Adapting the Tudors: From Novels to Film to Public History
Two-Volume Collection | Edited by Jessica S. Hower, William B. Robison, Valerie E. Schutte
Call for Papers, deadline – 31 January 2025
There are few more enduringly popular periods than sixteenth-century Britain. Its people, its places, its events—they all draw in teachers, scholars, and students, but they also all draw in producers and consumers of popular history and culture in droves, seemingly tailor-made for adaptation on page, stage, and screen. And neither creators nor audiences seem content to look away, adapting–in every imaginable way, shape, and form–the Tudor era for myriad purposes and in myriad forms, even when critics thought they might. In the wake of the success of Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) and Showtime’s The Tudors (2007-2010), doubters declared the moment over in the first decade of the 2000s; we had hit a saturation point, and it was time for some other period to shine. Lo and behold, enter Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (2009-2020) and Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s SIX (2017-), so significant and so potent, indeed, that they inspired and informed the biggest exhibit at London’s National Portrait Gallery since its $53 million renovation: 2024’s Six Lives, which showcased Catherine of Aragon’s costume from the musical and Anne of Cleves’s from the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Mirror and the Light first, before leading viewers into the expected and the contemporary: paintings by Hans Holbein and Master John. The gallery tour began, in other words, with adaptation. The decision fit well with what was happening on screen, big and small, at the same time. This past summer and fall (2024), visitors to London could see several gallery rooms filled with Tudor and Tudorist history and culture, past and present, then go to the movie theater to see Karim Aïnouz’s Firebrand or home to watch Amazon Prime’s My Lady Jane and Karim Aïnouz’s Firebrand, based on Elizabeth Freemantle’s 2013 novel Queen’s Gambit, or Disney+’s Shardlake, based on CJ Sansom’s mystery series (2003-2018). Look back or forward even slightly, and the list balloons even more, no shortage of works that adapt, fictionalize, and dramatize the period for the modern audiences that never cease to be amazed by it.
Perhaps it is no mere coincidence, that the century that bore Henry VIII also bore Shakespeare’s Henry VIII; the past and its popular representation were birthed and brought up almost alongside one another, engaged in a complicated, symbiotic dialectic—so much so that parsing them often becomes a futile exercise.
So what is it about the Tudors and adaptation, broadly defined, to encompass novels, film, and public history? More pointedly, what can the many adaptations of the Tudor past tell us about the Tudors and, conversely, what can the Tudors tell us about adaptation?
This volume builds on a small but mighty body of scholarly work that interrogates the role, use, and power of representations of the Tudors to pose and answer these essential questions. Its goal is to critically investigate the phenomenon of adaptation further, in expected and unexpected places and forms, highlighting both well- and little-known examples across time, space, place, medium, and form, from novels to film, television, plays, musicals, museums, and heritage sites. The result will be a text that pushes the field forward and serves as a guide of sorts for academics, their students, and interested consumers of Tudor-based fact and fiction. We welcome essay proposals that explore any aspect of Tudor adaptation, querying the line between what is truthful and what is not, and what adaptations demonstrate about the period in which they were created as well as the one in which they are set. What unites the collection is its interest in how history is adapted for public audiences, whether those public audiences are readers of fiction, viewers of films and television, or visitors to museums and heritage sites.
We welcome abstracts (250-300 words) for chapters of approximately 7,500 words, by Friday, 31 January 2025, for full contributions due in early 2026. Please also include a brief academic CV (max 3 pages) with your abstract submission. Abstracts should be submitted to all three co-editors via email at howerj@southwestern.edu, veschutte@gmail.com, and william.robison@selu.edu.
Possible chapter topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Historical novels and novelists focused on the Tudor period, e.g. Jean Plaidy, Margaret George, Hilary Mantel
- Novels adapted into films, e.g. The Other Boleyn Girl, Firebrand
- Novels adapted into television series, e.g. Shardlake, Wolf Hall, My Lady Jane
- Theatrical adaptations
- Historians who have turned to historical fiction, e.g. Tracy Borman, Alison Weir
- Historical novelists who have turned to history, e.g. Philippa Gregory
- Tudor museum exhibits and heritage sites, e.g. Hampton Court, Tower of London, Hever Castle
- Virtual exhibitions, video games, and world-building as historical adaptation
Image: Wiki Commons