The Invention of You: How the Renaissance Discovered the Self
Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the TudorsShow Notes
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We talk about the Renaissance as the time people rediscovered the ancient world. But they were also discovering themselves, for the first time.
For most of human history, nobody really knew what they looked like. Then a mirror, a chimney, a printing press, and a blank book arrived within about 150 years of each other, and together they invented something brand new: the interior life. The private self.
In this episode: Venetian glass mirrors that once cost as much as a naval ship, the rise of private heated rooms, the explosion of diary keeping, and why Hamlet might be the most "online" character in literary history.
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More from Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors
Long before anyone in England was hanged as a witch, ordinary women had a magic of their own. They wrapped parchment girdles covered in prayers around their bellies in labor. They borrowed holy relics from the parish like library books. They baked cakes in total silence on St Agnes’ Eve, hoping to dream of the man they’d marry. Nobody called them witches. It was just how you got through life.
This summer I travelled around the south of England staying in historic inns, and stop number three was the White Horse in Dorking, Surrey. There's been a building on this spot since at least 1278, when it belonged to the Knights Hospitaller, and it later became one of the big coaching inns on the road from London to Horsham.
Henry VIII didn't dismantle the Church in England. He took it over, one step at a time, and the plan looks an awful lot like a hostile corporate takeover. Squeeze the leadership, take the board, cut off Rome, audit everything, find some dirt, close the small houses first, and then come for the big ones.
By All Saints' Day in Tudor London, the sun was down by quarter past four. In the final episode of our autumn series, we find out how the Tudors got ready for the long dark, in their bodies, in their homes, and in their hearts.
Every September, all of Tudor England was on the move. In episode 3 of our autumn series, we climb the social ladder one rung at a time, from a seventeen-year-old farm servant looking for next year's job all the way up to Queen Elizabeth watching sea gods row across a lake that was dug just for her.