 These are the fourth event in the Poor Mellon Centre Public Events Series, Tudas Now. It's my pleasure to welcome you this evening, that art history is increasingly attending to the global dimensions of objects and their material histories. rydym yn ei cael ei gael i ddweud y bydd eich cyfnod o'r ffordd hyn y ffordd o'r gwirionedd ymwylliant cyntafol yng ngyfaint o'r ffordd a'r cyfnodol. Rydym yn ymdill wedi'u gweld i ynglynigol Cymru yn y newid yn y newid, ac i'r sír i'r ddiplymu'r rhaglenol yma ar y Ffyrdd Autulwr ac i'r ffantysg ymddill cyd-gryffydd yn cyfnodol. Mae cyfnodd yn ddwy'n Lloron ymddindol, Matthew Dymaeg, a Jerry Brotten. Lauren is a lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the University of York. Her research explores how English colonialism influenced taste and politics in 17th century London and she's written on a diverse range of subjects, including civility and intoxication, female travellers, and the colonial gaze. Her first book, The Making of an Imperial Policy, Civility, and America in the Jakobien Metropolis, jointly won the Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize in 2021 Mae eich gwneud rydych chi'n meddwl i'r ddweudio'r amserion ffordd a gwneud yr edrych ar y bydd y gwneud hynny yn Llyfrgell, ac ar gyfer y Llyfrgellion Cyngor yn Llyfrgellai Cyngor. Efallai efallai yn cymdeithasol i'r gallu galei ym MŽeddol a'r BBC Radio 3, Yngyrch Gwyllys Gweithwyr. Mat Dimwch efallai efallai eich profesiad yr ydym yn ddwyloedd yr unedig, ac yw'r ddwyloedd ydym yn yr ystafell mae'r ddwyloedd. Y llwyddiad yw yw'r cyflwyno cyflwyno ar gyfer y cyflwno ymweld yng ngyflwng Llywodraeth yn cael ei ddweud y llwyddiad o'r cyflwyno, meathologiad ym Mhwyd, Elisabeth i globalism ymweld, ac ymgweld ymweld y cyflwno gyfweld ymweld ymweld. With Andrew Hadfield, hi'n edrych bod hefyd yn edrych ar yr edrych yma o Amersyn, Savages ac Maciavel, ychydig i'ch gydig i'r cyflwyno cwrsio ff矿 yn ynglyn â'r 1550 ac 1630. ac yn ystod y cwmwylliant y bydd y cyfnodd yng nghymru a'r ysgolwyr John Davies yn ymgyrchio'r cyfrifysgol. Jerry Broughton yw y profiad rhonaeson yr ac yn ymgyrchio Llywodraeth Cwmwylliant. Mae'n cyfrifysgol yn gweithio'r ysgolwyr yn ymgyrchio'r ysgolwyr yw 9 ymgyrchio'r ymgeisio yn yw 20 ymgyrchio. Mae'n gwybod ymgyrchio'r rhonaeson ar y Llywodraeth Cwmwylliant, The Renaissance Bazaar from the Silk Road to Michelangelo, The Sail of the Lake King's Goods, Charles I and his art collection, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and the prize-winning New York Times bestseller, A History of the World in 12 Maps. He is also a broadcaster having presented more than 10 BBC television and radio series, including Maps, Power, Plunder and Possession for BBC Four, one direction for BBC Radio Four, presumably not about the boy... OK, and Blood and Bronze, and We Are the Tudors both for BBC Radio Three. He has curated a number of exhibitions, including Penelope's Labour, Weaving Words and Images for the Venice Biennale in 2011, and Talking Maps for the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 2019 to 2020. His book, This Orient Isle, Elizabethan England and the Islamic World, was a Radio Four book of the week, a Waterstones non-fiction book of the year, and winner of the Historical Writers Association Prize for Non-Fiction. He's currently writing another book on the four points of the compass and a global history of discovery. So I can't think of three better overachievers to discuss globalising the Tudors with us this evening, and I'm delighted that they're able to join us. So the format will be... They will each speak for about 10 minutes on a single object to get us going and thinking about some of these themes. Then we'll move to a round table discussion before opening questions to the floor. So if Lauren would like to take the stand. Thank you so much, Christina. It's such a pleasure to be here and take part in this series, which I've really been enjoying, kind of listening in on so far. So I'll just turn to my image. So on the 18th of June, 1912, Workman tore down a timber frame building in Sheepside, not far from St Paul's Cathedral. The building sat on a 17th century site, and as these workmen demolished the floor, they struck a casket revealing a glimmer of gems. They had stumbled upon what is now referred to as the Cheap Side Horde, which has been called the greatest single collection of Elizabethan and early steward jewelry in the world. This collection contains hundreds of dazzling pieces of Tudor workmanship, enamel chains, amethysts, anemerald watch, cameos, Indian and Persian stones, and even beads from Africa and Argentina. So in the 10 minutes I have, or nine minutes and 50 seconds, I want to talk about one of those objects, and that's this small sparkly emerald pin shaped like a parrot. So parrots were considered to be symbols of erotic love. The choice of gemstone might be significant here, as the colour green could signify new love or perhaps jealous love. The parrot has been drilled for setting into a jewel, so it was probably meant to be worn on the body, perhaps pinned to a sleeve or bodys. In addition to the connections with unsentimental or lecherous love, parrots were also beginning to appear more frequently as objects of curiosity and status in Tudor England. There is an instance of a man being brought to his local justice of peace to answer for stealing a neighbour's parrot. In March 1596, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State wrote to Sir John Gilbert, announcing that her Majesty should like a parrot of his, only to be met by Gilbert's protest that he had never actually owned one. The parrot, Elizabeth's Secretary sternly wrote, shall be delivered. There are several accent portraits with parrots in them, kind of starting around this time, although they become a bit more frequent in the early 17th century, so there's one of an African grey parrot accompanying an Elizabethan woman, and then there are several more that I've come across of green and red parrots from Central and South America, including recently coming across a miniature from the early 17th century of a child holding a parrot by an anonymous artist. In the decades that follow, they become a bit more ubiquitous, so paintings such as Van Dyck's portrait of the Earl of Denby includes a very flashy multi-coloured parrot flying across one of the corners. Following on the trail of this emerald, I began searching for other mentions of emeralds in Tudor London. Privy purse expenditures in 1529 included a hefty £66 to Lady Kerry upon an emerald, and in 1530 to Christopher the milliner for 154 pearls and an emerald valued at £80. Gifts at Henry VIII's court included a crimson velvet doublet with emeralds in 1534. In 1545, an English secretary transcribed intelligence from Spain, writing that with regard to the ships that the English have captured of those gallies which left for the Mediterranean for the Atlantic, I wish to speak especially of the ship called San Salvador from Santa Domingo, the emeralds you will have sold. 50 years later, in 1593, English intelligence about Spanish cargos included reports of large chests full of pearls and emeralds, and one loose emerald that accompanied bars of silver sent by the viceroy of Peru. A report of Francis Drake's activities around the Strait of Magellan included intercepting Spanish ships that contained emeralds. Captain Francis, the account goes, and his people came to Puerto San Domingo and found a great crucifix of gold and emeralds which they had taken out of that ship alongside bars of silver plundering them. So in London, little emerald objects like this one entered into the world of artisanal craft, gift giving, and illicit trafficking. A lady Frank in Westminster asked the lapidary John Crithlow to cut her a small emerald, but Crithlow complained that he received of her lady for cutting the same stone not worth much more than their cutting cost. In addition to showing how skilled artisans learn to cut emeralds and mount jewelry such as this, we get a glimpse of the demand by women for these jewels. Crithlow had asked to cut one of these stones into an emerald ring, but to take special care in the cutting since it had already cost the lady 10 pounds. For one illegal East India Company sailor who had stolen the cargo of a ship, the safest place to store his most valuable stolen emerald, which he reported to be seven inches in length, was among some old shoes under some stairs in a house in Hockley in the Hole in Clarkinwell Green. When several East India Company agents went in search of the gem, they found the emerald at a Susan Brady's house and again kind of giving us the sense that women are kind of handling these objects kind of beyond the court as well. So emeralds could be located in the household pockets and jeweler shops of Tudor London, but where were they sourced from? So the emeralds, all the emeralds from the cheapside horde, were analyzed and curators found that the pieces all came from the mountainous district of Chivore in the province of Muzo 65 miles to the northwest of Bogota, Colombia. In the mid-16th century, as married the first marriage to Philip II of Spain encouraged England's connections to Spain's imperial reach, the Spanish extracted these blue-green emeralds from the mountains of South America, finding stones ranging from the size of a finger or thumb, as kind of reported by the East India Company agent to crumbs and grains. