anneboleynqueen
anneboleynqueen
“For supporters of Katherine of Aragon, she was worse: a coldhearted murderess. For Catholic propagandists such as Nicholas Sander, she was a six-fingered, jaundiced-looking erotomaniac who slept with butlers, chaplains, and half of the French court. For Elizabethan admirers, she was the unsung heroine of the Protestant Reformation. For the Romantics, particularly in painting, she was the hapless victim of a king’s tyranny (…). In postwar movies and on television, Anne has been animated by the rebellious spirit of the sixties (Anne of The Thousand Days), the “mean girl” and “power feminist” celebration of female aggression and competitiveness of the nineties (The Other Boleyn Girl), and the third-wave feminism of a new generation of Anne worshippers, inspired by Natalie Domer’s brainy seductress of The Tudors to see in Anne a woman too smart, sexy, and strong for her own time, unfairly vilified for her defiance of sixteenth-century norms of wifely obedience and silence. Henry may have tried to write his second wife out of history, but “Anne Boleyn” has been too strong for him, in the many guises she has assumed over the centuries.”
— The Erasure of Anne Boleyn and the Creation of “Anne Boleyn”. (Susan Bordo. The Creation of Anne Boleyn)
