Dr Janet Dickinson

Janet has taught for Oxford Lifelong Learning since 2006, working across a range of programmes and disciplines before her appointment as Departmental Lecturer in History in 2024. She has several times been recognised as ‘Most Acclaimed Lecturer’ and ‘Outstanding Tutor’ at Oxford University Student Union’s Annual Teaching Awards. Her core principle is that student participation and engagement with the topics discussed is essential to the learning process. She looks forward to continuing to work with her students to help them to make the most from their studies.

Janet’s main research interests focus on the Tudor nobility and the Tudor court as well as the global history of the court in the early modern period, on which she has published widely, including a monograph, Court Politics and the Earl of Essex (2011). She has recently co-edited two volumes: ‘The Embodied Court’ (Brepols, 2026) and ‘Burghley at 500: Quincentennial Essays on William Cecil’ (Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming), to which she contributed a chapter on Burghley and royal wards. She was also involved in researching the extraordinary objects retrieved from a 17th century shipwreck off the Dutch island of Texel, known as the ‘Palmwood Wreck’. The article based on this research, ‘Drowned books and ghost books’, has been published with open access. 

• Court Politics and the Earl of Essex, 1589-1601 (Pickering and Chatto, 2012) 
• Co-editor, with Neil Younger, Burghley at 500: Quincentennial essays on William Cecil (Boydell & Brewer, 2026) 
• Co-editor, The Embodied Court (Brepols, 2026) 
• ‘Drowned Books and Ghost Books: Making sense of the finds from a seventeenth-century shipwreck off the Dutch Island of Texel’, The Seventeenth Century, 38, 1 (2022). Open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0268117X.2022.2123847?src= 
• ‘The Dilemma of Loyalty, Loyalty to the Monarchs of Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain, c.1400-1688, edited by Matthew Ward and Matthew Hefferan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)  
• ‘The Book Covers’, a chapter in an illustrated collection of essays focused on the variety of finds recovered from shipwreck BZN17, Werevondstern uit een Hollands schip (Province of North Holland, 2018) 
• ‘Faction and the Tudor court, 1509-1603’, in A Europe of Courts, a Europe of Factions, edited by Ruben Gonzalez Cuerva (Brill, 2017) 
• ‘Political Culture’, in Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources, edited by Jonathan Willis and Laura Sangha (Routledge, 2016. Revised and updated edition due 2025) 
• ‘Just how nasty were the 1590s?’, with Neil Younger, History Today, July 2014. 
• ‘Elizabeth, Essex and leadership in the 1590s’, in Leadership and Elizabethan Culture, edited by Peter Kaufman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 
• ‘The Elizabethan aristocracy and gentry’, in The Elizabethan World, edited by Susan Doran and Norman Jones (Routledge, 2010; second edition, 2013) 
• ‘Courts and Centres’, a co-authored chapter, with Stephane van Damme, for The European World, edited by Beat Kumin (Routledge, 2009; second edition, 2013; third revised edition, 2018; fourth revised edition, 2022)  

Forthcoming:

I have two co-edited collections at proposal stage and am currently writing a chapter on royal ordinances in sixteenth century England.