☛ Gorgeous Books and Royal Annotations: What Katherine Parr and Henry VIII Wrote in their Books ☚

CEMS is proud to host Professor Micheline White (Carleton University) for this public lecture at the National Library of Australia.

When: 7 August 2025

Where: National Library of Australia, Canberra and online

Registration: Register here to attend

Abstract

Henry VIII and Katherine Parr owned hundreds of deluxe books. They sometimes read with pen in hand and left fascinating markings in the margins and on the title pages of their volumes, markings that include charming inscriptions, little hands (manicules), trefoils, and notes to themselves. At first glance, these markings appear to be highly personal and private, but a king and queen were never alone, and their reading and writing were carefully scrutinized by the courtiers who surrounded them. By closely examining some of the marginalia produced by Katherine and Henry, we’ll see how they used handwritten markings to create ideal representations of themselves as self-reflective, learned, pious, prudent, and charitable. For Katherine, the stakes of her self-representation were very high, and we’ll discuss how she used books and marginalia as part of a broader strategy to “survive” her marriage to Henry.

About the Presenter

Micheline White is Professor in the College of the Humanities and the Departments of English and History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on women writers, religious history, book history, and social networks in early modern England. She and Jaime Goodrich have co-edited a volume on women and communal worship which is forthcoming from the Delaware University press in 2025.  In 2018, she co-edited (with Leah Knight and Elizabeth Sauer) Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (University of Michigan Press). She is the editor of English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Ashgate, 2011) and Secondary Work on Early Modern Women Writers (Ashgate, 2009). She has published widely on early modern women writers in venues including the Times Literary Supplement, Renaissance Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and the Sixteenth Century Journal.  In 2024, she was awarded the Sixteenth Century Society’s “Raymond B. Waddington Prize” for the best English-language article on the literature of the Early Modern period. Her work on Katherine Parr and Henry VIII has been featured in interviews with the London Times, CNN, the Berliner Morgenpost, the Canadian Globe and Mail, and other radio and TV outlets.

Images: (left) Micheline White; (right) Katherine Parr’s handwriting and signature in a copy of A Sermon of Saint Chrysostom (1542). Image by permission of Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe.