tudor england

October 15, 2020

Book 255: The Butcher’s Daughter

“We go down on our knees with a pail of water and handfuls of rags and wipe the floor clean of dirt and spillages. The stones are irregular and filth is embedded in the cracks. I do my best, telling myself that such labour teaches me the true meaning of holy charity – which is principally, if you are female, concerned with the bodily needs of others.”

Dates read: August 16-19, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Catholicism runs deep on both sides of my family, but particularly my mother’s. My great-uncle Tom was even a priest! I’ve sometimes wondered what makes people chose to take holy orders. Faith, obviously, but there are lots of religious believers in the world and only a very small percent of them embark on a ministerial career. And it seems like it’s declining generationally. I can’t think of a single person I know, or even someone I’ve heard of through friends, deciding to enter the priesthood or become a nun. In a modern world, renouncing the ability to amass private wealth or have romantic relationships seems like a very difficult choice to make indeed.

It’s not an excess of religious zeal that drives Agnes Peppin to enter an abbey in Victoria Glendinning’s historical fiction novel The Butcher’s Daughter. Though she’s not an unbeliever, she doesn’t have particularly deep convictions. Rather, teenage Agnes arrives at Shaftesbury Abbey because she fell pregnant with the child of a neighbor, Peter, in her small village. Peter’s sister had recently lost a child of her own, so when Agnes’s baby is born, he’s given to Peter’s family and Agnes is sent to the Abbey to join the sisters there. She comes to find some measure of contentment and a role for herself in the community, but it’s not a great time to have joined a Catholic order. You see, Agnes lives in the time of Henry VIII, and his religious reforms threaten the Abbey’s continued existence.

In her childhood, Agnes had learned to read and write and these skills land her a position as the Abbess’s personal assistant. So she’s right there as the Abbess tries desperately to save their way of life, but ultimately fails. It’s about halfway through the book that the women are finally turned out of their homes and sent into the world, and Agnes has to figure out what’s next. Going off with a fellow sister? A return to home? To the big city of London to find her fortune? She ends up exploring all of these paths and more while contemplating what it really is she wants out of the rest of her life.

Victoria Glendinning has written several biographies, and while skill sets don’t always transfer over neatly (and I’ve never read any of her bios, so I can’t speak to their level of execution), I think it really helped her make Agnes a well-realized, compelling character. Agnes is not your typical historical fiction heroine…I feel like many authors in the genre default to making their protagonists read like modern spunky young women to appeal to their intended audience of, well, modern women. Agnes, however, is clearly an introvert and spends a lot of time thinking things that she doesn’t say. She breaks with the gender conventions of her time gently, without raging about the restrictions upon her as a woman in a man’s world. Since the book is deeply centered on her experience of the world, a character that feels real is crucial, and Glendinning pulls it off very well.

It was also refreshing to get a historical fiction perspective that wasn’t from the top of the social hierarchy. We’ve all read (and I’ve personally enjoyed) books about the court of Henry VIII, but this book shines a light on people further down, for whom Henry’s marriages and divorces are background noise to the actual living of their lives. It wasn’t just the people actually living in the dissolved monasteries who were impacted, it was the people who depended on services that religious houses provided, and this book shone a light on that. That being said, there were a few things that kept this from being even better for me. The biggest issue I had with the book was that it felt like Agnes’ path was a little too easy. She drifts into one thing, and then into the next, in a way that seems improbably fortunate. The resolution of the plotline of a side character, Elinor, also felt a little off and I wished that it had been cut. Those quibbles aside, though, this is an interesting, unusual take on the genre and time period and I’d recommend it for people who’d like to broaden their reading in the historical fiction realm.

One year ago, I was reading: Plagues and Peoples

Two years ago, I was reading: We Are Not Ourselves

Three years ago, I was reading: Lincoln in the Bardo

Four years ago, I was reading: The Executioner’s Song

Five years ago, I was reading: Reservation Road

August 29, 2019

Book 196: The Lady of the Rivers

“Through the night we hear the clatter of hooves down the village street, and occasional shouts. The girl, the woman, and I cower like frightened children together: this is what it is like to live in a country at war. There is nothing of the grace of the joust or even the inspiration of great principles—it is about being a poor woman hearing a detachment of horse thunder down your street and praying they do not stop to hammer on your frail door.”

