The Challenge of Anne Boleyn

by Hester W. CAHPMAN

"Anne Boleyn" by Elizabeth Louisa Moresby. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Genres: History, Tudor Period, Biography

244 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Juliew. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written but be prepared for a bit of historical inaccuracy.This was published almost forty years ago and much has come out since then on Anne Boleyn.It does,however,offer worthy insights into Anne,Henry VIII,Tudor court life and the people surrounding them.I would not recommend this to a first time reader of Anne Boleyn's story but to someone who wants something a little more detailed on her life.

[Alienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one gets an A for readability; it felt more like a novel than a textbook, very lively and not at all dry. Some of the scholarship is outdated, which I can't really blame Chapman for. Some of the sources are questionable (at least she acknowledges Chapuys's bias), which given the pre-Internet time of publication I can't be too mad about either. What I can blame her for is frequently putting thoughts and motivations in people's heads - as much as I like the novelistic feel of the narrative, it's supposed to be nonfiction. You can't pull a long-dead person's thoughts out of thin air and then claim them as fact.

Even setting aside the outdated bits, some of Chapman's conclusions and characterizations of events are just frustrating. Anne Boleyn is a virtual nonentity with no agency; she spends a good portion of her time "complaining" and having temper tantrums that Henry is forced to oh-so-graciously "deal with". Her accomplishments as queen and as an influence in the Reformation are bizarrely ignored. Henry, on the other hand, is a golden king who can do little wrong, "patiently" soothing the hysterical women in his life and executing Anne out of a sincere belief that she and her supposed adulterers were guilty. This viewpoint results in a particularly insulting passage - discussing Anne's execution speech no less - where Henry is praised for his "tolerant understanding" and "endurance" of Anne, which she "may not have appreciated" prior to her last days. Just...wow.

tl;dr: Give this one a look for an entertaining and at times even moving overview of events. Chapman brings up some really interesting points and theories, and it's a good read overall. I probably wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to Anne, though - maybe pick up something more recent first!

[Marisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terribly researched, I counted at least five complete falsehoods and a number of questionable assumptions on baed on no evidence at all within the first 20 pages. Worth it if you like to rage read things that masquerade as history but are just flat out untrue.

[Amy Louise Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a good book, read more like a novel than a historical book. I learnt things I didn’t know and revisited facts I already knew. Well written, even for an older book.

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biographer seems to have a better grasp of Henry, Anne and Catherine of Catherine's characters than any other. The book also gives a good portrait of the character of the times, when justice meant an entirely different thing than it does now. I'd never heard of this book until I chanced to see it on the library shelf. I thought it was excellent; it's a pity it's not better-known.