Famously controversial, Warnicke’s revisionist study of Anne Boleyn shifts attention away from the familiar story, and toward the social world in which Anne’s rise and destruction actually became apparent. 

The book is most famous for its argument that Anne’s fall cannot be understood apart from Henry VIII’s obsession with succession and the cultural meanings attached to her final miscarriage. She argues this by covering the ambience around the fact, the family loyalty, dynastic anxiety, sexuality, fertility, religion and contemporary beliefs about miscarriage and bodily abnormality. Warnicke reads the court as a place where family politics, theology, superstition and reproductive history were inseparable. It remains a provocative intervention in Tudor historiography precisely because it refuses the cleaner explanations later historians often prefer.

Cambridge University Press / Canto, Cambridge, 1991. Canto edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear and minor handling marks to covers, with faint creasing to lower front cover. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.