Dates read: December 15-19, 2017

Rating: 6/10

When people talk about the history of marriage (a subject I find really interesting), they tend to talk about how the idea of marrying for love is relatively recent. Which is mostly true! Most marriages until just the last couple of generations were at least partially arranged by family. This has some advantages (like fostering stronger social connections within communities), as well as some obvious disadvantages (like getting stuck with someone you might not necessarily even like, much less love, for the rest of your life). But the idea that love matches never happened isn’t exactly true, either.

There were two love matches, in fact, that were influential in the English Wars of the Roses. In one, Queen Catherine, widow of King Henry V, married a Welsh commoner and her grandson from that union became King Henry VII. In the other, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, who had been married to King Henry V’s brother briefly before his death, secretly married one of the knights of her deceased husband’s household, Richard Woodville. This productive marriage (they had 14 children, including future Queen Consort Elizabeth) is explored in Philippa Gregory’s third novel in her Cousin’s War series, The Lady of the Rivers. As is relatively common with Gregory’s historical fiction, this book isn’t the first in the series, but does take place first in the timeline, so while it explores much of Jacquetta’s life, it ends where the first book written (The White Queen) begins.

Gregory begins Jacquetta’s story with a meeting between our heroine and Joan of Arc as pre-teens, while Joan is being held by Jacquetta’s uncle. This is used to establish the plot device of Jacquetta’s family’s claim to be descended from water goddess Melusina, and set up Jacquetta’s interest in fortune-telling, primarily through tarot cards. When Jacquetta grows up, she’s married off to much-older John, the Duke of Bedford and brother to the King of England. Gregory paints this marriage as never consummated…the Duke is mostly interested in using Jacquetta to further his interest in alchemy and believes she must remain virginal to do so. They never develop much of a relationship, but she does develop a big old crush on her husband’s chamberlain, a handsome young knight called Richard Woodville. When John dies, she and Richard wed…in secret, at first, because technically Jacquetta needs the Crown’s permission to remarry and knows they’ll never allow the match.

From there, Jacquetta and John join the English Court, under the rule of Henry VI and his high-spirited French bride, Margaret of Anjou. Jacquetta becomes Margaret’s maid of honor and closest friend, and is by her side through most of the events of the early period of the Wars of the Roses…at least, when she’s not having children, because she’s basically constantly pregnant. She tries to protect the Lancastrian Royal Couple from themselves (pious, timid Henry lets powerful-minded nobles run him roughshod and drain the royal treasury, and his lack of marital attentions to his lively wife leads to an affair), only to mostly be unsuccessful. When her husband is captured in battle with the Yorks and has to swear to set down arms against them to be freed, Jacquetta is relieved to leave Court behind and settle down to life as country gentry…until, of course, her oldest daughter Elizabeth comes to the door hand-in-hand with Yorkist King Edward.

Since this book provides much of the backstory for The White Queen, I was afraid it would be just as immersed in the kind of silly mysticalism that’s all over the previous book and made it so hard for me to enjoy it. Happily, though, there’s much less of that in here, and it’s integrated into the plot in a way that feels organic. My biggest issue with The Lady of the Rivers is that Jacquetta herself is a fairly passive character who mostly reacts to the events around her. Margaret of Anjou is the one who drives them, and I kind of wish she’d been the protagonist instead, because she seemed BONKERS in a delightfully dramatic kind of way.

Look, I like Philippa Gregory’s books. I don’t think they’re super high quality, but they’re enjoyable to read and as much as I like to be pretentious about my taste in novels, sometimes something that’s fun and easy doesn’t have to be more than that. But if you’ve read her work before, you know what you’re getting into: high drama and questionable historical sourcing. Sometimes they’re a little better, sometimes they’re a little worse. This falls on the mid-point for me…it’s fine. It’s not amazing, it’s not terrible. I liked reading it and I’d read it again if I do a read-through of the whole Plantagenet-Tudor cycle like I’m planning on one day. I’d recommend it if you like Gregory’s work, but if historical fiction is not your thing, it’s not unmissable by any means.

