Paulina Kewes is Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her work is strongly interdisciplinary, bringing together the perspectives of literature and intellectual history. She is the author of Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (2014), and Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations (2019). This evening’s talk derives from her book-in-progress Contesting the Royal Succession in Reformation England: Latimer to Shakespeare (OUP), for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, 2021-24. This interdisciplinary project examines the fierce controversy over the royal succession which dominated the reigns of the last three Tudor monarchs – the evangelical Edward VI, the Catholic Mary I, and the Protestant Elizabeth I.