Speaker

Joanne Paul

Joanne Paul

Historian, writer, and broadcaster specialising in the Renaissance, Tudor, and early-modern periods; Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex and author of Thomas More: A Life.

Paul trained as an intellectual historian in Canada before completing her PhD under Quentin Skinner in England, and has since built a public profile — YouTube, broadcast, and popular non-fiction — around the Tudor court and its leading figures, most prominently Thomas More and the Dudley family. Her scholarship centres on the history of political counsel: how educated advisers argued for, and against, serving princes and kings, a question she treats as live in More’s Utopia and across the Tudor administrative class more broadly. She is currently under contract for a second trade biography, provisionally titled Tyrant, on the character and mechanics of tyranny under Henry VIII.

Core positions

  • Refuses to sort historical figures into hero or villain. Her stated method, applied throughout to More, is to hold contradiction — a humanist wit who also persecuted heretics — rather than resolve it; she reads popular adaptations (A Man for All Seasons, Wolf Hall) as flattening this complexity in opposite directions.
  • Reads Utopia as a deliberate riddle, not a manifesto. Satire and sincerity coexist in the text; its narrator’s ambiguous name and nested frame narrative are designed to leave authority, and the reader’s verdict, unresolved.
  • Treats the scientific revolution as continuous with, not opposed to, mysticism. The scientific method’s own roots in alchemy and occult inquiry (John Dee, Francis Bacon) complicate any clean ‘science defeats superstition’ narrative of the period.
  • Sees Tudor social mobility as an engineered feature of monarchy, not an accident: Henry VII and Henry VIII both promoted educated low-born administrators partly because such men, lacking independent noble standing, were more easily discarded.

In the wiki