One year ago, I was reading: Paint It Black

Two years ago, I was reading: The Year of Magical Thinking

Three years ago, I was reading: Inamorata

August 8, 2019

Book 193: The Lady Elizabeth

“She fixed Hertford with a regal glare and was gratified to see him wilt slightly under her gaze. Thus she had seen her father do, and it cheered her a little to know that she had inherited something of his formidable will and presence. This was what it was to be royal, she reflected, this mysterious power that could make others tremble; it was something that might prove useful in the future. But what use was the semblance of power without the substance? For when it came down to it, King’s daughter or no, she was just a helpless young orphan, with no choice but to do as she was told.”

Dates read: November 29- December 4, 2017

Rating: 4/10

As blended families become more and more common, I’m often surprised to hear the amount of judgment people have for parents who have children with different partners. In my experience, it’s certainly not unusual to know others who, like myself, have a half-sibling, but I still hear snippy comments fairly regularly about women who have children with different dads, or vice versa. Being generally unafraid of confrontation, I almost always let people know that they’re talking to someone whose sister is actually her half-sister, and most people walk it back, but it seems like there’s often a gut instinct to deride it as “low class”, which is just total nonsense.

Indeed, one of the most admired women of all time is a product of such a household. Queen Elizabeth I had not one but TWO half-siblings! Actual royalty has been doing this for hundreds of years, it does not get more upper-crust than that. At least in the Tudors’ case, though, it does create some issues, which Alison Weir explores in her novel about the childhood of that monarch, The Lady Elizabeth. It begins with some segments of Elizabeth’s early childhood but really takes off shortly before the death of Henry VIII, and while it primarily focuses on the perspective of Elizabeth herself, we also see events through the eyes of her nursemaid, Kat, older half-sister Mary, and stepmother Katherine Parr, ending in Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne.

The relationship Weir depicts between Mary and Elizabeth is…complicated. Mary was stripped of her royal title and proclaimed a bastard when Henry divorced Katherine of Aragon to wed Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn. Although this devastated both Katherine and Mary, Weir depicts the latter as having made a real effort to be kind and loving to her little half-sister, despite having been made a part of Elizabeth’s service when she was born. Elizabeth, too, was made a bastard when her mother was executed, and the book depicts Mary as haunted by the allegations made during Anne’s trial that Elizabeth was actually the offspring of one of Anne’s alleged lovers. Once their brother Edward dies, there is too much between them, from that history to their differences in religious faith, for them to be close any longer, and it is only Elizabeth’s canny walking of a very thin line that keeps her from being disinherited.

I wish the book had focused more on this, and less on the salaciousness of the relationship between Elizabeth and her stepmother’s new husband: Thomas Seymour. While it’s certainly a significant factor in the period between her father’s death and her own inheritance of the throne, and deserved to be explored, it got a little too bodice-ripping for my taste. There’s historical record of some of the improprieties that occurred while Elizabeth lived with Katherine and Thomas, but Weir really makes it the centerpiece of the narrative and escalates it as high as she possibly can. We get endless scenes of Elizabeth’s growing desire, of Kat’s encouragement of the sparks between them, and it’s like Weir is going for a kind of Philippa Gregory-esque fun prurience (I’m not trying to mock, I like Gregory’s books) but forgot the fun part of it.

All in all, this was a second disappointment for me with Alison Weir and her fiction output. I read Innocent Traitor, about Lady Jane Grey, several months before I read this and while this one was better, they both fell flat for me. Her nonfiction histories do an admirable job of being informative but feeling light rather than heavy, making the people on the page come alive, but her fiction prose drags. There’s just no spark there, and her characters feel boiled down to as few personality traits as possible. While I certainly intend to keep reading her nonfiction, I think this is my last stab at her fiction. I would not recommend this book.

One year ago, I was reading: Less

Two years ago, I was reading: Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Three years ago, I was reading: The Lords of Discipline

August 2, 2018

Book 140: The Children of Henry VIII

“There remained, however, the problem of what to do with the body. The Duke had hoped for a fortnight in which to gather his resources, but, since the weather was warm and the corpse already beginning to decay, this proved untenable. He could not leave the body in the King’s chamber, yet nor could he risk an autopsy – which, in view of the current rumors, his colleagues might suggests which might reveal the arsenic in Edward’s body.”