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, travel literature described the great store of excellent emeralds in diverse parts of the Indies, where it could be found the land of the emeralds which grow in stones like unto crystal. So this seemingly innocuous little object directly links the Americas and, by extension, the enslaved Muzo Indians who worked in the mines to English consumption and self-fashioning. In a manuscript known as the Jewel House of Gems, William Heath recorded how in the West Indies there are great store of mines of all sorts, such as in the realms of Peru and metals, especially gold and silver. In truth, Heath wrote, the Spanish had no knowledge of Potosí nor of the wealth of the mountains of Bolivia until an Indian called Gualpa from a province of Cusco going one day to hunt for venison was forced to lay hold unto a branch which issued from a vein of a silver mine. Finding pieces of metal, he carried it to Porco to trial the metal by fire. It is a fearful thing, Heath continued, and breeds an amazement to think upon it that so great is the desire of silver and wealth that for the gain thereof men endure many pains. Truly it is not without reason that Pliny said, we enter even into the bowels of the earth and go hunting after riches even to the place of the damned. In the English translation of the very popular account that kind of fueled the Spanish black legend Bartholomew de Las Casas' short account of the destruction of the Indies, Las Casas had written of how the Spanish and western South America in the region that is now Bolivia and Peru found those countries very fertile and full of people whereas abundance of precious stones especially emeralds. The conquerors were extremely cruel, they shed human blood without any scruple or remorse. The goods these people had in their possession, he wrote, was the motive that violently prompted the Europeans to persecute and destroy them. The English are very quick to be critical of Spain's method of imperial expansion, but they have fewer qualms about reaping the benefits of global travel. So to me this object is fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, I mean it's beautiful, it's a small pleasing object, it showcases the skill of the artisan who turned a stone into a playful piece of art to wear close to the body. The parrot motif building on medieval imagery might indicate carnal love, perhaps it's a love token, but it contains a certain resonance too with tutor exploration and the growing fascination for birds and feathered artifacts from Central and South America. The stone connects the hands of indigenous peoples to the lives, fashions and bodies of the tutors and to other trades and industries such as silver mining. It also connects us to different European ports from whence many American goods flowed before arriving in London from Seville and other other European cities and it conjures a time as the author Edward Galliano wrote when you could build a silver bridge from Potosita Madrid from what was mined there and one back with the bones of those that died taking it out. So an object like this one opens us up to a world of ships and shipwrecks where emerald jewels sank into the Pacific seabeds after hurricanes in the Florida Keys and East India Company merchants smuggling treasure perloined in the Americas and trafficked in Asia. It sheds light on stories and travel literature about Spanish crucifixes and Anglo-Spanish rivalries and the material culture of Aztec and Incan elites and moving forward as I continue to kind of look into this area I hope such emeralds might also continue to uncover more stories about resistance to the imperial project as well. After all it took Spain many decades of conflict to overpower the Muzo and Chippcha people who had mined emeralds for centuries before European travel. Thank you. Thank you Christina again and to my fellow panellists and it's very good to be back at the Paul Mellon Centre. I'm very pleased to be here and I will move on to my chosen object. So for me this remarkable object is a useful crystallisation and perhaps a kind of culmination of a series of Tudor engagements with the global. It's the only surviving example of its kind and it is as you can see a letter from Queen Elizabeth I. I mean her name starts and finishes the document. Interestingly it's signed unusually in the Italian style, Elisabeth Regina. And it's written again I think as you can hopefully see to the Emperor of Cataire and dispatched with the experienced Devonshire Sea captain Captain George Weymuth and his crew on May 1, 1602. Cataire was a kind of mirage, a kind of fantasy region imagined to the north of China sort of blending Cathay and China, Cataire, Cathire and a place with which China is often elided or connected and before Weymuth ships left on their long voyage to East Asia on the last day of April, this copy was held aloft and read aloud to the assembled members of the new East India Company in London. Before it was then carefully folded away with translations in Italian, Latin and Portuguese into a protective tin, the tin still survives amazingly, alongside what's described as a garnish of English trading goods. So different types of cloth, night caps, gloves and shoes, mirrors, locks, keys, hinges, bolts, maps, books, all designed to showcase English technical ingenuity and all of this was packed away to withstand the trials of potentially more than a year at sea before they would reach their destination. Hopefully you can tell from the reproduction that the letter is as visually stunning now I think as it was when it was initially completed and it's certainly intended to be visually stunning. It's a substantial parchment document, it's about half a metre across half a metre high and features again as you can see an elaborate banner border in red with swirls of gold foliage, limbed by a man called William Seger who was the Noroy King of Arms and seems to have been something of a specialist in these kinds of letters. He did other letters to China and other decorative letters to other potentates and the letter cost the East India Company the princely sum of six pounds, 13 shillings and forpants to decorate. Of course the Queen never paid for the decoration of her letters. From these banners again you can see at the bottom right and left hang pearls items which I think aren't there by accident. They hold their value in the global marketplace and were therefore useful even if only depicted when you're trying to establish a kind of mutually comprehendible iconography of magnificence. The use of coloured inks in the lettering, gold, red and brown here with an accentuated golden M for each use of the word Majesty is a device I think learnt from the letters that were moving between London and Istanbul from the Anglo-Ottoman correspondence in which in which Elizabeth had received letters in blue, crimson, gold and scarlet inks written on paper dusted with powdered gold. So here the English Queen and her court are attempting to intervene in global imperial spheres and are finding an iconography in which they can do so. Something similar but perhaps slightly less extravagant in terms of decorative scheme can be seen in the surviving letters from Elizabeth to Tsar Ivan IV which are now preserved in the Russian state archives and letters like this of course most of them don't survive because they arrive at their destination and then disappear for one reason or another or they don't arrive at their destination and disappear. But the ones that do survive tend to be extraordinarily decorative like this and there were probably many others reproduced in variant forms in the letters that were sent to India, Ethiopia, Morocco, Persia, the Indonesian kingdoms of Java and Aceh and of course to Istanbul so lots of letters sent out very few survived other than in secretarial copies. This sense of Tudor expansionism of new diplomatic and commercial horizons is also apparent on the level of the letter's content. The letter begins with an expansive opening to the great, mighty and invincible but conspicuously unnamed Emperor of Cathire. It states that the English are a people by nature inclined to great attempts and many years past and sundry times since Elizabeth has tasked her subjects with the finding out of some nearer passage by sea into your Majesty's countries through the north and east parts of the world. Many of these letters have never returned, not being heard of since their departure hence whereas others have been beaten back by the frozen seas and intolerable cold of those climates. All of this tells us that this letter was intended to be carried along the north west passage, a sea route that was speculated to lie over the north of what is now Canada and was imagined to be a kind of corridor that would carry English goods and merchants over the top of the globe into Cathire and to China. In the second half of the 16th century in particular it promised to be England's superhighway to global prominence. Indeed in the letter Elizabeth notes that Weymouth leaves with her blessing to find a nearer way of passage between England and eastern Asia than the usual frequented course which involves compassing the greatest part of the world so travelling right the way around the Cape and across the Indian Ocean. The opening up of such a passage could, Elizabeth writes, unite the two monarchs, their countries and their dominions for it would reveal that they were not so far remote or severed as they are estranged and unknown the one to the other. The arrival of this letter then would realise what Elizabeth calls the opportunity of intercourse of traffic or merchandise between the subjects of both our kingdoms. But Elizabeth goes beyond that and hopes for more that through this beginning a mutual league and amity may grow she says. The prospect of an alliance between Cathire, part of what was at least closely connected to China, which of course was the preaminent power in the early modern global economy and England, here the two on the fringes of that economy, is I think quite extraordinary. It shows how the English were willing to cast aside conventional geographies of peripherality and rethink the assumptions that their foremost connections were with Europe and the rest of Christendom. A league and amity with Cathire and ultimately with China, like those already established with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire would offer a further counterbalance to Spain and to Habsburg Catholic dominance. It's also of course a victory for wishful thinking. This was possibly the 12th letter that had been drawn up, decorated and dispatched for Emperors of the East. The letter concludes the very end with a justification of international trade which becomes a maxim for Tudor global thinking and follows the model of the very first English letter sent into the far north and to China, written by her brother Edward VI, 50 years earlier in 1553. This trade would allow the peoples of Asia to be served with the native commodities of these parts and in return we and our subjects would be furnished with things of like service and use. It was this that was understood to be God's plan in the world from an English perspective, that God had spread the natural resources across the globe in such a way that peoples necessarily had to come together to trade and out of such mutual benefit, she writes, amity and friendship may grow between us. Elizabeth looks forward to the receipt of His Majesty's letters to be returned by our said subject and concludes with a tellingly universalist invocation. She commends Your Majesty to the protection of the Eternal God, whose providence, guidance and perseverance preserveeth all kings and kingdoms. But, as you may have already worked out, this letter never arrived, which is why we have it. Indeed no Englishman arrived in China until John Weddell in 1637. Weymuth initially made good progress northward through June of 1602 into the Newfoundland area before the arrival of deep cold on the evening of the 19th of July led his crew to mutiny, tie him up, put him below deck and a storm drove them quickly back to England and the inevitable scrutiny of the courts and company investors. So amidst all those recriminations and the court actions in the aftermath of the failure of the voyage, somehow this letter, which had returned with them, mysteriously ended up in the Lancashire Public Record Office in Preston possibly through the hands of a senior naval commander called Robert Cross and it's