Read of the Week

Over the past week I have been diving into a biography of Henry VIII's wives entitled The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Frasier. This book was really interesting because it  attempts, in 450 pages, to chronicle the lives of six complex historical figures. You can tell where Frasier's interests lie in that she spent significantly more time on Anne Boleyn and Kateryn Parr than any of the other women. Catherine of Aragon's role inthe government was downplayed and her work on Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard lacked the biographical elements she included for the other four. Despite the compression of some wives' lives in the work it was a great book! I greatly appreciated how she focused on the scholarship of Catherine of Aragon, something largely ignored by historians who cast her as the pious, overly devout wife. Even though I was disappointed by the lack of background on Katherine's Howard's life prior to her royal marriage, I loved how she explored her naivete and how her spoiled upbringing contributed to her fatal indiscretions. I found the section on Kateryn Parr so enlightening, it explores her religious reformation, her intelligence (which were both profound) and how she influenced the ideology of Elizabeth I. I would recommend this book only if your interest in the wives runs very deep because several parts of the book would be hard to understand if you do not have a lot of background information.

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