Hello, friend, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor History podcast, telling stories of Tudor England since 2009.

We are also part of the Agora Podcast Network, and I am your host, Heather Tusco. I'm a storyteller who makes history

accessible because I believe it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the

universe, and being so much more deeply in touch with our own humanity. It is Women's History Month, still all month,

all month long it is, and we are talking about different aspects of women's history. So members

and patrons got an episode this week on women in medicine, and that talked about kind of mystics and herbalism and midwifery and stuff like that.

And this episode here for all of us is on different women in power. So one of the things that's

very interesting about the 16th century is that we do start to see the first women in roles of power, not just in England with the first

queen regnant with Mary the first, but also throughout Europe. A couple of years ago, I say a couple

time goes so fast. In 2016, Sarah Gristwood wrote a book called Game of Queens,

and I had her on the show. I'll link, I'll find the episode and link to it. And she talked about

how this period in particular was so unique with this emphasis on humanism on the Reformation.

There was this period where women really were stepping into their

own power. There were cases where, for example, a king was taken prisoner, and then his sister

or his wife had to rule Catherine of Aragon was the regent for Henry VIII when he was fighting

in France. There are so many of these stories in the 16th century,

and women were educated at rates they had not been up until that point, and also would not be

again for several centuries afterwards, too. This was like this little period of this

shining bright light for women in power that we we didn't see

again for a couple of hundred years afterwards. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call it

feminism as we know it. I don't like putting modern ideas onto people who wouldn't have

understood or necessarily embrace them. I don't

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