there that I've seen it and you can still see it today, a nearly lost icon of late Tudor global ambition. Thank you, Christine. It's brilliant to be doing this. It really is great and especially after what we've just heard, I feel I'm going to be rather traditional. I'm both showing an image which seems very sort of art based in effect if we can just pop it up and is also probably closer, sorry because I'm using that, there you go, is slightly closer to home in terms of what Lauren and Matt have been talking about. So my image is a manuscript depiction of Iosaphir in Istanbul. It's dated 1588. It recently appeared, reappeared, having been miscatalogued in the British Library in manuscripts in the edition manuscript 5234. I didn't find it, Fuchsha Hart or Oxford found it, but we were talking about this and I've sort of picked up and tried to connect it to other stories about the person who is associated with which is what I'm going to talk about. So it's a very large drawing which was made and signed quote by me, Thomas Morgan who says he's a mariner having been above 15 years bound and thrall in the Turkey galleys. You can see across the top that Morgan has emblazoned Elizabeth's motto, Viva Elizabeth, always the same. Across the top of the building's dome is written the great temple called Santa Sophia at Constantinople where the great Turk called Sultan Murat, Dothan habit. So the drawing shows that some of you are probably familiar with Iosaphir set in its gardens with its distinctive dome, two of the four minarets that were added when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. I'm interested in it because how do we see it as a piece of art because Morgan was neither an elite traveller nor a draftsman. So there's an interesting question about what its status is and I think in all the objects that we've been looking at as artefacts, material objects. This of course perhaps seems more the former but I'm not so sure. So who was Morgan and what was he trying to achieve by drawing Iosaphir in this way in 1588? We do know a bit about Thomas Morgan already. He's part of the genre of written captivity narratives which some of you working in this area may know. Scholars like Nabil Matat and Roslyn Knutson have worked on already. Roslyn Knutson wrote an article called Elizabethan Documents, Captivity Narratives and the Market for Foreign History Plays in 1996. That great piece provided an appendix of documents drawn from the parish clerk's records of St Botolf Oldgate. Thomas Harridons, who was the clerk of the parish, kept a detailed daybook from 1583 to 1600. That daybook included descriptions of the baptism and deaths of many interesting figures in terms of talking about global lives in Tudor, England. Figures like Mary Phyllis, which people like Miranda Kaufman's written about in her book Black Tudors and her baptism at the same church in 1597. So Harridons is interesting because of the records that he kept. He also kept accounts of collections taken for English captives who were captured by the Turks in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Harridons' record of 26 May 1588 gives an account of Thomas Morgan. So I'm now trying to marry up the account that we have from that record with this image that Morgan drew. So just a sort of snapshot of the account from Harridons' records, which says in 26 May 1588 a collection was made for Thomas Morgan, who had been captived by the infidels and infidels has been as replaced Hungarians. So this becomes interesting in terms of who the infidel is. Captive by the infidels, presumably the Turks, not the Hungarians, memorandum that Thomas Morgan in the County of Surrey, who had served a magistina wars in diverse places in the wars in New Haven under Ralph Brown in a ship called the Red Dragon, also in Ireland and in diverse other places. And after that served under Sir William Gorge Knight in Hungary, whereby infidels he was taken prisoner of 15 years, kept bond and thrall in most cruel slavery and bondage until our loving subject, Edward Cottness Squire, most charitably redeemed him from the same in consideration wherever he was licensed by Her Majesty's Letters of Payton to gather the devotions of well-disposed people within the city of London in the town of Norwich. Dated 2 May in the 30th year of Her Majesty's reign, there was gathered for him in our parish church the sum of 16 shilling seven pens, which have been engrossed upon the letters and delivered to his wife. So this is interesting because it gives us a sort of global dimension to a figure like Morgan, a very non-alied traveller, and those connected to it, it seems that his career started as a soldier and a sailor, involved in the ill-fated New Haven or La Hav expedition of 1562 to 1663 in support of the French Huguenots, which of course failed in 1563. He then fights in Ireland, and then he fights against the Turks in Hungary in the late 1560s under Sir William Gorge, who was Vice-Admiral of the Fleet, who also acted as a mercenary in the Pair of the Holy Roman Emperor, maximally in the 2nd. Presumably this is the point at which Morgan was captured and that his captivity extended throughout the 1570s and led into Istanbul where he saw Ayah Sophia. Presumably his captivity lasted this long. What transpired prior to his ransom is unknown. Edward Cotton paid Morgan's ransom. Cotton's interesting because he was a merchant from Southampton with commercial interests in Brazil. The report of his gathering in May 1588 is the last we hear of Morgan, so we know as far as we know. We must assume that it's around this time he draws Ayah Sophia. So, there's an interesting question. When is this object actually created? I guess he doesn't do it in Istanbul and then brings it back home due to the relatively high quality of the finish. So, what compels this relatively modest man, a jobbing soldier held captive for 15 years in Turkey to draw Ayah Sophia? We have written accounts but very few drawings. What else can we glean then from that drawing? So, I'm cheating a little bit by just giving you a few more details here. So, I'm just running you through so you can see we can look back at this in a minute. The inscription on the left suggests that one of Morgan's main interests is in describing religious practice. He offers a vertical narrative. He offers a vertical narrative on the left describing religious practice. Starting with the call to prayer, describing the text next to the left hand minaret. It says these that are here to be seen in pinnacles. So, I do call the people to the church and to that end of try. So, here is throughout there's some attempt I think to describe what Morgan sees in rhyming couplers. You know, one wonders did he write as well as draw this object? It's questionable, we just don't know. Below he also describes what seems to be prayers within the mosque and those that herein do remain to Muhammad they try saying next to the living God that he remains on high. The inscription at the bottom describes Wudu which is the ritual washing before prayers. It says, and those that are here underneath at fountains they do wash believing that their sins they clear and God's do refresh. The figures in the windows, fascinating. Trying to offer some kind of account of a religious or a political hierarchy in labelling the figures in the window. On the ground floor what he calls Jamikas which are presumably Jamiseries wearing their distinctive headgear. And above are Murad's lords and what Morgan calls the high priest. To the right, just going back to the main piece he talks on the right hand side you have an inscription referring and praising Elizabeth. For God confound her secret foes that's an a line which is quite difficult to transcribe and give her still the upper hand above all her enemies. So there's a sense in which there's a celebration there of Elizabeth. Interestingly obviously at the moment which is the high point of the Angler-Ottoman relationship at the time. So who was the image intended for? Was it made as a gift to Cotton for providing the ransom that led to his release? Or was Morgan offering an implicit defence of his captivity? One theological response to the captivity enslavement suffered by the likes of Morgan was to question the motivation for their actions. John Elmer who was Bishop of London wrote in 1582 that it was quote, strange and dangerous that the desire of worldly and transitory things should carry men so far with such kind of traffic which neither our ancestors before is new of nor can be attempted without selling of souls for purchasing of pelf to the great blemish of our religion and the shame of our country. One of those standard arguments about expenditure, the loss of the goods of the country and really something that I think all three papers are implicitly talking about in some ways. So if individuals like Morgan chose to do so to travel in this way then their physical bondage was equally spiritual. A theological trial to be endured by the Christian soul. So was the drawing of Isaphir Morgan's praise of Elizabeth's religious constancy and his own bond and thrall in the Turkish gallids an attempt to justify his own religious travail? If so, is he one of the many dispossessed individuals caught between two different forms of bondage imposed by those in power and authority, one physical, the other spiritual, and neither of his choosing? Is this why he drew? I don't know perhaps, but it still doesn't quite explain who received it then or today. Fantastic, thank you. So I think those were all fantastic, I think that was a fantastic group of objects to start us off because they speak to so many different ways in which the global permeated Tudor society, political, religious but also personal and sort of social in the form of the jewel and then of course the different levels of craftsmanship that that implies as well. So the kind of professional gem cutter or the professional illuminator versus the sort of amateur sketcher. So in terms of breadth I couldn't have asked for better but I wonder if we can think a bit about the field at the moment and what you think are the most exciting developments at the moment, how recent scholarship has shifted our understanding of the Tudor global? I'd have a mic so they're going to do that. Well, yeah, I can start. I think one thing is that thinking about what a global perspective actually means and how we kind of think about connected histories, comparative histories. I suppose thinking about the difficulties perhaps of different languages, kind of understanding our positionality in relation to other cultures and how we navigate that. One thing that I find quite exciting and I know not everyone might but I think the geopolitics and kind of thinking about those political tensions, the kind of power relations behind the production of art is really tantalising and allows us to think about various cultures of making and how they come together. Oh, I'm just going to cough on. Oh, you're going to cough. And