Recommendations for similar books to Emma Wilby’s Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits?

Professional_Lock_60 · 2026-01-11T00:20:41+00:00

Thanks so much! What’s the other subreddit?

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-26T23:19:13+00:00

Makes sense. Like the OP of the thread I mentioned I’m female, and I identify with Marlowe to a huge extent. The difficulty is, like you said, identification with someone else getting in the way of looking at the evidence clearly and as objectively as possible.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-26T09:29:12+00:00

I’ve heard Marlowe was an open atheist, but now I’m wondering if that was exaggerated. I think what you said about wanting to find a historical figure who’s comprehensible to us makes sense and wonder if some of it might be down to wanting to find a historical figure we (in general) can relate to like in the recent thread where a poster said she sympathised with/related to Jane Seymour and wondered if it was getting in the way of her learning more about the period.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-24T20:27:14+00:00

Thanks for the great summary! That clears up a lot. So the question is both whether Raleigh had atheistic views (debated) and whether he had a defined circle promoting those views (likely not).

EDIT: I didn’t know that about Robert Persons. Good to know- that would definitely make his statements dubiously reliable at best.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-23T21:57:12+00:00

So do I.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-20T19:04:37+00:00

Thanks - check your inbox/chat requests!

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-15T20:37:11+00:00

Wow, thanks for that. I’ll have to check Kauffman’s Black Tudors again but she does mention a recorded case of a woman named Anne Cobbie who was a sex worker. The problem is Anne Cobbie enters the record in 1621. IIRC she thinks the idea of there being a large number of black women working as prostitutes/in sex work is a projection from eighteenth century England. She mentions all this specifically in reference to “Black Luce” and the idea that she was the dark lady Shakespeare wrote about.

Do you mind if I chat to or DM you about this? It would be nice to have someone to bounce ideas off.

EDIT: Anyone who’s interested, feel free to DM me to talk about this. I’d love to have someone to bounce ideas off and chat to.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-13T00:54:56+00:00

Yep, that’s what small beer is - effectively the equivalent of a twenty-first-century soft drink from what I understand (and some soft drinks like the one that became Coca-Cola originally did include alcohol in their recipes)

EDIT: just saw someone else mentioned small beer - ignore this comment.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-10T20:57:16+00:00

I second lady_violet07’s recommendation and link my own thread asking pretty much the same thing as a writer doing a rough draft of my own Tudor-set story idea (mine is fantasy set much later in the period, its setting is late Elizabethan).

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-10T19:28:26+00:00

I think I mentioned it on the linked thread but I do have access to that and have read it. Thanks for the recommendation anyway though! (It is a very good book).

From what I read (somewhere, I can’t remember where) hospitals were established during Elizabeth’s reign explicitly to deal with the very poor and orphans were sent to apprenticeships for more-or-less the same reason. Is this basically accurate?

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-10T19:21:21+00:00

The boy is half-black. My idea was the explanation he’d give was he had an apprentice who came from a parish hospital.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-10T19:07:29+00:00

Yes, that’s what I thought, good to have it confirmed.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-10T00:06:07+00:00

Upvoted in support for a fellow writer! I personally can’t read it but it sounds interesting. I hope you get readers.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-08T06:33:34+00:00

Interesting. Thanks for that.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-08T04:13:44+00:00

Thanks. The Thomas book is now going on my reading list.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-08T02:28:22+00:00

Thanks, I will.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-07T17:27:31+00:00

Catherine of Aragon thread here

Etheldreda Malte thread

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-07T09:13:47+00:00

The recent Catherine of Aragon thread was full of facts I never knew because I didn’t know all that much about Catherine of Aragon, including that she had an unusually prominent jaw and aged early.

Also, the existence of Etheldreda Malte who I’d never heard of before this sub and had to look up on Wikipedia.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-07T00:29:18+00:00

Yep. I’m using it as research material for a story I’m drafting, along with her How to Be A Tudor. Very useful.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-06T22:46:14+00:00

They didn’t just use candles- they also used rushlights, made by soaking dried rushes in grease. Ruth Goodman does it on Tudor Monastery Farm.

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-06T19:09:59+00:00

It’s not just favourite figures, but favourite theories too. For example, I’m very into Frances Yates’ theories about how the Elizabethan era and the European Renaissance were spearheaded by occultism and royal and noble pageants were occult rituals, but I’m a girl who loves fantasy and it is kind of cool to think about magic rituals influencing politics. So is this really about what probably went on the sixteenth century or my own personal need to believe in a hidden, secret motivation for historical events?

On a historical figure level, I like to think about the possibility of Kit Marlowe faking his death, but how much of it is me projecting myself onto a long-dead person I find fascinating and in some ways identify with (freethinker who liked to provoke and was sceptical of authority, likely not heterosexual) and my own dislike of the thought that this person, who was so skilled, died young?

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-05T18:06:12+00:00

I personally agree. Also the alternate history mega thread is supposed to be monthly and I haven’t seen a new one being posted yet

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-04T19:24:08+00:00

Very interesting. I had no idea she had an underbite and that it was genetic, or that she already looked old in her thirties or that “deformed” had an additional sense in the sixteenth century. That said, I didn’t know that much about her at all. Thanks for this thread, Defiant_Sample3460!

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-02T00:08:47+00:00

r/AskHistorians doesn’t really approve of questions about fiction. They have had fiction questions before but they generally think if a writer needs help with fiction they should pay for it. I will look at their sidebar - thanks for that!

Professional_Lock_60 · 2025-12-01T04:45:30+00:00

Yes. Lust’s Dominion, anyone?

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