Dr Janet Dickinson

Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (History)

Biography

Dr Janet Dickinson has taught for the Department for Continuing Education since 2006, working across a range of programmes and disciplines before her appointment as Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (History) in 2024. She has been recognised as ‘Most Acclaimed Lecturer’ and ‘Outstanding Tutor’ at University of Oxford Student Union’s Annual Teaching Awards several times.

Janet obtained her degrees from the Universities of Southampton and Bristol, where she began her postgraduate work as a medievalist before recognising the early modern period as her natural home. Janet is a co-convenor of the Tudor and Stuart Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London and a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Court Studies. She recently served on the steering committee of the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation, celebrating the 500th anniversary of William Cecil, Lord Burghley’s birth and continues to be involved in establishing an educational legacy programme and encouraging awareness of and interest in the broad subject of Mildred and William Cecil and their world.

Her main research focus is on the Tudor nobility and the Tudor court as well as the global history of the court in the early modern period, on which she has published widely, including a monograph, Court Politics and the Earl of Essex (2011). She is currently co-editing two volumes: ‘The Embodied Court’ and ‘Burghley at 500: Quincentennial Essays on William Cecil’.

Leather book covers are another area of interest, arising from Janet’s involvement in an Anglo-Dutch project focused on the extraordinary objects retrieved from a 17th century shipwreck off the Dutch island of Texel, known as the ‘Palmwood Wreck’. The article based on this research, ‘Drowned books and ghost books’, has been published with open access.

She regularly reviews books and exhibitions for journals and newspapers and is always keen to hear about new developments in her field. You can find her on X at @Tudornobility and Bluesky at @janetdickinson.bsky.social.

Research interests

• Tudor nobility
• Tudor court and it’s global history of the court in the early modern period
• Leather book covers

Publications

• Court Politics and the Earl of Essex, 1589-1601 (Pickering and Chatto, 2012)
• ‘Drowned Books and Ghost Books: Making sense of the finds from a seventeenth-century shipwreck off the Dutch Island of Texel’, The Seventeenth Century, 38, 1 (2022). Open access.
• ‘The Dilemma of Loyalty, Loyalty to the Monarchs of Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain, c.1400-1688, edited by Matthew Ward and Matthew Hefferan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
• ‘The Book Covers’, a chapter in an illustrated collection of essays focused on the variety of finds recovered from shipwreck BZN17, Werevondstern uit een Hollands schip (Province of North Holland, 2018)
• ‘Faction and the Tudor court, 1509-1603’, in A Europe of Courts, a Europe of Factions, edited by Ruben Gonzalez Cuerva (Brill, 2017)
• ‘Political Culture’, in Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources, edited by Jonathan Willis and Laura Sangha (Routledge, 2016. Revised and updated edition due 2025)
• ‘Just how nasty were the 1590s?’, with Neil Younger, History Today, July 2014.
• ‘Elizabeth, Essex and leadership in the 1590s’, in Leadership and Elizabethan Culture, edited by Peter Kaufman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
• ‘The Elizabethan aristocracy and gentry’, in The Elizabethan World, edited by Susan Doran and Norman Jones (Routledge, 2010; second edition, 2013)
• ‘Courts and Centres’, a co-authored chapter, with Stephane van Damme, for The European World, edited by Beat Kumin (Routledge, 2009; second edition, 2013; third revised edition, 2018; fourth revised edition, 2022)