Has anyone read the new biography of Mary Tudor by Anna Whitelock? It looks interesting, but I aready have two biographies of Mary in my library (by Linda Porter and David Loades) so I was wondering if it offers anything new. Thanks for any help you can offer.
4 comments:
Its really good. I just finished it.reads like a novel but is all based on sources.short chapters makes it really readable. I would really recommend it. can be enjoyed by anyone - people who know stuff about the Tudors and people who don't.
Thanks so much. I'll be adding it to my summer reading list. Mary never interested me all that much, but lately she's captured my imagination. Thanks again.
Anna is a serious historian, well trained out of Cambridge. She's been working on Mary I for a while now and has done a lot of work re-evaluating her reign.
I have not read the book but given what I know of Anna I suspect it will be quite good.
I read this over the weekend and can report that it's a standard, middle-of-the-road and fairly unremarkable biography of Mary Tudor. I'd rank it definitely below Linda Porter's and Judith Richards' recent biographies, in that the author provides no new information or interpretations of the usual source information. The chapters are short, as Anonymous notes, it's readable -- could use some editing, Katherine Howard is described as Henry's "fourth" wife -- but humdrum and in many aspects formulaic.
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