Did you know that #Elizabethans kept Andean guinea pigs as pets? In this extract from #AGoldenWorld for Unseen Histories, I trace some of the parrots, monkeys, crocodiles, boars, flying squirrels & other Atlantic creatures in English parks & country houses: www.unseenhistories.com/the-tudor-an...

The reference to jaguars over the Seine is from the chapter in the book that follows Richard Hakluyt's acquisition of a Mexica codex while living in Paris in the 1580s. The codex is now at Oxford's Bodleian Library, where I last saw it on display a few years ago.

And @kerrylouisehistory.bsky.social’s review for the August issue of @historyextra.bsky.social 🌻 #AGoldenWorld #Tudors #Jacobean

Amazing to see #AGoldenWorld reviewed in the LRB this week, very well placed next to an Anne Carson poem and an advert for coffee & baked goods. My thanks to Clare Jackson for engaging so thoroughly with the book. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... #earlymodern #Tudor #Jacobean

What unites Mary, Queen of Scots and Jonathan Anderson? Both have been inspired to bring a little South American creature into their art. Before the #Dior armadillo bag, Mary stitched one in silk to pass the time during her long imprisonment.

Flesh. Blood. Friends. Enemies. The worst of enemies. The best of friends. In how many daies will there come hither any more English Ships?

An Algonquian word list from the University of York's edition of John Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) @uoyborthwick.bsky.social 'Because many doe desire to know the manner of their language, I have inserted these few words'.

A few signed copies now at the London Review Bookshop 🪶

Here’s a little sneak peek at one of my favourite chapters, about the mysterious golden figure from South America that Walter Ralegh tried to smuggle to France.

Today is the Faber summer party AND the release of #AGoldenWorld in the US! Featured here with a few 17th century objects — a tobacco pipe & engraving of pearl divers. www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Gold... #Tudors #earlymodern

And if you want to read about Jacobean history under the shadow of some very cute leopards, there are now signed copies of #AGoldenWorld in Knole‘s amazing bookshop! 🐆

A white stag trotting past the Jacobean mansion at Knole @nationaltrust.org.uk this morning. Through the heat haze, a 400-year-old view into the past. #earlymodern #sevenoaks

And a great spread in The Times’ book section, reviewed by Katherine Harvey #AGoldenWorld #Tudors #earlymodern

And for an extremely biased opinion, here’s what my partner said in his Substack (Useless Concentration - check it out if you love poetry and literary criticism!):

Thank you @unseenhistories.com for a lovely #AGoldenWorld recommendation: 'beautifully researched and tenderly written'. uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-go...

and what better example of the confluence of voyaging & pearl earrings in 1590s portraiture than this fabulous painting of Robert Dudley (the younger), currently on rare public display at the Philip Mould Gallery in London 🦪

Thank you @cjfaraday.bsky.social for this New Statesman review of #AGoldenWorld alongside Nandini Das’ This Little World! #earlymodern 🦜

A lovely evening yesterday at Oxford’s Divinity School, toasting @rentravailer.bsky.social’s new book, This Little World. A perk was getting to revisit this 1662 chair, reputedly made from the timbers of Francis Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, that circumnavigated the globe in 1577-1580.

Here is a page from the index, giving a snapshot of what a different kind of Tudor history can look like. An Algonquian elder next to Drake. Elizabeth’s jousting champion, the Earl of Cumberland, near entries for Cumanagoto & Cusco. Oaxaca near Ovid, Oxford. St Kitt’s, Shakespeare, shell, sugar.

'it is salutary to be reminded that rigorous scholarly history can also be stylish and lyrical' -- thank you Peter Marshall for a lovely joint review of Nandini Das' 'This Little World' and #AGoldenWorld for @historytoday.com this week.

In 1621, as colonists met with Wabenaki leaders in Dawnland (in northeastern North America), England’s first botanic garden was established in Oxford. In a 17th c Oxford herbarium, or collection of dried plants pasted onto paper, a 400-year-old sunflower remains fixed to a page, brittle but intact.

The book begins with one of my favourite early Stuart portraits: Van Dyck’s Self Portrait with a Sunflower. Rather than seeing the dashing cavalier figure as the sole protagonist, what happens if we also linger on the sunflower, first cultivated by peoples thousands of miles away? 🌻

✨ Out today! ✨ Happy publication day to #AGoldenWorld @faberbooks.bsky.social 🎉🎉 uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-go...

What a treat to pop into the Philip Mould gallery today to see some stunning Elizabethan paintings up close — including this secret portrait of John Stubbes and his severed hand. Stubbes lost his hand as punishment for vehemently opposing the queen’s proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou in 1579.

She’s here! And resplendent in gold foil! Available to preorder @faberbooks.bsky.social and out in a few weeks. Featuring 2 new graphics by the award-winning Cherokee artist Rebecca Lee Kunz. 🌻

Many of the artisans who worked with silver in England were Protestant migrants from the Spanish-occupied Netherlands. They brought a taste for mannerism to English silverworking – an eccentric style of ornamentation characterized by foliage and scrolls, marine imagery and grotesque figures.

This is a piece of eight, of the kind carried by an English teenager who found his way back to Elizabethan England after years in Mexico. During these years, Miles Philips learned Nahuatl and worked in a Spanish monastery. His companions married African & Indigenous-descended women.

‘I am very much afraid that England, seduced by desire for gold, will throw itself upon those islands recently discovered by Frobisher’, a diplomat wrote to the poet Philip Sidney. Sidney invested in the voyages, as did several prominent court ladies. Here's Frobisher @bodleian.ox.ac.uk today.

In coming weeks, I’ll spotlight some of the stories & artefacts from the book and the places they’ve taken me. The book begins with a seemingly familiar tale – Frobisher’s search for gold in the 1570s. But the chapter is really about the English fascination with sealskin & the craft of Inuit women.

Why was Walter Ralegh carrying a copper-gold figure by an Arawakan metalworker at his arrest in 1617? What stories of Bolivian mines and encounters with Tupinambás lay behind the silver, sugar, & tropical animals on a Tudor dining table – and why don’t we talk about them? #earlymodern