then you're going to say something. No, you go ahead. Okay. Well, I'm quite curious about how, is this an ignorant point, I'm wondering how far the analysis of visual culture is playing catch up with a lot of textual studies that's happened over the last 20 years. So the work that's been done in the field of east-west exchange, that's been very textual, the work that both you two have been doing and people have been writing about mercantile exchange ambassadors, people like Harbourn's work and so on and so forth. I'm wondering, I mean your work is engaging with this to some extent. So you also should talk about this in a way. I'm not really sure how much, because when we talk about Tudorart, actually, the other issue is it's a massive elephant in the room. What do we mean when we talk about Tudorart? There is no, because then we get into the interesting question of the global and the local and the national, because having written a book years ago on Charles I's art question, there is no notion of an English tradition around the art. So what I guess you're hearing here is the way, none of us have really looked at what you might call a more traditionally artistic object. My mind was nearest to it. So I think it's interesting that, fully enough, although there's been so much work on material culture and objects, I don't know in terms when we talk about Tudorart. Yes, later, and the European tradition I think is changing and has looked at cross-cultural visual culture, but the Tudor work I'm not so sure. There you go, Matt. No, I think that's exactly right. I was thinking when I was walking over here thinking about this very question about the work that's been going on recently around inventories, but that is, I mean it's not really about Tudorart either, it's about Tudor collections of objects, thinking about Susan Bracken's work, for instance, and the ways in which I think in the last decade or two we've become attuned to different kinds of objects in ways that weren't necessarily the case before. I think there's a wider debate going on. I didn't really want to mention the word, the debate around national trust property and being aware of the kinds of objects that are in collections that wouldn't have necessarily been picked out before, but are suddenly open to questions of provenance and I think those sorts of debates are quite interesting because of the way foreground art objects that wouldn't otherwise have been foregrounded. Yeah, I think I was kind of recently asked if I thought that there was like an imperial aesthetic in the kind of Tudor, Jacobean period and there certainly isn't a kind of imperial or colonial one in the way that we might think about later 17th or of course 18th century work and so it's kind of, is there not one earlier or have we just not thought about how we kind of conceptualize that or talk about it? I guess your book, Elizabethan Globalism, kind of thinks about that a little bit from the perspective of thinking about empire in a way that might encompass colonialism but also encompasses these other ideas about sovereignty and, you know, cross-cultural engagement and other kind of empires in the East. I want to ask you, because of what you've been doing and you know the field in a way better, but, you know, it also connects to what's going on. You know, the notion of the sort of what I call the theological Brexit that happens in the Tudor period, you know, in 1570, Elizabeth's excommunication and really from the 1550s, England is cut off from the continental high traditions artistically, you know, so there's a problem there about exactly how cross-cultural encounter takes place. Is this me? Is this me? It's interesting what you were saying at the end about trying to, you know, you just kind of jump, the Tudors jump into the periphery. They just cut out Europe and I mean that's quite funny because it is, it's very Brexit, it feels very much about the way in which they're related. Yeah, we've got a trade deal with cafes, so, you know. We're good, we're good, you know, absolutely great, but it is easy. And the polar ice is melting so we can get over the north, yes. But we know this, it's not until sort of 6th, 11th, 12th, 13th when you've got people like Arendl and Inigo Jones who are getting to Italy going, we've just missed out on the high renaissance, blimey, look at this stuff, they're bringing practitioners and it's like they've come from outer space. So when you've got that going on to then trace the wider, what we are talking about, the global, which I still don't think we know what you mean when we talk about the global, such a city. I mean, you know, what do we mean by that? It's vaguely international, there are things for the new world. What do we mean by that? You know, we need to give it a bit more heft rather than just sort of muddling around on the edges. But you know, you see in that field in terms of what we traditionally call as Tudorat. So I'd be interested to see what you say about it. Yeah, okay, there's so much there. I think just on that point, yes, I think it's true that Tudorat is playing catch up. I mean, as we saw in the previous round table for those of you who were here or you can watch it later online. It's only relatively recently that people have A, acknowledged that there was any art in Tudor England at all, foreign or otherwise, because prejudice is about the reformation having held firm throughout a lot of the 20th century. And then beyond that, you know, actually thought of asking interesting questions about it. So it's not just a case of antiquarian kind of discovery and listing and, you know, yeah, description. And actually thinking, okay, how does this fit into other theoretical moments? And what else can we say about it? So I think, yes, it's playing catch up, but that's why we're here trying to drag Tudorat history into the 21st century. Something you were saying, Lauren, about this idea of imperial iconography and a phrase that you had, which I wrote down because I liked it so much, mutually comprehensible iconography of magnificence. I think actually when we, I think we do find that at least earlier in the 16th century, but where we find it is in Henry VIII looking to Turkish imperial dress and I mean, there's this portrait of him possibly based on a whole vine, which is of him wearing a Turkish overcoat, effectively. And that kind of, him sort of embracing this reputation that he had as a, you know, the new Turk because he'd had lots of wives. So, you know, I think it struck me as well with your object, that the pearls, but also these sort of so-called arabesque ornaments in the borders, you know, they're writing to what we would think of as China, but they're using Ottoman decorative repertoire to show that they are a sort of generic foreignness or is there something else going on there that it's deemed both exotic in inverted commas but also somehow elaborate, imperial, exciting. Yeah. I'm thinking about Henry VIII parading around the Turkish clothes, which I love. There are plenty of references to it, as we know, that he travels across London, goes to mass, 10s weddings, dresses, the Turk, that famous painting where he's wearing a kind of kaftan. I still can't quite work out in my head whether... I think that's him playing a kind of exotic dress-up, as you were suggesting. Whether there's a kind of political charge there, that he's having himself painted dressed as the Turk to make a political point about, you know, Ottoman-French relations that have begun in the 1530s, about opposition to Habsburg, dominance. So it's a kind of European power play. Or whether it's... I suppose what its meaning is for Henry, I mean, it's something we'll never recover, but what happens when a monarch dresses up as a Turk in the 1530s when there's no direct contact between England and Turkey? Don't look at me. I have no idea what he's doing. I think it's something very different than when, say, Elizabeth I receives a suite of Turkish women's dress as a gift from the Ottoman court. There's suddenly a very different dynamic. Yeah, we knew that from the ambassadors. You know, one of the great contests. I mean, if you've been writing about this, I wrote about this with Lisa Jardin 20 years ago. You know, the context is the failed, it's the collapsed Franco-Ottoman alliance, Franco-Tudor Ottoman alliance, which is about to be signed at that point. That's the assumption that that's what that image shows. So embedded within it, of course, the Turkish carpet, which is there, and certain implicit signs and symbols gives you an indication of that's what happened. The pact falls apart, the painting gets literally shelved, the image that we have of the Moroccan ambassador. I think it's the same moment. It's a moment of what you expect is about to happen, an Anglo-Moroccan alliance, which is about to be signed in late 1600s, early 1601, for various reasons which are not the orientalist arguments of, oh, we can't have a deal with the barbarian, Moroccans is not what's going on, but it does fall apart, so the picture literally gets shelved. The thing with Henry, what is that moment about? Is it just also a power play? It's about... It is an attempt to assimilation, isn't it? I can dress in their clothes, therefore I have more power, but then we know that they're probably two seasons out of date. So actually he's trying to play catch up. You don't really know, but that's how I've always read those moments. You found all that stuff anyway. So when these objects do come to England, whether they are gifted by an emperor, or whether they come by it perhaps slightly more securities routes, how do you think patrons and viewers regarded these objects? Do you think they were aware of their origins, or do you think they had any sort of knowledge about where they came from? How much travels with the object? This is just going to be another... I have no idea. On one hand, I think, and as I kind of wanted to mention a little bit with the emeralds, there is knowledge about where these goods come from. It isn't just like someone's like, oh I had no idea that enslaved people had to collect these pearls. So there is an understanding of those commodity chains and where goods are coming from because there's so much travel knowledge that's circulating. I mean we've devoted our careers to looking at that, but there is a lot of information about where objects are sourced and the kind of consequences of that. I mean there's a great quote, a chaplain, James the first chaplain, so I know I'm cheating by looking slightly but his sermon that's preached at court in the kind of 1610s I think, and he basically says, you know the well-dressed courtier is basically clad in goods that indigenous peoples have had to produce for him, whether or not that's the pearls, the silks, the gold, the silver, the figure of the courtier is kind of created through this patchwork of different kinds of labour and non-European knowledge. But how much is that self-fashioning part of how we