Episode 4: James VI and I

If you liked Yiorgos Lanthinos' court psychodrama The Favourite, you'll love this exploration of the complicated life of James VI and I – a king who united Scotland and England, persecuted witches, and granted his male favorites extraordinary power and privilege. Come for the court drama and stay for in-depth discussions of primitive accumulation and the question of whether using the word 'gay' to describe a 16th-century monarch makes any sense at all.

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Sources:

Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso Books, 1979.

Ackroyd, Peter. Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day. London: Chatto and Windniss, 2017.

Bergeron, David. King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2002.

Holstun, James. Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London: Verso Books, 2002.

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.