BBC’s new historical drama,’The White Queen began on Sunday, with an impressive 5.3 million viewers tuning in to watch the whirlwind romance between Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. A great deal of modern historical fiction deals with Henry VIII and his choice of wives, but it is the commoners turned queen that command the most… Read More Accuracy, Authenticity and Accessibility: The White Queen
Having settled down for the evening with some toffee popcorn and a bottle of coke to watch All Star Superman, I suddenly remembered The White Queen was showing on BBC one and so hastened to find a different television, abandoning the popcorn in the process. To be honest, I was not expecting much. The BBC… Read More The White Queen
I have studied history for years and throughout it all, until very recently, you will find religion underlying a great deal of societal history. Considering that for a vast amount of time, Europe was predominantly Catholic before changing, in the sixteenth century, to somewhat Catholic with some Protestantism thrown in for good measure; religion is… Read More Joan of Arc on film: The Mad Messenger
Pssst, I’m going to let you in on a secret. Anne Boleyn was Queen of England for three years! We know, you cry! But think about it, how much of our fiction shows Anne Boleyn as a queen, performing her duties or highlights any of her achievements while she held the crown? Now compare this… Read More Anne the Quene
Showing the Holocaust on film is always going to be a controversial move for some. There is, after all, so much films can show. They will never be able to capture the horror of the Nazi concentration and death camps or the suffering of those imprisoned there. So I was surprised to watch a film… Read More Presenting the Holocaust: The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999)
Sometimes when researching history, you come across someone who is entirely unimportant in the grand scheme of things but didn’t half lead an interesting life. Lady Zhen is one such person. She occupies a role in history so brief and unassuming that we don’t even know her name. She lived between 183 and 221 AD in… Read More The Life, Death, and Posthumous Revenge of Lady Zhen
Titanic is an interesting piece of fiction to consider. Director James Cameron is hailed as a  ‘hugely respected Titanic expert’. The film itself was, at the time, heralded as one of the most historically accurate versions of the ship ever to be put on the big screen, yet despite this, it is riddled with glaring… Read More Fact & Fiction: Titanic (1997)
Recently, I watched the 2008 film version of The Other Boleyn Girl. (Why, why did I do this to myself?) While musing on the sheer historical inaccuracy and wondering where Benedict Cumberbatch disappeared to halfway through the team, we came to a rather disturbing rape scene between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. It’s a common… Read More The R*pe of Anne Boleyn
During the medieval/early modern period (and many others but I’m working to a deadline here), a woman was defined by her marital status. As an adolescent, she was unmarried and therefore a virgin. As an adult, she’d marry and would either die a wife or survive a widow. The sex lives, imagined or real, of… Read More Fiction, Feminism and Marriage