Dates read: April 13-21, 2017

Rating: 7/10

The more I read about Henry VIII and the world into which he came, the more understandable he becomes. Instead of reading his serial marriages as the behavior of a man who refused to control his desires, it becomes obvious that, in significant part, the desire for a male heir to ensure the security of his bloodline was all-consuming and not unreasonable. After decades of brutal warfare between the Lancaster and York family lines, Henry was the product of a fragile new dynasty, and his failure to produce a viable heir could plunge England back into active hostilities. He needed a son, or better yet two, so that in the event that the first one didn’t survive to produce heirs of his own (like Henry’s own older brother Arthur), there would be someone to carry on the line.

These fears turned out to be both founded and unfounded. While he was absolutely correct to be worried about producing a son that would survive to adulthood, his failure to do so led directly to one of the most successful reigns in English history. In The Children of Henry VIII, Alison Weir focuses on the period between Henry’s death and the beginning of Elizabeth’s rule. This 11-year timespan saw three monarchs and a significant amount of instability, much of it driven by the religious schism between English Catholics longing to return to the old faith and Protestants wanting to protect their gains. With this book, Weir explores how Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey (Henry’s grandneice), Mary I, and Elizabeth I interacted with each other, with the nobility, and with the levers of power.

In popular culture, there’s a tendency to focus on Henry and then Elizabeth, with little if any thought to what happened in between. But there was a LOT of drama…Elizabeth’s teenage sex scandal with her stepmother’s husband, Edward’s slow death from tuberculosis, complete with an artificial prolonging of his life to give courtiers more time to scheme to get another Protestant on the throne, Jane Grey’s 19-day queenship, in which she was mostly a pawn to her parents and their co-conspirators, Mary’s romantic obsession with her largely uninterested husband and her extended phantom pregnancy which everyone just apparently pretended never happened. Seriously! She went into confinement to have her baby and stayed there for months and then just disbanded it long after it should have been obvious that there wasn’t going to be a baby.

As always, Weir has a keen sense of who her subjects are as people and gives them life rather than just dryly recounting the events of their life. We see Edward’s haughty remove and strong religious conviction, Jane’s helplessness as a pawn in a game she’s not a player in, Mary’s desperation to have a family of her own to love and fervent Catholic faith, and Elizabeth’s intelligence and caution, constantly trying to balance on a wire. It’s easy to see why Weir was inspired to write about Jane for her first stab at fiction, as her sympathy for the doomed teenager shines through brightly. She’s clearly done her research and the book feels satisfying both as reading for information and reading for entertainment. I’d definitely recommend this book!

Tell me, blog friends…did you know that Elizabeth got into hot water with Katherine Parr’s husband?

One year ago, I was reading: Butterfly Boy

Two years ago, I was reading: The White Tiger

July 12, 2018

Book 137: Innocent Traitor

“When I open my eyes, I am still lying there. I realize, aghast, that not one person, not even my mother or my husband, has stirred to help me. Is that what being a queen will mean? I am alone, utterly alone, and will be so for the rest of my life. This realization is just too much to bear, and my composure breaks. Lying on the floor, I bury my head in my arms and fall to weeping piteously, great racking sobs tearing at my body. This is wrong, I know it! We must surely be damned to hell for all eternity, I along with them, even though I am forced to be their accomplice in this evil.”

Dates read: March 30- April 4, 2017

Rating: 5/10

When I was in high school, I was on the mock trial team for three years. So when I became a lawyer, I went back and worked with them a bit. I was struck by how young they were, these 15 and 16 year olds. When I was that age, I was sure I was basically an adult, but coming from the perspective of actual adulthood, even less than a decade later, they were definitely not adults yet. But of course, cultural definitions of adulthood have shifted and changed over time. A couple hundred years ago, people of the same age would have been considered perfectly old enough to have jobs and be starting families.

Noble children in the late Middle Ages/early Renaissance, especially, were placed in a double bind: from the time they were old enough to appear in public, they were dressed as and expected to behave like tiny adults, but they were simultaneously completely at the mercy of their parents. Historian Alison Weir’s first fictional novel, Innocent Traitor, illustrates the way this played out, by looking at the life of Lady Jane Grey. Known as the “Nine-Day Queen” when she’s remembered at all, she was briefly crowned after the death of Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII. She was deposed quickly by Mary I and less than a year later, she was executed.

