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
