A European Elizabethan: The Life of Robert Beale, Esquire

Please join us for our next event in the NACBS Book Launch Series.

A European Elizabethan with David Gehring

Thursday, September 26 9am PT/ 11am CT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm BST

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of A European Elizabethan: The Life of Robert Beale, Esquire by David Scott Gehring. Lucy Kaufman will join David Gehring in conversation.

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“Robert Beale (15411601) was a diplomat and administrator who worked at the heart of Elizabethan governance and international policymaking. In spite or perhaps because of the voluminous record he left behind, he has never been the subject of a dedicated biography, and his remarkable life and influence have therefore remained hidden. By thoroughly investigating Beales personal reference archive, which remains largely intact at the British Library, and additional material from archives across the UK, mainland Europe, and the USA, this book brings Beales life into sharp focus: from his shadowy upbringing in Coventry and London, through his first trips to the European mainland in the 1550s, and to his prominent roles in Queen Elizabeths government. By reconstructing the complex web of transnational connections he forged throughout Europe, David Scott Gehring demonstrates for the first time the extent to which these networks and his experiences abroad made him an invaluable agent of the Elizabethan regime. In the process, Gehring reveals Beales broader significance for our understanding of the workings of Elizabethan government, especially the role of second- and third-level players within it, and he recognizes the impossibility of truly understanding Elizabethan England without considering its interactions with and connections to the rest of Europe. The book makes a range of novel contributions, including to understandings of Elizabethan foreign policy, the succession, religion, political life, and intelligence gathering.”

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David Gehring is Associate Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Nottingham. He received his BS in History and Economics before earning the MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. David has been a research fellow at higher education institutions like Warwick, Durham, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as elite archives such as the Huntington Library, Newberry Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. His book A European Elizabethan: The Life of Robert Beale, Esquire was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press.

Lucy Kaufman is an Associate Professor of British History at the University of Alabama. The author of A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish (MQUP 2023), she has also written numerous articles and chapters, including the forthcoming chapter on “Religious Cultures” in the New Cambridge History of Britain (1500-1750). Lucy received her PhD from Yale in 2014, where her dissertation won the university-wise Field Prize; has held posts at Clark University and the University of Oxford; and was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.