Mock National Endowment for the Humanities Public Programs Project Proposal

Wives of Agency

The wives of Henry VIII are regularly depicted as having no agency in their marriages. They are considered to have been at the will and folly of Henry, at constant risk of divorce or beheading. These women had tremendous agency, and in many cases had numerous accomplishments in their lives that have been overshadowed by “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” For instance, Catherine of Aragon was the first female European ambassador. In addition, Katherine Parr is believed to be the first English woman to publish a written work under her own name. This timeline intends to show the fascinating and amazing accomplishments of these women and humanize their legends. 

Some questions that may be answered by this project:

• Who were the wives of Henry VIII?
• What are the major accomplishments of each queen?
• What are the extant writings by these queens?
• For queens that did not die during their marriages, what did they do after their marriage ended?
• What did the queens study?
• Which queen had the most honorable funeral?
• Which queens had multiple marriages?

For this project, the chief investigator intends to use TikiToki to provide an interactive way to learn about the wives of Henry VIII. When possible, this project will include multi-media sources such as pictures, historical text, audio, and video sources to provide engaging variety for the user. TikiToki allows the chief investigator to color code “spans” of years. This will help display the duration of the marriages of each of the wives, show where they overlap with the marriages of other wives, and illustrate the events that happened during each marriage, even if not related to the wife of said marriage. In addition, events can be categorized, and if the categories are color coded to represent wives, it makes the events easily differentiable even to users with little technical experience.  

The target audience for this project is broad, as Tudor history is one of the more publicly known European history topics in America. I believe this project will be helpful for teachers, professors, European history buffs, Renaissance Faire attendees, fans of Six the Musical, fans of the show Tudors, and more. 

The development of this project uses personas to identify potential types of audience members for the project. One of the personas is Janet, an AP European History teacher at a Virginia High School. Janet finds that it’s hard to engage her students especially on topics like the Reformation. She would love resources to bring this time period to life, as long as they address the concerns of the standardized testing required of her students. She is not the best with technology, but is willing to learn as long as the user interface is simple enough. This project will help Janet engage her students.

Conversely, the secondary persona is Stephanie. Stephanie works in IT, but on the weekends she loves to hang around Renaissance Faires wearing historically inspired garb. Her friends want to wear Tudor costumes at the next fair, so she wants to get a basic understanding of the lives of some famous women of the time. She wants to know all the fun facts, but she does not want to get distracted by details that bore her, like overly nitty gritty political information. 

These two personas have some overlap in their interests, but they have different priorities. It will be important to balance these priorities, to appeal to a wider public.