Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

History has traditionally taken a negative view of women in power.

This series of talks from our archive explores stories of powerful women and how their

legacies have been shaped by their gender.

I'm Lauren Johnson, an author and historian, and today we're joined by Dr Nicola Clark,

a historian of late medieval and early modern British history.

She's an associate lecturer at Royal Holloway College University of London and the University of Chichester.

Polly Putnam is one of the collections curators for historic royal palaces, and she's currently

working on the restoration of the Great Pagoda. Dr. Diane Atkinson is the author of Rise Up

Women, The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes, and she has consulted on TV documentaries, and

most recently the film Suffragettes starring Meryl Streep and Kerry Mulligan.

So starting chronologically with Dr Nicola Clark,

I'm interested to know how you respond to this idea of progress or not progress in the language of women.

I wrote down a little list of the different ways I could think of

that women were talked about or even talked about each other

throughout the medieval and early modern periods. And then I realized that each of those was still

in reasonably current use today. For instance, women are quite often talked about in a sexual

context. The word whore is as common then, as it is now.

Slander against early modern queens, particularly Amberlin and Elizabeth I,

...