The Creation of Anne Boleyn: In Search of the Tudors' Most Notorious Queen

By Susan Bordo

Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne's life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination.

Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really even look like?! And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne's death more than her life. How could Henry order the execution of a once beloved wife? Drawing on scholarship and popular culture Bordo probes the complexities of one of history's most infamous relationships.

In her inimitable, straight-talking style Bordo dares to confront the established histories, stepping off the well-trodden paths of Tudoriana to expertly tease out the human being behind the myths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Release date: Jan 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780744292

Susan Bordo

Susan Bordo is Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, and Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (UC Press, 1997).

Reviews for The Creation of Anne Boleyn

[janarose1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Susan Bordo pulls together the legends, stories and tales of Anne Boleyn. Despite Henry VIII's attempts to eradicate her memory, Anne Boleyn is his most well known wife. Bordo spends a large part of the book talking about how Anne's tale has been influenced by cultural history and the historian/author discussing her. I found this book to be an interesting point of view about Anne's legacy. At times I thought the book was a bit dry, but that is the nature of scholarly writings. Overall, not a bad book, but not something I would reread.

[kerrymarsh · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow what a book. Like so many of the most interesting characters in history - all is not what it seems. Anne Boleyn is no exception. Susan Bordo portrays a very different Anne than that we see in tele-movies (The Tudors) and in popular fiction. She has meticulously researched her subject and discovered many inaccuracies in how Anne has been portrayed; no sixth finger, no goitre, and certainly not a shrew. Anne's character assassination is typical of that era when someone falls out of favour, history is re-written and the person painted as evil. This is a lovely mix of fiction, historical fact, and the authors insights. We worth a read.

[a.happy.booker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Whether you believe Anne Boleyn was the tragic pawn of powerful and ruthless men or a manipulative whore that stole a crown and spent her days scheming to murder her enemies, or something in between, you have to admit that Anne Boleyn was fascinating. Susan Bordo's "The Creation of Anne Boleyn" discusses how Anne has been portrayed in both fiction and non-fiction, TV, movies, and documentaries and how that has changed over time. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the author explored and compared the many versions of Anne's life and character throughout history and how each portrayal of Anne was adapted to fit in with the era in which it was written. It's easy to see how the "true" Anne Boleyn could be lost somewhere in history. It makes me hate Henry all the more for all that he did to remove any mention of her so that now, we're left with mostly conjecture about who she really was. Of course, that may be the very thing that causes me to be so drawn to her above many other dynamic women in history. I admit, I haven't watched many of the movies and documentaries mentioned but there are several that I am eager to see after reading this book.

Bordo is very opinionated about the way she believes many popular authors have unfairly characterized Anne. From the beginning, this approach was very off-putting for me since my introduction to Anne Boleyn was from authors such as Alison Weir, Norah Lofts, and Jean Plaidy and I was almost offended at, what I felt, was Bordo practically accusing them of fabricating history (as far as Weir and Lofts, not much is said about Plaidy). As you see by my 4 star rating, I ended up finding this to be an excellent read, and I may have even rated it a 5 had she not been so harsh on Alison Weir. I am much more inclined to see Anne Boleyn much the way Bordo does, as an intelligent, charismatic, and complex woman as opposed to the sly temptress that she is so widely believed to be. However, I think that, with the lack of information available about Anne Boleyn and since the information that is available cannot necessarily be taken at face value, Alison Weir's interpretation of historical events and Anne's character is just as likely as Bordo's interpretation.

I found "The Creation of Anne Boleyn" to be thought-provoking and it definitely motivated me to revisit some of my favorite Tudor reads and led me to discover some books and movies I wasn't familiar with. I appreciated that there were many points of view discussed and compared even though there was a clear bias. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who is curious about Anne Boleyn because it does present so many differing points of view as well as the author's own opinion about Anne's character and why she has been portrayed so many ways.

[ahappybooker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Whether you believe Anne Boleyn was the tragic pawn of powerful and ruthless men or a manipulative whore that stole a crown and spent her days scheming to murder her enemies, or something in between, you have to admit that Anne Boleyn was fascinating. Susan Bordo's "The Creation of Anne Boleyn" discusses how Anne has been portrayed in both fiction and non-fiction, TV, movies, and documentaries and how that has changed over time. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the author explored and compared the many versions of Anne's life and character throughout history and how each portrayal of Anne was adapted to fit in with the era in which it was written. It's easy to see how the "true" Anne Boleyn could be lost somewhere in history. It makes me hate Henry all the more for all that he did to remove any mention of her so that now, we're left with mostly conjecture about who she really was. Of course, that may be the very thing that causes me to be so drawn to her above many other dynamic women in history. I admit, I haven't watched many of the movies and documentaries mentioned but there are several that I am eager to see after reading this book.

