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The Open University. The future is open. Hello, friend, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network,

and the original Tudor History podcast telling stories of 16th century England since 2009.

I am your host, Heather. 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 more deeply in touch with our own humanity.

So this is episode 265 or 266, something like that.

And we are going to talk about a very unique type of woman in history.

And that would be the mistress.

So a lot of people have a lot of opinions about mistresses, especially royal mistresses,

noble mistresses. But it's true that they were very much a part of court life. They were

very much a part of life, as indeed they likely still are. And they have a very complicated

and controversial place in history. And we're going to talk

about them. We're going to talk about some famous mistresses throughout medieval and Tudor England

and what the role of the mistress was. Oh, and just a quick note that Yuletide with the Tudors

started on December the 1st, of course.

It's an Advent calendar and then we'll have a countdown for the 12 days of Christmas as well.

Every day opens up to a new video detailing some aspect of a Tudor Christmas or Christmas throughout medieval and Tudor England. So you can still hop into that

and just catch up on the days that you missed. You can go to Englandcast.com and right up in the top

right is a little button that says you'll tied with the Tudors. So you can check that out and have a very historically festive season

all the way right through January 6th. So let's get right into it. Royal mistresses, far from being

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