The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen

About this book

Part biography part cultural history The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Annes life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really look like? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: neither.) And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Annes death more than her life. How could Henry order the execution of a once beloved wife? Drawing on scholarship and critical analysis Bordo probes the complexities of one of historys most infamous relationships. Bordo also shows how generations of polemicists biographers novelists and filmmakers imagined and re-imagined Anne: whore martyr cautionary tale proto mean girl feminist icon and everything in between. In this lively book Bordo steps off the well-trodden paths of Tudoriana to expertly tease out the human being behind the competing mythologies.