read a portrait or a kind of image? It's in the same way that we know that iPhones are created in conditions that we probably don't want to think of. So how much is that self-fashioning part of it? So it's kind of look at the access that I have to these goods even if they come at the expense of other people and how much is that not part of what the viewer is supposed to think about a monarch or a painting when they look at it. I mean I don't know what you think. I was thinking about the number of kind of broad sides against courtiers wearing foreign fashion, barbarian sleeves and so on, Turkish mustachios that go in and out of fashion and they're basically told that they're nothing better than dogs in doublets, which I've always enjoyed as a sort of insult. But for me, I think there's a change over the course of the 16th century but even though it's the course of Elizabeth. I think if we're, I appreciate Jerry's point about what are we talking about when we're talking about the global, but if we think about the 1550s as a key point for England's expansion into new markets with Henry VI and the search for the north-west and northeast passages and beginning to write letters to the Emperor of China as a sort of origin point for that commercial expansion. Then I think the goods that return from that commercial expansion are treated in a very different way than the ones that start to arrive in a sort of bulk trade interaction that develops around about 1600 or the early part of the 17th century. You can see that by the way that they are treated, the way that they're mounted, the way they seem to have been displayed. Robert Cecil, who I've written about, his initial collection of porcelain, the porcelain is taken to an English silversmith and mounted in very specific ways with classical motifs. He seems to have jettisoned all of that when everybody else started to do it and started to focus on acquiring unadorned porcelain as the kind of fashionable, more difficult to get item. So I think there's a sense that as the volumes of trade change, as the roots of trade change, tastes change, and also elite tastes change in reaction to popular tastes, so there's a kind of sequence of complex interconnections there. Sounds good. Well, I suppose for me I'm thinking of the, you know, John Dee scrying mirror, which we now know was from the obsidian minds of Mexico. And the fact that he used that for sort of spiritual purposes or attempted spiritual purposes, the fact that actually in Aztec culture it had associations with the spirit world, it could be a coincidence or something to do with the material suggesting things like that, but it just seems like sometimes, you know, not just the mode of production, but also the cultural value of these things possibly travelled with them. I mean, it would be really interesting to know whether the kind of porcelain that William Sestle valued was actually the hardest to get, or the most valuable, you know, was he buying stuff that they were making for export and not having that understanding. So yeah, I suppose thinking also about cultural value as well as, you know, the mode of production. It's certainly the case that China is a label attached to many things that clearly didn't come from China. So I think, I mean, there's been some arguments that suggest that there's a big, with the cabinets of curiosity which we haven't mentioned yet, and the kinds of collections we're talking about, that there's the kind of beginnings of something like a kind of conno-surship in England in the later part of the 16th century. But it's a conno-surship that's kind of floundering in the dark. They don't really know what it is that they're talking about. They don't really know the provenance of these items certainly in terms of Chinese goods come from captured Portuguese ships. So, you know, you just pay for whatever you can get and then you say, yes, of course this comes from China. Here, see it on display in my drawing room. No, I just wanted to bring in one of my favourite examples, which is a peddler. So a gentleman, a kind of country gentleman, sees a peddler walking around on a summer's evening and he's wearing an Indian hat that he says he... And so the man writes to Robert Cecil again and kind of says, this man has this Indian hat which I think must have been taken from the West Indies in a conflict in the expedition by Francis Drake. So already there's a sense of, OK, this is a valuable object that shouldn't be in the hands of this peddler kind of wandering around the countryside and the Secretary of State should kind of know about this. But the really great thing is that a few weeks later there's another letter that Cecil receives from this man and who kind of says, oh, so about that Indian hat I wrote to you about, it turns out it's not actually from the West Indies, it's from London and it seems to have been made there. So then you kind of get all these other questions of these like knockoffs, you know, that we've been making and then there is that sense of the elite still kind of want access to the real thing. You know, they want the real feathers and the action of the Indian King. They don't want the kind of, you know, imitation object that was made on the cheap side of it. Died pigeon feathers, yeah. Do you reckon Cecil's just therapy gets all these letters going? Not another letter about a global object which I have done and said. Well, wasn't that, there's the shipwreck, the Portuguese shipwreck off the south coast and then he's sort of all the, when Robert Cecil's going down to try and secure the goods on this thing and he said everyone he meets on the way is going down to the south coast of Perfew because they've just crammed their stuff into their pockets. And other orifices of Perfew. Nice. Okay, so we've got imported objects and things coming to England but besides actual physical movement of things from far away to nearby how else might we trace the influence of Tudor exposure to other cultures and material and visual culture? Traditionally though, it's been, well, some of this analysis has been done through carpets and fabrics hasn't it? There was a big vogue quite a long time ago now to identify carpets in Renaissance art and to the extent that you could identify the weave and place them in specific places I think there's a lot of work going on now about fabrics and trying to identify the provenance of particular fabrics or the styles that are being reproduced but it is very hard I think. And as we were saying before the fashion's changed so fast that even when you recognise it in a portrait for example you're still kind of wondering is this meant to be seen as outdated by now? Is this actually produced in the regions that we think it was? But yeah, I think this is something that I've been thinking about with the work I've been doing with the National Portrait Gallery but it's just how you can look at the various objects in a painting but also things like the rugs the jewellery the pearls but also dyes I guess are another useful way through technical analysis and things because when you find something like cochineal dye then you know that's come from Central America and that is a very tangible we can kind of speculate about where various jewels come from but things like the dyes you know there's like a little piece of some beetles that were crushed in South America that are inside a portrait of Titian or something Absolutely and obviously ultramarine as well you know from Afghanistan and the fact that it was from Afghanistan being part of its value that it had this cache of close to Eden so it's a slightly more heavenly pigment than as you write which is just from Germany And golden silver leaf I mean obviously the silver leaf is probably again coming from real context currencies I guess for me the struggle is also how you read absences in things as well so we find lots of goods that are being treasured that are coming from Persia or the Ottoman Empire you don't see indigenous headdresses and kind of tutor art even though they're collecting them so then the question is kind of why not if it's a can you prove a kind of deliberate act of erasure because I do think there's something to be said here about the English conception of civility and the fact that that civility hinges on kind of access to the imperial greatness of kind of Asian territory they also kind of juxtaposing that civility against the supposed kind of savagery of those people that the English are in the process of attempting to colonize at the same time So do you think we can add attitudes towards other cultures in the use and sort of value of the objects themselves well yeah I guess I mean I guess we can all give examples of where we think I guess what Matt was saying about the Henry VIII example mine from when I wrote Orion Isle was discovering is a story of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire has a tapestry called Fides with the first and the first depiction of the Prophet Muhammad from the 1580s and I drove up there once with my kids and I was getting ice cream and I walked in and I went why do you have an embroidery of the Prophet Muhammad here and it's a bit like the Lancashire story that it was in Derbyshire and what you see is an image of Elizabeth with a prostate figure of what seems to be the Prophet Muhammad labelled us so and also with the Al Qurran so with a copy of the Qurran and what seems to be a representation of a mosque in the background now how do you read that do you say this is a representation or a reflection or a response to an Anglo-Islamic relation that we didn't really know about 40-50 years ago but now is very much the centre of the field so we now know that Anglo-Otoman alliance is a very very significant part of Elizabethan foreign policy do we say it's a reflection of that or do we say again it's trying to play games claiming that reform Protestant theology is trying thing over an image of Islam and we know that the narratives or the claims around conversions you know Matt's done more work on this than most people that we know that of all the conversions that were going on it was mainly Protestants who were converting to Islam in the Mediterranean rather than any Muslims who were converting to Anglicanism of which we have one example from the 1580s and that's it so you look at that image and you think again are we seeing a nascent emergence of a sort of Protestant imperial iconography is it more of a response in a confused way to an alliance and what the heck is it doing in Derbyshire and I tend to feel I don't know it's odd I suppose our training and our more conservative history tells us that it's always already a symbol of visual western iconography which is trying thing over a sort of anaconic representation of Islam but maybe what we're hearing and I think what you're doing is saying maybe we need to think much more carefully about what those images are doing these days and I think you'll work more on the new world stuff is perhaps