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Dr Ana Sáez Hidalgo was a Visiting Research Fellow in 2023-24
Ana Sáez-Hidalgo is Associate Professor of English literary and cultural studies at the Universidad de Valladolid, Spain. Her research is concerned with late medieval and early modern Anglo-Spanish cultural and literary relations, with special focus on book culture. Her most recent publications explore the cross-cultural dimension of the textual and material exchanges between Spain and England and the circulation of knowledge, ideas, and objects through English Catholic exiles on the Continent. Her books include Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767 (2020, co-edited with B. Cano), John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception (2014; co-edited with R.F. Yeager). She has co-edited The Fruits of Exile: Emblems and Pamphlets from the English College at Valladolid (2009, with B. Cano) and published editions and Spanish translations of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. She is co-head researcher of the project Missions and Transmissions: Exchanges Between Iberia and the British Isles during the Long Early Modern Period (www.networksexchange.com), an interdisciplinary project intended to research the early modern networks of cultural, religious and diplomatic exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles.
Project Description:
Ana Sáez-Hidalgo’s project as Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (UCL) was entitled Henry VIII’s Catholic Afterlives. Despite the centuries-long interest in Henry VIII and his image, his representation in historiographical, literary and graphic works by English Catholics has garnered scant attention. Her research project examined sixteenth-century Catholic writers of the history of the Reformation, in England and in Iberia, and their interaction in the formulation and dissemination of historical and religious narratives, past and present, throughout the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. The dissemination of these accounts is inextricably connected to mobility of English Catholic exiles on the Continent and back in England. Through the material and linguistic movement of the texts they produced, the record of their importation, translation, and subsequent dissemination, the texture of these historical and religious narratives evinces a complex process of “transformission,” to borrow Randall McLeod’s term. Interestingly, narratives of English events were not transferred solely from English to Spanish authors. Her research set out to prove that there is more of a circularity: the material and textual mobility of Spanish texts among English Catholics was equally rich, prolific—and influential. The question she sought to answer, then, was this: how did Anglo-Iberian “transformission” texture the dissemination of information about, and image of, Henry VIII?
