speak. A debate of what constituted a church followed.’
Mothers and Midwives in the 17th Century by Kate Braithwaite Alice Wandesford was born in Yorkshire in 1627 and in 1651, aged twenty-four, she married William Thornton of East Newton. Alice was soon pregnant and carried the child to term, but it died within half an hour of birth. Her second child, Betty, survived almost being ‘overlaid’ –… Read on
The Institution of Marriage in 17th Century England By Deborah Swift My new book, A Plague on Mr Pepys, has at its heart a marriage. During my research for the book I had to look into attitudes to marriage in the 17th Century, and how these attitudes might affect my characters, Bess and Will Bagwell, when their marriage… Read on
Maids, Wives, Widows: Exploring Early Modern Women’s Lives, 1540-1740 by Sara Read is a book I’d been wanting to read since it was originally published in 2015 by Pen & Sword. I became acquainted with Dr Read through Twitter, and she subsequently has contributed two popular articles here on The Seventeenth Century Lady. In her book, which is… Read on
Pleasing Mr Pepys is the newest work by Deborah Swift and set to release this September (2017), and I was fortunate to have been given an advance review copy. To me, Swift brought Deborah Willet, the Pepyses, and the London of the 1660s to life in an exciting and sometimes touching way. I found this to be a really enjoyable story, with its various… Read on