Cliff Davies, of Wadham College, Oxford has a letter in The Times Literary Supplement today commenting on the lack of response to his argument in the TLS a year or so ago (13th June, 2008) that the term “Tudor” was hardly used in the sixteenth-century either by the rulers or by the ruled in England. He also chides Anthony Fletcher for his use of the term when reviewing Kevin Sharpe’s Selling the Tudor Monarchy in the TLS two weeks ago. Davies ends by challenging Fletcher to say whether he thinks it “of no importance that historians should continue the indiscriminate use of a term which has acquired massive and misleading resonance, even though it had little purchase in the minds of contemporaries?” An academic argument may well be brewing here.
