This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This special subject will allow students to discuss the changing diplomatic and cultural relationships between England, France and Scotland in the hundred years before the Anglo-Scottish dynastic union of 1603. This period was one of substantial political and religious upheaval and as an unintended consequence of the different processes of religious reform in each country, international relations changed completely. Students will be encouraged to challenge the traditional narrative of a straightforward shift in Scotland's primary diplomatic allegiance from France to England as a result of religious changes. They will examine in detail subjects such as Henry VIII's wars in France and Scotland, the dynastic significance of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the increasingly tense diplomacy undertaken between Scotland and England in the approach to James VI's accession to the English throne in 1603. The module will be structured chronologically, but several themes will run throughout. These include the significance of propaganda and textual responses to politics. Through this, students will be encouraged to consider the significance of conflict and change in the creation of public political discourse, and challenge teleological narratives surrounding the growth of the public sphere. A second theme will be the impact of religious change on broader political allegiances: did the Reformation fundamentally change how diplomacy worked? Thirdly, students will be encouraged to consider the differing political and cultural cultures of each of the three kingdoms under consideration, and how such domestic concerns played in to diplomatic interactions.
3/week
There are no extraordinary costs associated with this module.
This module will be assessed by 40% Coursework and 60% Examination. This will comprise:
1 gobbets exercise (2,000 words) – 15%
2 essays of 3,000 words – 25% each (50% total)
1 essay of 4,000 words – 35%
2 examinations, each of two hours: 1) a Source Analysis paper and 2) a "Topics" paper of standard essay questions. Each will be worth 50% of the Examination Component.
Alford, Stephen, The early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (Cambridge, 1998)
Britnell, Jennifer, and Britnell, Richard, (eds.), Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the early sixteenth-century: France, England and Scotland (Aldershot, 2000)
Dawson, Jane, The Politics of Religion in the age of Mary, Queen of Scots: the earl of Argyll and the struggle for Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2002)
Eaves, Richard Glen, Henry VIII's Scottish Diplomacy, 1513-1524: England's relations with the regency government of James V (New York, 1971)
Eaves, Richard Glen, Henry VIII and James V’s regency, 1524-1528: a study in Anglo-Scottish diplomacy (Lanham, 1987)
Lynch, Michael, (ed.), Mary Stewart: Queen in Three Kingdoms (Oxford, 1988)
Mason, Roger, (ed.), Scotland and England 1286-1815 (Edinburgh, 1987)
Merriman, Marcus, The Rough Wooings: Mary, Queen of Scots 1542-1551 (East Linton, 2000)
Macdougall, Norman, An Antidote to the English: The Auld Alliance, 1295-1560 (East Linton, 2001)
Potter, David, Renaissance France at War (Woodbridge, 2008)
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
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