Join Nandini Das and Lauren Working, in conversation with Rachel Willie, to discuss their new books, This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England and A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England – Shakespeare's 'scepter'd isle', proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. But beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, lies a more complex and connected reality that reveals how England at this time was far from insular. Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life, yet alive to the sweep of history, This Little World offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England's past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making – on the cusp of empire – told through the traces of those often written out of it. In reframing England's story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental ideas: about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging.
 


A Golden World illuminates how the Americas became a visible and material presence in English culture, through a range of unexpected objects: from tobacco leaves strewn in playhouses to a boy wearing a pearl earring. From rumours of lost Amazonian cities of gold to the silver running through the mountains of Bolivia, hopes for dazzling wealth fuelled the imperial fantasies of the Tudors and Stuarts. But while stories of treasure ships and privateers like Walter Raleigh have become entrenched in national myths – what did Elizabethans actually know about Mexico, the Amazon rainforest, or the Chesapeake? How did Indigenous people and knowledge enter the art, fashion, and literature of Shakespeare’s time – and at what cost? Award-winning historian Lauren Working presents an altogether new history of the ‘golden age’ of 16th century England, that considers the desire for power, land and resources in the first era of colonization, alongside the craft and labour of those in the Americas who contributed to the English Renaissance as we know it.
 


Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture and Fellow of Exeter College at Oxford University. Her most recent book, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, was longlisted for the Cundill Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and Wolfson History Prizes, and won the British Academy Book Prize. It was also a Spectator, Prospect and History Today Book of the Year. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly contributes to and presents television and radio programmes, including Tales of Tudor Travel on BBC Four. In 2025, she was awarded an OBE for services to Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and to Public Engagement.

Lauren Working is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the University of York, with an interest in Tudor and Stuart colonialism, material culture, and travel writing. Her academic work includes The Making of an Imperial Polity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and a new introduction to The Tempest for Oxford World's Classics (2024). As a BBC New Generation Thinker, she has spoken about her work across broadcast media, on topics ranging from still life painting to cavalier style, and she has collaborated on projects with institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, and National Trust. Her most recent book is A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England (Faber & Faber, 2026).

Book Talk: Nandini Das and Lauren Working