Weir tells Jane’s story from several perspectives: her mother’s, her cousins’, her governess’, and of course, her own, throughout her 19 year life. Weir depicts Jane’s parents, Henry and Frances (herself the niece of King Henry VIII), as grasping social climbers deeply disappointed in Jane’s gender. The couple are Protestants who raise their daughter (and later, her younger sisters) to follow in their religious footsteps. They are harsh parents, even by the standards of their time, but Jane herself grows into a quiet, obedient, and devout teenager (she is given a top-quality education and has the love of a devoted caretaker, Mrs. Ellen, which certainly helps). While it is hoped that she’ll be considered a suitable bride for her cousin Edward VI, she is eventually married off to Guildford Dudley to form a political alliance. When the king finally succumbs to tuberculosis, her family, as well as her husband’s and their allies, proclaim her queen on the grounds that Edward’s sisters are bastards and therefore ineligible to inherit…and also to ensure that a Protestant monarch takes the throne rather than the rabidly Catholic Mary. When Mary musters troops, Jane is rapidly deposed and imprisoned. While Mary is initially inclined to show mercy, she eventually realizes that Jane makes too attractive a figurehead for Protestant foes and has her beheaded.

I love Alison Weir’s histories…she has a light, lively touch with her subjects, creating a real sense of the person behind the recorded deeds. So I had high hopes for her fictional debut. But those hopes were disappointed. It’s honestly not very good. Her characters are, for the most part, very one-dimensional: Jane and Mrs. Ellen are good, her parents and husband are bad. I found it jarringly anachronistic that Jane’s wedding night rape is conceived as such by her…is “rape” even a word that would have been in common use then for someone of Jane’s class? Especially to describe nonconsensual-but-within-wedlock sex (which was perfectly legal in many states in the US well into the 1900s)? Weir does not handle her multiple perspectives with particular skill and it often feels like just when you’re getting into the groove of one character that it shifts to another.

Weir clearly feels a great deal of sympathy for her subject, and paints a picture of a life that seems cruelly harsh to a modern eye: abused and manipulated and finally killed. But from my own reading, it seems different more in degree than in kind for noble childhoods of the era: distant, uninvolved parents who expected their offspring to be seen and not heard and made plans for their future in order to create or cement alliances with other families. Jane’s short life is certainly a tragedy and her father’s continued scheming around her even after her imprisonment, without seeming consideration about putting her life in very real danger, certainly evinced an unusually high level of disregard for his child. But the book creates no real tension or interest in the interplay between characters…it’s just waiting for the historical events to play out as you know they will. I have a few of her later novels still on my TBR because I think some of these issues are simply mistakes by a rookie novelist, but I can’t affirmatively recommend this book.

One year ago, I was reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Two years ago, I was reading: The Shipping News

April 6, 2017

Book 71: The White Queen

“A modest woman looks down in this world, keeps her eyes on her slippers; a supplicant bows low and stretches out a pleading hand. But I stand tall, I am aghast at myself, staring like an ignorant peasant, and find I cannot take my eyes from his, from his smiling mouth, from his gaze, which is burning on my face.”

Dates read: July 19-23, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Can we really ever understand anything without context? I’ve been big into Tudor-era England for years, reading plenty of fiction as well as nonfiction historical accounts centered around Henry the Eighth (and his wives) and Queen Elizabeth I. But until now, I’d read almost nothing about the period immediately preceding it: the Wars of the Roses, with two houses of royal lineage, Lancaster and York, squaring off against each other and fighting for the crown. Philippa Gregory’s Cousin’s War series begins with The White Queen, an account of the life of Elizabeth Woodville, wife of King Edward III.

I rolled my eyes pretty heavily when The White Queen kicked off with the hoary romance trope of instalove. But it redeemed itself from that sin by not dragging out an endless will-they-or-won’t-they in which we’re supposed to believe that two adults with serious responsibilities (he as the king, she as a widowed mother to two small sons) would pine after each other for years based on one encounter. Instead we’re supposed to believe that these same two adults would almost immediately fall in love and decide to marry…according to Gregory’s author’s note, because that’s what they did. That they married in secret while Edward’s advisors were trying to negotiate a marriage to a foreign princess for alliance purposes is a matter of historical fact. But to her credit, Gregory wraps up their “courtship” in a relatively short period of time and their actual marriage (and Elizabeth’s life after his death) make up the bulk of the book.