Bordo is very opinionated about the way she believes many popular authors have unfairly characterized Anne. From the beginning, this approach was very off-putting for me since my introduction to Anne Boleyn was from authors such as Alison Weir, Norah Lofts, and Jean Plaidy and I was almost offended at, what I felt, was Bordo practically accusing them of fabricating history (as far as Weir and Lofts, not much is said about Plaidy). As you see by my 4 star rating, I ended up finding this to be an excellent read, and I may have even rated it a 5 had she not been so harsh on Alison Weir. I am much more inclined to see Anne Boleyn much the way Bordo does, as an intelligent, charismatic, and complex woman as opposed to the sly temptress that she is so widely believed to be. However, I think that, with the lack of information available about Anne Boleyn and since the information that is available cannot necessarily be taken at face value, Alison Weir's interpretation of historical events and Anne's character is just as likely as Bordo's interpretation.

I found "The Creation of Anne Boleyn" to be thought-provoking and it definitely motivated me to revisit some of my favorite Tudor reads and led me to discover some books and movies I wasn't familiar with. I appreciated that there were many points of view discussed and compared even though there was a clear bias. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who is curious about Anne Boleyn because it does present so many differing points of view as well as the author's own opinion about Anne's character and why she has been portrayed so many ways.

[juliew.-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was very pleased to read this book.I had considered that I had read a lot on Anne Boleyn before beginning but I was glad to know there is so much more.I have watched television shows,seen movies and been on websites devoted to her and still this book surprised me.A fascinating portrait of Anne Boleyn and how we have come to view her through the centuries.

[bookofsecrets · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After Anne Boleyn was executed in 1556, King Henry VIII tried to erase her from history by destroying her portraits, letters, and any other traces of her existance. Because of this, the real Anne Boleyn remains a mystery. Was she a wicked harlot or a Protestant martyr? A conniving husband-stealing shrew or feminist champion? In THE CREATION OF ANNE BOLEYN, author Susan Bordo sets out to “save” Anne the human being from the various myths created over the centuries.The first half of the book was my favorite. It’s an in depth look at Anne’s relationship with Henry, and how certain people from her own time viewed her and her marriage with the king. It was interesting to hear the author’s opinions of Catherine of Aragon and Jane Seymour, and how they differed from Anne. Ms. Bordo also looks at the theories about Henry’s health that may have caused his fickle nature when it came to disposing of his wives.I didn’t care for the second half of the book quite as much. It explored how different versions of Anne Boleyn have been created over the last 500 years to fit the standards of the time. The chapters dragged at times, and ideas were repeated. I did like that the author showed how Anne is portrayed in film and literature today, including her thoughts on The Tudors television show. One negative for me was her obvious dislike of Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (both the book and movie). It’s fine if she doesn’t like Gregory’s portrayal of Anne, but hearing about it over and over got tiresome after a while. (I have not read or seen The Other Boleyn Girl, but now I want to!)This book was narrated by Barbara Rosenblat, and she gave a brilliant performance. She added just the right amount of enthusiasm, humor, and sarcasm in her voice at the appropriate passages. I would give the narration alone 5 stars!THE CREATION OF ANNE BOLEYN was expertly researched, and I enjoyed how it was so much more than a typical biography. The information presented was certainly thought-provoking, and I walked away from this book with a new view of England’s most notorious queen.Rating: 3.5 StarsNote: A copy of this audiobook was provided by Audible.com in exchange for an honest review.

[ghneumann · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. It's how you remember what became of the six wives of Henry XIII. That there's even a way to help you remember the love life of a monarch whose reign is 500 years in the past speaks to the enduring cultural relevancy of Henry and his wives. And if you were to ask someone off the street to name you just one of them, I'd put my money on it that they'd name Anne Boleyn. Witch, feminist before her time, seductress, all of the above and more....a lot of people have a lot of opinions about Anne, who she was, and what she did. But who was the "real" Anne Boleyn, and why do we still care?Susan Bordo is a popular culture/gender studies academic, and brings a welcome level of inquiry, research, and critical thought to her examination of the legends that surround Anne Boleyn. Nearly all of Anne's personal correspondence and even official portraiture were destroyed by Henry in the aftermath of her death, so we have to rely almost entirely on secondhand accounts (many of them hostile, like Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys) to know much of anything about her at all. This has created a narrative with substantial gaps, which can only be filled by conjecture.The book begins with a walkthrough of what we do and can know with relative certainty about Anne (what she probably looked like, her upbringing in the French court, her move to England and courtship with Henry, her proto-Protestant religious beliefs, her short reign, and the circumstances of her death). It then examines the myths that have sprung up around her, and how they've varied over time. Bordo's research pops up interesting facts, like that the "Anne as headstrong teenager" strain of Anne's mythology only pops up after World War 2, when the concept of teenager-hood was just becoming a thing and audiences were primed by wartime media to be ready for plucky heroines.Bordo is displeased with the popular historical fiction surrounding Anne, and she rakes it over the coals pretty hard. Phillipa Gregory gets an especially high dose of her ire, to an extent which I actually feel is unfair. Gregory has never pretended to be writing scholarly, academic history, and while there are definitely people who probably look at her books and think they're reading something that's been heavily researched for historical accuracy, I have to imagine that most of us understand that she's using outlines of the actual people who were her characters and taking pretty heavy dramatic license with the rest. It's not Gregory's "fault", per se, that her book became enormously popular and is probably most people's go-to reference for Anne Boleyn. Some of her statements imply that she does hold herself out as somewhat of an authority in the era, but at the end of the day, there's a reason her books are filed in the fiction section. Then again, I own and enjoy many of Gregory's books, so maybe I'm just defensive.At the end of the day, if you have an interest in Anne Boleyn that was sparked by the dreaded The Other Boleyn Girl, or Natalie Dormer's incredible portrayal on The Tudors, or Wolf Hall, or anything at all, really, you'll enjoy this book. It's accessible, well-researched, and put together in a way that makes for a really enjoyable reading experience!

