This past July I read Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox. Guy and Fox found new sources and used existing ones to place this famous English royal courtship, marriage and death into a new and international context. (Anne is the first ‘beheaded’ in the school mnemonic ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived’.) I was excited to read it, as I had studied Henrician England for my Master’s thesis, and this was the first book in a long time to reframe the dynamic between Henry and Anne. It was also exciting as the authors had discovered sources that other historians had overlooked.
It is a truly groundbreaking piece of history in a field that is well-researched. The State…
