Event: The Charles V lectures: Mary Tudor’s Union with Philip of Spain: A View from the Poets’ by Professor Greg Walker
Date: 17 May 2023
Time: 17:15
Venue: , Erin Serracino Inglott Hall, Msida campus
Speaker: Professor Greg Walker
The Charles V Lectures are the first series of honorary lectures sponsored by the and the Embassy of Spain
With words of welcome from HE J M Muriel (Ambassador of Spain), Prof. Frank Bezzina (Pro-Rector for International Development and QA), Prof.. Dominic Fenech (Dean, Faculty of Arts), Prof. James Corby (Head, Department of English), and Prof. J A G Ardila (Head, Department of Spanish & Latin America Studies).
Followed by a drinks reception courtesy of the Embassy of Spain.
In this lecture Professor Walker will reflect on the controversial marriage between Queen Mary Tudor and Prince Philip of Spain (the future King Philip II), and the alliance between England and Spain it was intended to cement. Through a discussion of the poems that John Heywood and Nicolaus Mameranus wrote to celebrate the marriage, Professor Walker will discuss both what sympathetic observers hoped would follow from the marriage and what they feared about it. His analysis will also demonstrate how poems of praise may be used to offer subtle advice to their recipients, and even hints of criticism at the same time.
Professor Greg Walker holds the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Over four decades he has written extensively on the literature and drama of the late medieval and Tudor periods, the history of the Tudor court, its politics and religious culture. He is the author of John Skelton and the Politics of the Tudor Court (Cambridge University Press, 1988), The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (CUP, 1998), Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2005), Imagining Spectatorship from the Mysteries to the Shakespearean Stage (OUP, 2016), co-written with John J. McGavin, and John Heywood: Comedy and Survival in Tudor England (OUP, 2020). He is the editor of Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2000) and The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama (OUP, 2014). He has co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (OUP, 2010), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama (OUP, 2012), and is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Scottish Theatre (forthcoming, OUP, 2023). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, The English Association, The Agder Academy of Arts and Sciences (Norway), Academia Europaea, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was chair of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Advisory Board for ten years, and chaired the Research Excellence Framework (REF) sub-panel for English language and Literature in 2021.
