The Making of “Wives of Agency” (Progress Update #4)

Progress

Not much has changed since my last update. I’ve been steadily making progress and writing descriptions of events. I’m still focusing on Catherine of Aragon, and hope to be done with her in the next week. Here’s a few more of the events that are written up so far. I feel like these ones are a bit longer and more complicated than the previous set, so please remember that these are all draft descriptions and likely to change before the final project:

• April 2, 1502 – Catherine of Aragon becomes a young Widow: Soon after their marriage, Catherine and her first husband Prince Arthur moved to Wales as part of an English custom followed by the Prince of Wales upon maturity. While in Wales, the couple and their entourage caught an illness that claimed Arthur, and the new bride was subsequently widowed. 

• June 23, 1503- Catherine of Aragon’s first marriage was annulled: Because Catherine and Arthur were married for such a short period of time, Henry VII was able to arrange papal approval for the dissolving of Catherine’s first marriage. Henry VII still wanted her dowry, however, so instead of sending Catherine back to her parents in Spain, Henry began to plan for her remarriage. One of the first options presented was that Henry VII could marry his former-daughter-in-law after his own wife had died in Childbirth, though this was denied by Catherine’s parents. Soon after the question of Catherine marrying Arthur’s younger brother Henry (the future Henry VIII) was raised and accepted by all parties. 

• November 1504- Catherine of Aragon encountered much grief as a widowed teenager: In November of 1504, Catherine’s mother Isabella died, which followed a long string of grief from the loss of her husband two years earlier, her mother-in-law soon after, and sister-in-law who moved to Scotland. Losing her mother compounded her grief. Grief was not the only stress that befell Catherine at this point in her life. After news of Queen Isabella’s death, many feared the alliance between England and Spain was not as strong as before, leading many, including Prince Henry himself, to ask for the betrothal to be dissolved. These diplomatic quarrels, as well as growing financial problems, for the young princess, caused her much distress.

Challenges

As previously mentioned, the main limiter of my progress right now is time. I’m chugging along, but I want to remain diligent in sorting important events for the timeline versus normal events just typical Tudors. I am also finding a lot of Creative Commons images, but many of them do not state or give information regarding what archives, galleries, or museums the original artwork is located, which causes some difficulties. I should not be worried about the copyright of the images themselves as they are creative commons, but I feel like my citations suffer from these sorts of sources because the originals cannot be easily located. I am also growing more hesitant to utilize other materials such as videos or podcasts, not because of software limitations (TikiToki has the ability to embed these types of media), but because it is difficult to both determine copyright on these sources, and double check their research due to lack of formal citations in these types of media. I also fear it will be hard to cite my sources without scaring the public, so I may need to have a bibliography, but no individual citations. It would likely clog up the flow of the timeline to constantly have footnotes in the events.

Next Step

Make more progress. The timeline is not close to being completed, more research must be done, then I have to curate that research, display it in the timeline, and find more media (and determine what media I feel trustworthy enough). I wish I could elaborate more on what I plan to do next, but the project is just at that tricky stage where it begins to look like a mess before I get to tidy it into a final prototype.