So anyone reading anything relevant in 2012?

I had been having fun with Neale's collections Essays in Elizabethan History (review up on the page if someone is interested).

So - anyone else reading anything else about the period? Or about the Tudors in general I guess - they are related to Elizabeth after all (no pun intended).

I will have to look that one up, as I am interested in Edward Stafford and his family!

I just acquired Death and the Virgin Queen, an investigation of the death of Amy Robsart Dudley, but have not started it yet. I have laid out a fairly ambitious reading program for this spring, so it will be a while before I get to it. I am planning to start with English aristocratic women, 1450-1550 : marriage and family, property and careers.

I had been spending way too much time in the DNB lately - had been tracking an obscure name I saw in the essays and... kept clicking around :)

I will be interested to hear what you think about the Robsart book when you get around to it - I am trying to convince myself to read it (Leicester still being my main research interest) but I keep deciding not to. :)

>2 staffordcastle:
With the book at hand:

The Stafford article can be found either in this book or in the April 1929 issue of English Historical Review (in case you have access to a library that carries old issues). The previous one ("The Diplomatic Envoy" mentions him a few times as well - as an example mainly (originally in History, Oct. 1928) but it is a pretty well done article anyway and both of them make a very good pair.

And the Netherlands one has one footnote mentioning him and I will cite: "Foreign Cal, XXI, iii, 122. Beale's remark on page 173 shows that this point in the instructions was not altered. It is interesting to note that Stafford charged Walsingham and Leicester with trying to over-reach the Queen." Not worth tracking that one down (if you go for the single articles -- and I am not entirely sure if this note was made in the original article (I presumed so...) or is added for this volume.

Thanks! I'm pretty sure that UC Berkeley would have the EHR issues back to that, and it's pretty handy for me to go there; I'll check these out!

:) I remembered vaguely that you have access to an academic library so decided to post the exact issues.

Yes, UCB is close to my workplace, and is the main library that I use these days; haven't really used the public library system in quite a long time!

Yeah... I wish I had something like that close by. On the other hand I seem to be building a pretty good reference library on my shelves :)

A bit back on topic, read Elizabeth I: A Novel by Margaret George earlier this year - still trying to decide if I like it or not and post a review.

I find it hard to read historical novels set in the 16th century - the authors usually make too many mistakes, deliberately or not. I have been enjoying Mercedes Lackey's This Scepter'd Isle series, though; a nice combination of history and fantasy, and also Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age series - her writing is incredible.

Yep, Bear is good. Need to check Lackey's - I had read some of her other works..

I like reading the novels set in the era... I had been avoiding them for ages and then decided to start reading them, keeping in mind that they are fiction. Some of them really piss me off occasionally but there are quite a few that are readable..

Lackey does a good job of intertwining Tudor politics with the politics of Under Hill, which is quite entertaining. It's kind of fun to look at some completely different causes for familiar events of the 16th century!

Have you ever read The Armor of Light by Melissa Scott? It is set in a late Elizabethan England where magic works, Christopher Marlowe didn't die at Deptford, and Philip Sydney survived Zutphen. Its pivot point is the political uses of masques, which the author uses so beautifully I could almost tell you what books she'd been reading about the period.

Nope... as I said I was keeping out of the period in fiction for so long that I am catching up. This one is now on its way to me. Thanks :)