Oceans Wide: Queens Consort and Ecologies of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Early modern British queens were situated at the heart of a century brimming with new experiences of nature. An overhaul of queenship studies in the past twenty years that has ascertained consorts’ abilities to participate in the cultures of their courts and their position ‘on display’ as public individuals, is only beginning to consider how they operated as active entities in large-scale imperial processes. As kings, explorers, merchants, and scientists parcelled up lands, put plant cuttings in their pockets, and boxed spices, they sought to render the world containable and knowable. How did consorts contribute to this handling of nature in their own boxes, books, chambers, and minds?

This talk focuses on two miniatures, a feather mantle, and quillwork bag associated with Anna of Denmark, Henrietta Maria of France, and Catherine of Braganza. Delving into the materials of these items, along with their visual and literary associations with foreign landscapes, this presentation outlines the beginnings of a postdoctoral project that explores how elite royal women used and understood nature from across the sea within the political world of the British court. 

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