Worldly Women at the Court of Charles II: Exile, Excess, and the Expanding World

On Thursday 22 October, join Dr Kerry Apps (Sheffield) and Dr Annalisa Nicholson (KCL), in conversation with Dr Hannah Dawson (KCL) and Catharine MacLeod (National Portrait Gallery), for a discussion on women’s transnational activities at the court of Charles II. Within that Francophilic and cosmopolitan court, many women embraced trends and opportunities from continental travel and global consumerism to libertinism. How did court women respond to libertine ideologies? How did this libertinism lend itself to links with Europe and the expanding world? And how did court women signal their supposed worldliness by fashioning themselves and their homes with global and colonial objects? The panel will focus on figures at the centre of recent research, including the French exile Hortense Mancini, the Italian queen consort Maria of Modena, and the Anglo-Scottish courtier Elizabeth Maitland. Exploring the treatment of these women – in portraiture, in satire, and in contemporary correspondence – the panellists will reflect on how feminist archival methodologies are fuelling new perspectives on early modern women.

After the panel discussion, there will be an informal Q&A with the audience, followed by drinks and nibbles.

Speakers:

Kerry Apps is Research Associate at the University of Sheffield. She recently completed her PhD on the global assets and commodities owned by Restoration courtiers, especially the Duchess and Duke of Lauderdale. She writes for HistoryExtra and has contributed to Hachette’s Changing Histories series.

Hannah Dawson is Reader in the History of Political Thought at KCL. She has published extensively on intellectual history, especially in the early modern era, and is the author of Locke, Language, and Early Modern Philosophy (CUP, 2009) and Life Lessons from Hobbes (Pan Macmillan, 2013). She is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing (Penguin, 2023).

Catharine MacLeod is Senior Curator of Seventeenth-Century Collections at the National Portrait Gallery. She has curated numerous exhibitions, with accompanying catalogues, including Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II (2001), The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart (2012), and Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver (2019).

Annalisa Nicholson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in French at KCL. Her first book, A Salon-in-Exile (Bloomsbury History, 2025), explores the cosmopolitan circle of Hortense Mancini. As an accompaniment to this book, she has edited and translated Mancini’s letters (Iter Press, 2025).