Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII - reading
Finished "Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII" by David Starkey. I started this one because of the Tudors series on Showtime, which I'm still in the middle of, and found the two overlap quite a bit. Taking the author at his word, it is amusing that the further away we get from events of King Henry VIII's reign, the more accurate the information about the event becomes. On the other hand, the author had an attitude of superiority over other historians with all the cattiness of a royal reporter. For example, "The fact has been obscured by the carelessness of many historians about detail." He had similar problems with some of those he wrote about. "Anne had an irritating and un-businesslike habit of not dating her letters," for example. Or referring to the papal "weasel word" when talking about whether his first wife was a virgin when they were married ("perhaps"). There were other amusing phrases. One that stands out talks about Henry's "machinery of 'love on the rebound.'"
I don't personally know much about that part of English history aside from recognizing many of the bigger names, so found it a bit difficult to follow at times when the author would jump ahead - sometimes even decades - to events I'm not familiar with. There are other similar jumps around the timeline that make it difficult to correlate the events in my mind. Sometimes he got bogged down in details, which had I known more about that time period I might have appreciated more, but really just muddled through. I mean, he's a(n?) historian, not necessarily a storyteller, right?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Brett:
This is a fascinating period of history because there is so much going on. There is one game I play called "Here I Stand: Wars of the Reformation" which covers this period exquisitely. I've found books related to Henry VIII (and other leaders of the time) fail to do justice to all the ongoing political intrigues. Understanding Henry is a function not only of recognizing his personality and actions, but the social upheaval going on at the time (Protestant Reformation in Germny, French invasion of Italy, Hapsburg's attempts to hold their empire, the Ottoman invasion and piracy of the Barbary coast, discovery of the New World).
There is so much to learn about what is going on at time period and to realize communications were, at best, weeks of writing letters!
Another TV series to watch which is related, occurring just before/during the Reign of Henry VIII, is The Borgias.
Post a Comment