ERO Presents: Lady Anne Bacon: A woman of learning at the Tudor Court

Speaker: Deborah Spring

Born into an Essex gentry family, the Cookes of Gidea Hall near Romford, Lady Anne Bacon (1528-1610) grew up as one of five scholarly sisters. Unusually well-educated for their time, they became renowned for their learning. Intelligent and astute, a published translator by the age of twenty, Lady Anne Bacon lived through the great political and religious transitions of five reigns, and was embedded in the network of power at the Tudor court as a woman of the Privy Chamber, the inner circle of royal attendants, to both Mary I and Elizabeth. She married lawyer Sir Nicholas Bacon, later Elizabeth I’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, becoming stepmother to six children. Her own sons, Anthony and Francis, became respectively spy and statesman, and as a widow she ran a great estate alone for thirty years. In this talk Deborah Spring will explore Lady Anne’s Essex family and upbringing, and describe her extraordinary part in shaping the public story of Tudor history as she was caught up in pivotal events, including the accession crisis of 1553 and the reform of the Church of England under Edward VI and Elizabeth I.

Deborah Spring originally studied social anthropology, later gaining an MA in garden history at Birkbeck, University of London, and a further MA in biography at the University of East Anglia. Formerly an academic publisher, she now researches and writes about history, with particular interest in women’s history, the sixteenth century, gardens and landscapes. Her recently published book Lady Anne Bacon: A woman of learning at the Tudor court (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2024), is described by historian Dr Elizabeth Norton as ‘expertly researched, detailed and highly comprehensive … a wonderful addition to the growing body of works on Tudor women’.

The University of Hertfordshire Press will be attending this event: www.herts.ac.uk/uhpress.

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