doing that but also you can talk to that as well Thinking about that harbour call image it is, it's an odd it seems almost anomalous and then you realise that there's something very similar in the margins of the English prayer book from that period that's probably elaborating copied into the tapestry and harbour call and then you start to think well why is the image of Prophet Muhammad being crushed by a figure of a female personification of faith in the English prayer book and it opens up a different way of thinking I think about the way in which the Anglo-Otoman relationship worked because we've discussed this many times before on the level of faith as in the letter I was talking about everything becomes in the correspondence everything becomes very universal the eternal God bless you and so on whereas any discussions in England about Islam specifically maintain without question that it is a dominable religion that is infernal and so on and should be crushed and how those two things co-exist in England in the period that you were talking about Jerry the kind of height among the Ottoman relations between say 1580 and the mid 1590s it is very peculiar it comes back to that question about elites and popular culture and the way in which English elites seem to have been able to quite easily negotiate some of these contradictions in ways that a popular culture wasn't allowed to true although this tells a lie to that a little bit because it doesn't have that sort of very anti-Turkish Islamic tradition it's quite descriptive in many ways so it's interesting because from a non-elite figure I gave a version of this and played around with first colonial scholar Gatry Spivak famously in the 80s said can the subaltern speak I was saying can the subaltern draw this is interesting as a non-elite figure and of course an Englishman who is a captive at that point who very much feels that he would be the subaltern at that point the power of the Ottoman polity is very much that he is the subaltern he is the minor figure there so to represent that in this way is kind of interesting because it doesn't give you the sort of the vertuprative account of Islam it's not so again I think that's interesting in terms of these different regimes that we talk about the visual culture who's producing the work and why I still don't know I have no idea why I don't understand this image why I'm so fascinated by it this is a great example because I want to talk recently about kind of sailor's drawings in the 18th century on board kind of East India Company ships and these kind of amateur artists actually just produce so much beautiful artwork and then you kind of think oh that's really annoying that we don't have that for an earlier period but then we actually kind of do in some examples of there and I'm thinking also of the Drake manuscript so a kind of anonymous artist travelled with Francis Drake during his certain navigation in 1577 to 1580 and left behind all these drawings of Flora and Fauna and there's lots of indigenous peoples being depicted in that they're kind of shaking trees to kind of get the birds to fly out of them to collect the feathers that fall down there's a really poignant image of an enslaved African diver who's kind of swimming away from this large kind of man to ray in the water and so it might kind of be quote-unquote bad art from a kind of aesthetic perspective but on the other hand it's kind of opening up so many other perspectives in which we can approach this material. I think that's something we see with the John White drawings as well sort of say you know can this have open speak well it's such a complex issue whether because there were so many different people involved in that obviously the John White drawings were primarily produced from a quote propagandistic perspective to try and persuade investors back home that there was all this stuff that could be you know grabbed but also you've got Thomas Harriet you've got John White himself genuinely curious about these cultures that seems trying to learn the language trying to communicate with the people which adds a big layer of complexity as to what those images really are showing you know is it entirely about sort of getting one over on the natives or is it actually about trying a sort of early ethnographic impulse? I mean the John White drawings are so beautiful. I mean I was lucky enough to kind of see them in person at the British Museum a few years ago with Dr Stephanie Pratt and who's a kind of culture ambassador for the Code Creek Dakota and being there in the room with her and kind of looking at those objects and discussing them and the more you look at them the more you start to see kind of non-European cycles of kind of thinking about you know the kind of circularity of some of the images and the fact that there's almost no European objects in any of you know there's the one image of the girl kind of holding Elizabethan doll but other than that it's almost you know they are portraits and their portraits that in some ways should be sitting alongside other kind of Tudor and early Jacobean portraits Great So if we're thinking then about particularly the west and the way that Tudor explorers were approaching the new world how would what works fit with wider narratives about England's colonial ambitions in this period? What about the new world? Well all these I think So the work I've been doing at the moment Do you mention the book I'm working on? Well I'm not really working on it Well he is the first he goes further north as a European then anyone who has been before gets quite close to the kind of upper reaches of Greenland and he is unusual because he seems absolutely fascinated in Inuit language and returns Richard Hackford in his principle of Inuit vocabulary with kind of rough translations as well as accounts of his voyages he takes three voyages up into that region and later travels to the east and west Indies What struck me when I was thinking about it in the context of our discussion was the way in which moments which we tend to call encounter moments of encounter like Davis arriving at the tip of Greenland calling out to try and bring indigenous peoples in they arrive in canoes they start playing instruments and dancing the English to try and attract the Inuit in and then there's an exchange of goods they give English items and they receive items in return and it's the same tale in every equivalent moment that I've seen certainly for Frobyshire and Davis all of these voyages into the north west all begin with the exchange of goods and the English of course think that they're giving away things of small value and getting things in return of greater value or indeed that these exchanges are a kind of preliminary step towards accessing something of greater value whether it's precious stones or anything else but one of the things that crops up again and again this is a slightly weird digression I admit is a fascination with the canoe as a kind of technical marvel everybody writes about canoes every picture you have about a cabinet of curiosity that has an indigenous canoe again perhaps we're thinking slightly different ways in slightly the wrong way about what we think of as indigenous art and the way in which it was appraised from a kind of European perspective because the things that were collected and valued and brought back wouldn't necessarily fit the normal definition of art and yet were displayed as such and were held as such the first English voyages to West Africa in the 1550s with cargoes of pepper, some gold and ivory that they don't quite know what to do with and they bring back a vast elephant skull huge that takes four men to carry it and they put it on display in Central London and people from all over the city are allowed to come and gape at it and it's not art in the conventional sense is it but it shows something of the way in which objects that were brought from distant locations were displayed understood, thought of used as a way of articulating something about the wider world The question then for me is just are these gifts, are these taken so there's already that story of collecting and I think it's it's very tricky because I think sometimes these objects were gifts and so it's almost too easy to say they were all taken by conquest but it does risk stripping away a sense of agency and cultural value that indigenous peoples are giving to these objects that they want Europeans to have they can be subversive as well Jack Davies at the British Museum he works on this later period but looking at the way that indigenous groups in North America on the west coast for example would carve anti-colonial messages or stories onto canoes that they then gift to put on display so how do we get to that kind of understanding of the function of these these artifacts or these art objects when we don't we have so little written by these peoples we have such little evidence left of the intentions behind them and I think that is a huge obstacle in how we build a global picture of Elizabeth Amarff Do we want to bind to the colonial discourse narrative as well though that's one of the issues because we're so tied to some notion that we have to say this is going to lead to what we see later in the 17th, 18th century and I wonder whether that's true I wonder whether we see too much to a sort of very very limited argument about plantations in the new world and beyond that everything that goes eastwards there's no notion about colonial projects there's nothing there's nothing about what's happening with the Ottomans, with the Barbary States with anything to the east of the Cape of Good Hope which is about plantations or colonial settlement it's purely a new world narrative and even that it's just disastrous so we were doing this in literary studies decades ago people were all the tempest representation of colonialist discourse how Tudor England is always already going to become this great imperial power not really we don't have to buy into that and of course at the moment it's very tricky I think with the culture wars argument that there's a need again to talk about say the issue of slavery and it's really difficult it's not a plug or anything but it's having done a radio series about other Tudors and these kind of questions about the globalised moment in the 16th century in where England was which was nowhere, it was just a spit was just something on the corner so I'm asked about China, it's interesting oh yeah we're making all these claims and nobody knows who we are Chinese or the Turks don't even know we are so I worry about how we made the argument and do we give too much agency to that visual culture that says it's already laying down a story about colonial claims to territory to the sort of subjugation of other peoples and I'm not so sure because until you get really the joint stock companies that start East India Company the Virginia Company really it's a much more of a Jacobian and Caroline moment and I'm so this is the next