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Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions. By G. W. Bernard. (New Haven, Connecticutt: Yale University Press, 2010, Pp. x, 237. $30.)
G. W. Bernard's Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions raises questions about widely accepted views of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, on almost every page. His own summary of his findings shows the range of these questions and of his conclusions: "It has been a careful review of the evidence that has led me to the conclusions that it was not Anne but Henry who held back for years from full sexual relations until he could marry her and father children of unimpeachable legitimacy, that it was Henry, not Anne, who developed the ideas that led to the break with Rome and the assertion of the royal supremacy, that it was Henry, not Anne, who worked with churchmen to purify the church, and that it was neither Henry nor political factions that brought Anne down, but her own actions, or at least justified perceptions of her own actions" (194).
Bernard disagrees with historians who have written about Anne in the last twenty years, including E. W. Ives, Retha M. Warnicke, and David Starkey. His perspective in this book is consistent with his perspective in his much longer work, The King's Reformation: Henry VIII and. the Remaking of the English Church (2005). There, he maintained that it was the king who was chiefly responsible for governmental policies rather than advisers, ministers of state, or factions at court.
One of the most interesting discussions in the book concerns Anne's...