Although Edward was a prolific adulterer, Gregory doesn’t mine their relationship for drama. Elizabeth is not totally immune from jealousy, but she accepts that her husband is who he is and his philandering is only a minor plot point. The drama comes organically from the situation in which Elizabeth and Edward find themselves: the leaders of a tenuous dynasty, constantly threatened. Elizabeth even gives birth to her first son, also named Edward, in sanctuary (literally spending months living inside the walls of a church) because her husband has been temporarily foisted from the throne. With a background situation like that, she doesn’t need to create problems in their marital relationship for intrigue.

Getting into War of the Roses material does help the Tudor era issues make more sense. Henry’s desperation for a male heir is understandable when you realize that it was only with the marriage of Henry’s father (a Lancaster) to his mother (a York) that there was any sort of sustainable-seeming peace in England after a generation of civil war. Henry was only the second Tudor king and there were men in England with equally persuasive claims to the throne. It wasn’t just his personal desire for a son, it was a very real matter of societal security.

When I read The Creation of Anne Boleyn a while back, one of Bordo’s beefs with Philippa Gregory was that she’d alluded to Anne’s guilt on some of the charges…specifically, that she might have slept with her brother in a desperate attempt to conceive an heir for Henry and save her own head. But it’s not only to Anne that Gregory does this: her Katherine of Aragon is guilty of the charges that she’d consumated her marriage to Henry’s brother Arthur, and in this book, Elizabeth Woodville and her mother are guilty of charges of witchcraft that are levied against them. I almost wonder if this is Gregory’s way of pushing her audience out of their comfort zone a little. It makes us ask ourselves if they’d have “deserved” what they got, even if it were true. Did Anne deserve to die? Did Katherine deserve the cruelty she suffered at the end of her life? Did Elizabeth Woodville deserve to have her crown taken and her sons disinherited (and disappeared)? Even if it were true?

Tell me, blog friends…what period do you wish you had more context about?

One year ago, I was reading: Suspicious Minds

March 9, 2017

Book 67: The Six Wives of Henry VIII

“Thus we will see that Katherine of Aragon was a staunch but misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves a good-humored woman who jumped at the chance of independence; Katherine Howard an empty-headed wanton; and Katherine Parr a godly matron who was nevertheless all too human when it came to a handsome rogue.”

Dates read: July 2-July 7, 2016

Rating: 7/10

When we were growing up, it was always my little sister who was the Anglophile. Every time we stopped at a bookstore, she had to get a book about England. She even ended up married to a British guy (completely coincidentally, but I’m sure that adorable accent didn’t hinder his entry into her good graces). But it must be airborne, because she got me hooked into books about England too. I’ve written before about my fondness for the Tudor period, but while that might have been the first instance of it showing up on this blog, it certainly won’t be the last.

Even with being a Tudor nerd, when I pulled Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII off my shelf to read, I figured I was in for a long haul. Nearly 600 pages of nonfiction tends to be a lot to handle, no matter how interesting you find the subject. But as you can see, I actually read it pretty quickly! Which is attributable in large part to how good Weir’s writing is. Although she’s presenting facts, she doesn’t forget that her job as a writer is to tell a story for the reader. The story of Henry the Eighth and his wives is an inherently juicy one, and she tells it well.

Like many stories about Henry and his wives, the first two (Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn) dominate the narrative. In the case of books based solidly in historical fact, I have to imagine that part of that is simply because there’s the most information there about these two women. As royalty in her own right, Katherine’s life would have been much more documented than a common woman. And since Henry and Anne’s affair lasted seven years before their marriage, there was a lot of time for things to be written about her by the types of people whose correspondence would have been preserved. Jane Seymour, on the other hand, had a very short courtship with Henry, and indeed a rather short life once they married, leaving much less time for a record to be developed. Weir does challenge the prevailing wisdom that regards Jane as a mild-mannered pawn used by her relatives to secure influence. She would have had to have a healthy level of her own ambition to pull it off and there’s no reason to believe she didn’t.