project presumably nobody talks about this about what's happening in that period in the sort of 1620s, 30s, 40s because then it just gets taken over by civil war narratives and that's the next project but you know it's interesting around how we go Tudors and we ought to extract so much from the Tudors around an early colonial project I'm not so sure we should I think we should be saying this was much more hit-and-miss, it was very contingent there's a kind of hit-and-miss narrative we can extract some of that material from people like Dee from some of Elizabeth's letters Elizabeth writes to Moraddon says you know I'm the great defender of the faith and I own half of the western world and he's like no you're not you're just telling porkies she says she's a defender of the faith in Ireland, France not so much, you know those claims need to be called out as yes it's a claim it's a pretty empty and hollow claim and so I wonder what whether we just put too much on the visual culture to say here is a kind of colonial project which we see emerging maybe not, not so much but we're so enthralled to reading backwards and saying it has to be there and maybe the Tudors are not the moment to look for it well I think that in the 1580s that is and things like John White's drawing so you do get a sense that you're on the cusp of so many different ways and there is a sense even in I mean I find Thomas Harriet's text in which these images are later printed you know really interesting because on one hand they are divided into the commodities we can get from here the commodities that will be useful I mean the word commodity comes up again and again and again and that is you know that is part of the colonial project but as you say I mean there isn't any guarantee that that colonial project will be successful at that point and so the the kind of 60s, 70s 80s it's difficult to kind of get back at them without thinking about what we know from a later period I mean saying that I think there's no getting around the kind of the trauma that indigenous peoples today still kind of associate with that very first moment because they do see that as the kind of moment where you know the intervention really started to come and continued to come after that I think this is interesting what's going on at the moment as well about that suggests that there is no single colonial model that the Spanish had a model the Portuguese had a model the English were working between and around those models but were also coming into contact with the models of what an imperial looks like and there's that recent book on conquistables by Cervantes which suggests that actually when people misunderstand the Spanish colonial model and in fact it's essentially a many evil idea of our trans planet into the new world in which indigenous peoples may have had more rights than they would have had under the Cep a Portuguese model which was more commercially and evangelical oriented sort of swerve in and out of those two potential models whilst also keeping in mind what's the great book by Patricia Seed ceremonies of possession from like the 1990s great book where she says you know all the European powers make different claims and that's why you have a lot of the collisions between them because the Portuguese use mapping and then the Spanish say we don't recognise your claim because we're talking about something completely different hence the collision great book we're all about settling gardens well that is why I think plantation is actually quite useful an important concept and needs to be brought into that discussion of what is empire what is colonialism where do they intersect and when are they different because often country house poetry is about plantation and of course plantation starts with Ireland before it moves elsewhere okay so before we open the floor to questions one last question for the panel which is if Tudorart is playing catch up what would you like to see next you know where should Tudorart go in terms of the hazily defined global it's got to be collaborative work I think we'll all say this that you need to be work well it's then interesting isn't it about the current political situation how difficult it is when I say things like we need to be working with Turkish historians well there are the ones arresting them you talk about trying to work with North Africa scholars as well you try and talk about working with people from the Lebanon it's a real problem but I think we need to have a model more like the social sciences even the sciences because you've all heard this from me before but the notion that we're all taught through the Greco-Roman Latin tradition none of us speak Arabic none of us have Turkish we're not doing that kind of work and we should be because I think until we do that I'm going to say a lot of this work remains Orientalism and until we start having different voices in collaborative work which is crossing languages and different visual cultures which would then perhaps have people from those different cultures oh well actually what I'm seeing with this is something completely different so I think until you get that you're still going to be I think pussy footing around a little bit and that's what I'd like to see but it's really hard to do and it's about research council funding trying to build those kind of networks with scholars who are prepared to do it as well and that's what I'd like to see and I've stopped doing this work now I won't do it anymore because I don't have the languages and I don't have those contacts and contacts within those situations but it's what Edward Said warned us about back in 1978 you know there's a point where it's about representation of others and that's really problematic so that's my slightly polemical thing about where we should be going this work has done a huge amount in the last 30 years massively it's transformed the field but it's very much come from what we might lazily call the west or the Anglo-American tradition rather than taking it seriously about how you do cross cultural work across different cultures yeah on that point money putting the money for your mouth is because you do need to build relationships of trust with the kind of communities you're working with and that doesn't happen overnight and the number of times you come across applications for funding and it's just kind of like the turnaround is very quick it's kind of expectations you're going to have outputs and kind of information within a year or within a couple of years and especially when working with historically invaded or colonised peoples they're not, as you say it's if they want to work with us in the first place and so it takes time to build those trust based relationships that would bring I think greater understanding in conversation and the levels of interpretation that we need I suppose also it's I mean we are talking a little bit about mixed media or the cultural transmission so many times when I was researching my first book I kind of came across an image and I was like oh my gosh this shows that the English are really interested in indigenous peoples there's this kind of woodcut or something and then it always came from like Holland or from Spain it had always been published in like earlier from a different European or colonial power and so it's also do we even understand how images are talking to each other we do a little bit I think with texts and particular iconographies but I think there's a lot more to do about artists and practices processes around printing and kind of studios and the way that the English are speaking to Europeans about these kind of global encounters and then the last thing I would quickly say is I guess thinking a little, continuing to think outside of the canonical as well even just their wonderful Elizabethan paintings in museum collections in the states for example and that are quite unfamiliar to a lot of us because we just kind of look at the ones that are perhaps most easily accessible or the ones that we kind of see because we're in London a way of access to museums in London but I think there's a lot more thinking about objects and things and dyes in portraits and in paintings from the Elizabethan era beyond Henry and Elizabeth and the monarchs that we've kind of speaking about. I completely agree with both though the only thing I'd add would be carrying on the work that's already going on about opening up collections and opening up archives there's still a lot of work to be done with Jerry's written about this far more than I have of accessing collections that should be publicly available that aren't. There's a lot of work in digitisation going on in the National Archive and of course of early modern books that allow us to cover much more material to make connections to material that wasn't possible before but there's still huge archives related to this period that are really uncataloged and unexplored so I think there's a lot more work to be done there too. Yeah and this room I mean just look at the room and think about what we're talking about and you think that will have to change will have to change well you know it's going to be this with feminism you know if Natalie Zemin Day this will talk about this about you know opening up the archive when women were doing that work and of course then the materials look completely different it's about who's doing that work and at the moment you know we would all say that I guess you know when she was basically you know white westerners who'd been doing this work and that that encounter with the archive and who's doing it needs to change well on that note let's do a little bit to diversify and ask the room if there are any questions also online Rachel do you want to start? Actually there's a question that's come up that launches straight off of that point where someone was asking if there are any kind of black early modern historians whose work you could share or reference to I'm just for the interest of the room Just on the panel with Dennis Britton who's done some amazing work on conversion recently I'd highly recommend England's other countrymen and Kim Hall, I mean the work of Kim Hall every time I go back to it I'm just blown away and you know that came out in the mid 90s and it's still kind of it seems like it's only now really that she's being cited in the way that she should be but she's done some really great work on portraiture and thinking about portrait miniatures and the relationship to the sonic form for example Yeah absolutely, I mean Kim Hall's Things of Darkness, I mean you're right it's just becoming our classic book and I think it has led to a new younger generation particularly of black American scholars who are doing this work now I think in the UK that's still developing this and it's why it's interesting because it's a reflection I think of what the culture's about so it's no surprise that there's been much more work done I think recently on Anglo-Islamic work and young British Muslim