[hyzie-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a hard book to rate for me. I feel like it vacilitated between a four and a two, which is why I left it at three, but I'm not completely comfortable with that rating. I guess a lot of my trouble was that I couldn't quite pin down what it was supposed to be. It was part biography, part social commentary, and part really personal, and all kind of thrown together.

I use the term "biography" in this instance rather loosely. If I hadn't had background on Anne I fell like I would have been in a bit of trouble trying to follow some of this. It bounces around a little bit too much for my taste and I feel like there is a lot of repetition and even re-quoting of the same passages from the same sources. It is heavily focused, perhaps rightly, on the trial and then backtracks to attempt to handle the charges against Anne.

Valid points against the neutrality of previous writers on the subject are brought up again and again, and then promptly ignored for this book's own narrative purposes, which makes it really obvious. Mary is a "spoiled brat", Henry is a sociopath, people's motives on writing badly about Anne are boiled down to an overly-simplistic view and those who write for her are ignored. Now, I don't really mind some creativity in terms of narrative or interpretation of events and people in my history. I know everyone does it, and that is why I read more than just one (or even two or three) non-fiction books on a given subject--in the hopes of being able to grasp the full narrative. My issue with it here is exclusively the unawareness of the language coupled with the awareness of everyone else doing it. It feels awkward to go from complaints about a lack of neutrality in the language directly into doing it.

The cultural history of Anne mostly consists of a discussion of her portrayals in popular culture and the responses to them. It was pretty heavily unbalanced in favor of picking apart the negative portrayals. Positive ones were brought up and then shortly dismissed unless words from one of those authors was needed to convict another, which was a shame, because I wanted to hear more about what they were doing right. Pages and pages and pages are devoted to complaints about historical inaccuracy in anything that is not kind in their portrayal of Anne, and occasionally in personal-sounding attacks against the authors.

The section on the fansites was probably my favorite. I found all of the interaction going on there to be fascinating and it was nice to hear thoughts about Anne from the kind of people who might also be reading this book, although they were clearly cherry-picked. I like the idea of an internet group that internally policed scholarship on the Tudors and required vigorous proofs for any statements made.

This was supposed to be a book to ease me into some more positive portrayals of Anne. I was aware that most historical fiction on her was pretty negative, and I had hoped this book would clear up why and steer me towards some interesting positive portrayals. Unfortunately, what it left me with was an awkward feeling towards her defenders. It was overzealous in her defense, and not quietly so. It was too focused on other authors. It left me with disbelief and a faint disquiet. Now I don't believe anyone. On the other hand, I am intrigued enough to pick up another book on Anne, and to reconsider what others have been saying about her, so in that regard the book succeeded at its purpose.

[meggyweg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read just about every Anne Boleyn book I can get my hands on, but I admit it gets pretty repetitive -- all these examinations of one woman's life. But this isn't "just another Anne Boleyn biography." In addition to the "biography" part (which provides some insights and perspectives I hadn't seen before), the author studies the various ways Anne Boleyn has been portrayed in popular culture, from the earliest novels about her to the modern soap opera The Tudors. (I confessed I never got past Episode 1, which depicted like five sex acts in the first fifteen minutes. Maybe I'll give it another go.)Also notable is Bordo's undisguised, unapologetic hostility towards certain people, both historians like David Starkey and fiction writers like Philippa Gregory, who she thinks over-dramatize Anne's life and make all kinds of assumptions and get it all wrong. I confess I really enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl, but I read it when I knew a great deal about Anne's life, and I knew the book wasn't historically accurate and didn't expect it to be.This book is an important lesson to students of history: both about how little we really know about characters of the past, and about how much "history" is a reflection of our times rather than it is of whatever happened back then.

[tribperiwinkle · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent study of how Anne has been depicted through the years in both history and popular culture. Bonus points for the emphasis on pointing out the disturbing anti-feminist undertones in The Other Boleyn Girl.