Noted Tudor historian Alison Weir has started a new series, "Six Tudor Queens," about the wives of Henry VIII. At 602 pages, this first one in the series is probably a couple hundred pages too long. For me, it dragged at times, particularly in the years after Henry sent her into exile. But with the author being Weir, you know it will be close to the truth. In her author's note, Weir states that "many of the letters quoted in the text are genuine, even if I have slightly modernized the language. The same is true of a substantial amount of the dialogue."
The book covers Katherine's arrival in England in 1501 as the bride-to-be for Henry's older brother, Arthur, through her death in January 1536. There are family trees (as of 1501) in the front of the book, but no bibliography, only mention in the author's note of "recent research by Giles Tremlett and Patrick Williams" who also wrote recent nonfiction books about Katherine.
Weir sums up her purpose with this book in the author's note as follows:
I have tried to show...that modern preoccupations with women's rights, feminism, and political correctness had no place in [the past]. Katherine's situation, as a woman, and her willing subjection to Henry in all things except those that touched her conscience, may seem shocking to us, but for her they were normal, right, and not to be questioned.
I have tried in these pages to evoke the sights, textures, sounds, and smells of an age, a lost world of splendor and brutality, and a court in which love, or the game of it, held sway, but dynastic pressures overtook any romantic considerations. It was a world dominated by faith and by momentous religious change...This was Katherine's world, and we can only understand her properly within its context.
© Amanda Pape - 2017
[This book was borrowed from and returned to my local public library.]
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