scholars were starting to do that work and in the states of course the debates and the issues are slightly different and questions about slavery would be much more to the fore I think more recently I think in the UK the humanities and history study of that period particularly is still playing catch up but that's for very specific reasons about politically what's happened really in the last 50-60 years in the UK in contrast to the US Fantastic Any other any questions in the room? Oh yes we have one at the front Thank you It's a more basic question but going back to the image of Iosaphia I wondered if we could interrogate the image a little bit more what are we actually looking at and does it bear any relationship to anything that existed in Istanbul in the contemporary period is it a fantasy image a hybrid indoor outdoor image and the portals with the figures is to some extent however the basic outline and the domed shape of Iosaphia and the gardens are actually relatively accurate so the way in which the figures are being portrayed is clearly Morgan is interested in something else then about imperial hierarchy within the Ottoman court about religious questions so that's a kind of overlay over what is a pretty there's a Melchior Lorwx panorama of Istanbul from the 1550s a more elite image by European, you know, western European traveller around the 1550s so you can map it and relate it I mean he's not a trained draftsman Morgan's not a trained draftsman but there is clearly two things going on there's a basic understanding of the building and a representation of the building and the way in which it's changed after the 1450s when it's turned into a mosque after the city falls to the Turks so there is that sense of a sort of realism there is a representation which it's recognizably Iosaphia but then the figures and clearly what's going on with the representation of hierarchy that's clearly something else that he's interested in as well Were there balconies outside the building or were there an interior feature that it's just sort of more we think so, yeah Is there a Byzantine waltz is that what the cannulation bit around the outside is still be Byzantine, yeah Have you looked at sorry, I'm kind of cheating and asking a question but just kind of albums and kind of album and the quorum and kind of travel books I mean is there some kind of resemblance between the kind of studios that produce songs for that or does this seem quite unique? It seems quite unique, it really sticks out as an image, you know a fuchsia heart threw it up and we all kind of went what on earth is that? and doing that in 1588 just has come out of nowhere Great, and at the back there thank you Hi, so this question is just inspired by you were mentioning I think it was in the 1550s of the elements all of it was a great curiosity to the public and I was wondering what kind of claim you might be willing to stake about that object because it occurred to me that it's maybe on that borderline natural objects and artworks in the sense of being a kind of proto-example of a wunderkammer so I'm wondering what if you could just talk a little bit about that possibility I think it's certainly I've certainly been thinking about it in that context and it's only mentioned in the briefest of sentences in Richard Eden's Decades of the New World which ends with these brief narratives by Eden relating to the first English forages to West Africa and Eden mentions the skull in order to castigate those people who file past it and just gape at it in wonder and he uses the term wonder and it is an item that is wonderful but it's wonderful because of the way it tells us something about God's creation and God's ingenuity and Eden's point is that people should be thinking about God when they see the subject not about far-flung places or just being amazed they should be reflecting on the creation and their part in it so I think it's part of that kind of wunderkammer style of item but for Eden it's a kind of prodigy it's a kind of item that makes us think about God but Eden says that a lot which is what a lot of art is meant to do Richard, another question online? Yes we have got a question asking if there are any more examples of depictions of Muslims at prayer that could be shared or referenced Will the Harvard Hall embroideries and embroidery not in a tapestry also shows an image of a mosque and it seems to show a form of religious observance we know it's a bit of a fantasy probably but we date that to the 1580s there are the more I mean you've looked more at this in terms of the depiction of the Prophet I mean there are more apocryphal images but there are a bit earlier of the Mohammed's Dove and they tend to be a preaching rather than prayer there are accounts but I can't think of any other images there are moments on stage where the posture of prayer is taken up but as I say I can't think of any images from this period and you know we do know that from the from the account books that we have from Henslow and so on we have descriptions of turbans and dress which is connected to that form of observance so that's kind of interesting because what can we do with that in terms of recreation of those moments of performance as Matt said you know post-Tambolene you know Mahler's Tambolene just kind of kick starts an avalanche of representation of figures who are synonymous with Islam and Muslims this work wasn't done because you know people used to say to me when I started it oh we know the word Islam and Muslim doesn't enter the English language until the 16th and 20s yeah true so what are all the synonyms about Turks you know Saracen you know Persian, you know maths and all this kind of work about those terms it's a mis-recognition of what's being seen but it doesn't mean that there's not an account of what's going on and what's going on around the staging is fascinating because it's just a fashion, you know the 1590s it's like everybody writes a Turk play you know Shakespeare is unusual because he says oh everybody else has done that I'm going to do me a Maul play that's what he does with Titus Andronicus so the representation there of religious observance I think is really interesting with those plays like Green Selimus which are representing those forms of worship interesting I think there's more to be said there too performance and visual representation that kind of comes out of that so even just you know women in masks kind of being portrayed in these in paintings where they're wearing their mask costume so again it's that question of what are they trying to say when they're wearing this mask costume are they alluding to kind of the ideas of the mask which are often you know there are Persian masks there are masks that tend to people that think it's called gypsies so what are those power dynamics that are at play in these seemingly kind of fanciful portraits as well and I think you make the point that although although we tend to see somebody in this quasi-Persian dress and think that must be a mask costume actually there may be more in that well they didn't make us back to the Henry the Henry point is that apart from the case of Elizabeth we've got documents that suggest they were sent but there are documents that suggest people are wearing the costumes together and doing the Shirley's of just coming back from being ambassadors in Persia and just kind of running around insisting on keeping the turban on and things and it isn't it that then they're kind of told off and told that they need to get that back and then there's Catholic imagery in that too he has a turban with a little cross on it doesn't it? Does that episode that Jerry mentioned before the one conversion of a Turk to Anglicanism that happens in 1586 and that happens because Drake rescues 100 Turks from the new one from Columbia brings them back to England and they're all put up at the government's expense in somewhere next to the river just outside of the city and then one person agrees to convert and comes in and they celebrate to go back to Turkey on the company ships so all of those people must have been worshipping in full public view and there's just main to tell us about them and they come back via Cartagena and they go back via Rhona can they pick up Manteon and Vanchesi? I mean it's extraordinary so you've got a boat full of Reformed Protestants, Turks and indigenous Americans it's just mad extraordinary to talk about a global moment I know but also speaking about art that we can't talk about I mean I think that's the voyage where is it possibly the voyage where Tom's Harriet says he loses his diary and his drawings in a storm and you just think like oh no what would those have contained considering how kind of sympathetic and interested he is in kind of native cultures Absolutely I think time for one more question does anyone else want this very keen question at the back of the room then? I've actually got three Any evidence of where the parrot was carved how secure is the knowledge of the distance to China? Do they actually know it's shorter? And would the artist know that that used to be a Christian church? Yes I imagine he would have known that they would have known the Byzantine tradition with the script Orthodox So one done So the idea of distances is it's still a kind of imprecise art in terms of Tudor mapping and Gerry knows more about this than I do but 1592 Emery Mullanew produces the first English globe which I think is the basis for some of these more outlandish ideas because they look at the globe Here's the north sea area we can go over here and here is Cathire and China which is misleading of course because all of that polar region is covered in thick ice so there's no way they were ever going to get through it So the idea that they can shorten the passage by going north was impossible either north, east or north west there were English travellers who had made it Anthony Jenkinson's the most famous one had made it through Persia and later on when English ships start to travel to Japan and China in the 17th century they obviously have a much clearer idea of what's possible than what's not but at this point I think in the 1590s it's still a little hazy In terms of the parrot no idea is the answer So it could have kind of gone to Europe first there's a couple other pieces a watch that's very intricately carved and that may have been carved in possibly Switzerland or Germany before coming and emeralds were also very fashionable in Asia as well and often the English specify that they want an emerald from Asia even though that emerald would have come from South America first So tracing it is fairly impossible but there were a growing number of artisans in late Elizabethan England who would have known how to carve emeralds as well as whether or not they were European migrants themselves Fantastic Discussion can continue for those of us in the room over drinks next door shortly but I'd just like to ask you to join me in thanking our panellists once again Thank you