At the end of the day, this is a history, so if you’re looking for deeper cultural analysis along the lines of The Creation of Anne Boleyn, you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s obviously very thoroughly researched and told with considerable narrative skill, but there’s little in the way of “new” information if you’re fairly well-versed in the subject. I did learn new things, like that Henry’s outreach to the Duchy of Cleves indicated interest in either of the two duchesses…Anne, who became his wife for a short while, or her sister Amelia. I also learned more about the lives of Henry’s sisters…not a lot, because they weren’t the subject of the book, but enough to intrigue me and make me want to learn more someday. I’d recommend this book to a pretty wide group…people interested in the time/place/people will get the most out of it, but its size shouldn’t intimidate readers without that kind of pre-existing grounding in the subject.

Tell me, blog friends…what interests have you picked up from family and friends?

One year ago, I was reading: American Gods

February 25, 2016

Book 13: The Creation of Anne Boleyn

“Why is Anne Boleyn so fascinating? Maybe we don’t have to go any further than the obvious: The story of her rise and fall is an elementally satisfying- and scriptwise, not very different from- a Lifetime movie: a long-suffering, postmenopausal wife; an unfaithful husband and a clandestine affair with a younger, sexier woman; a moment of glory for the mistress; then lust turned to loathing, plotting, and murder as the cycle comes full circle.”

Dates read: December 29, 2015- January 2, 2016

Rating: 9/10

Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. It’s how you remember what became of the six wives of Henry XIII. That there’s even a way to help you remember the love life of a monarch whose reign is 500 years in the past speaks to the enduring cultural relevancy of Henry and his wives. And if you were to ask someone off the street to name you just one of them, I’d put my money on it that they’d name Anne Boleyn. Witch, feminist before her time, seductress, all of the above and more….a lot of people have a lot of opinions about Anne, who she was, and what she did. But who was the “real” Anne Boleyn, and why do we still care?

Susan Bordo is a popular culture/gender studies academic, and brings a welcome level of inquiry, research, and critical thought to her examination of the legends that surround Anne Boleyn. Nearly all of Anne’s personal correspondence and even official portraiture were destroyed by Henry in the aftermath of her death, so we have to rely almost entirely on secondhand accounts (many of them hostile, like Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys) to know much of anything about her at all. This has created a narrative with substantial gaps, which can only be filled by conjecture.

The book begins with a walkthrough of what we do and can know with relative certainty about Anne (what she probably looked like, her upbringing in the French court, her move to England and courtship with Henry, her proto-Protestant religious beliefs, her short reign, and the circumstances of her death). It then examines the myths that have sprung up around her, and how they’ve varied over time. Bordo’s research pops up interesting facts, like that the “Anne as headstrong teenager” strain of Anne’s mythology only pops up after World War 2, when the concept of teenager-hood was just becoming a thing and audiences were primed by wartime media to be ready for plucky heroines.

Bordo is displeased with the popular historical fiction surrounding Anne, and she rakes it over the coals pretty hard. Phillipa Gregory gets an especially high dose of her ire, to an extent which I actually feel is unfair. Gregory has never pretended to be writing scholarly, academic history, and while there are definitely people who probably look at her books and think they’re reading something that’s been heavily researched for historical accuracy, I have to imagine that most of us understand that she’s using outlines of the actual people who were her characters and taking pretty heavy dramatic license with the rest. It’s not Gregory’s “fault”, per se, that her book became enormously popular and is probably most people’s go-to reference for Anne Boleyn. Some of her statements imply that she does hold herself out as somewhat of an authority in the era, but at the end of the day, there’s a reason her books are filed in the fiction section. Then again, I own and enjoy many of Gregory’s books, so maybe I’m just defensive.

At the end of the day, if you have an interest in Anne Boleyn that was sparked by the dreaded The Other Boleyn Girl, or Natalie Dormer’s incredible portrayal on The Tudors, or Wolf Hall, or anything at all, really, you’ll enjoy this book. It’s accessible, well-researched, and put together in a way that makes for a really enjoyable reading experience!

Tell me, blog friends…do you have a favorite historical figure to read about?

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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