Tudor England by Lucy Wooding
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Tudor England
By Lucy Wooding
Yale University Press 2023
It’s been a good long time since a book season featured a whopping-big general-purpose history of the Tudor era. The last was probably G. J. Meyer’s The Tudors, and Lucy Wooding’s new book, Tudor England, new from Yale University Press, is twice as long, seeks to tell the story of England from 1485 to 1603, and brandishes its modernity on its calling card. “In the last fifty years or so, we have seen significant advances in historical writing,” Wooding writes. “Anthropology, sociology and the history of race have provided important fresh perspectives. Women’s history, gender history and ‘history from below’ have transformed our view of society, popular culture and the political process, while the study of mentalites has added a kind of ‘history from within’.”
“Important fresh perspectives” is of course fodder for horror, but Wooding’s book is generously magnificent, sprawling over all aspects of the era, from sex to theater seating, from taxes to trout fishing, and virtually never descending into the muck of 21st-century grievance micro-studies. In fact, the research underpinning of Tudor England is amazingly fruitful: a hundred tight-printed pages of End Notes and a further ten tight-printed pages of Further Reading on broader subjects like “holiness and heresy,” “life and death,” and “Tudor politics'' – it’s not quite as useful as an actual bibliography, but since every major publisher seems to have signed onto the deplorable fad of simply omitting actual bibliographies from allegedly serious works of history, it’s the best readers are likely to get.
Wooding is perfectly aware of the standard ways of approaching her subject, usually as “a melodrama about a glamorous but dysfunctional royal family.” These are mostly just fables, Wooding notes, and she works mostly consistently in the course of her book’s 700 pages to avoid such things. “Fabricated notions of the Tudor era have been used over the centuries to support everything from the averred prerogatives of parliament to the claims of different sects within the Church of England,” she writes, “they have been blithely appropriated for accounts of the beginning of empire or the dawn of secularism.”
Thus in Tudor England Wooding attempts a very tricky balancing act between giving readers a comfortably familiar version of the Tudor world they’re expecting to find and giving those same readers a history that feels fresher and less phlegmatic than some of its predecessors. It’s a tall order, and she succeeds so confidently that it’s easy to imagine this fat volume becoming the bedrock synthesis for a generation.
Thankfully, predictably, even Wooding can’t escape the reigns or doesn’t want to – we move steadily from Henry VII, the usurper who founded the dynasty, to his son Henry VIII, to the teen-king Edward VI and his successors Mary I and the great Elizabeth I. But it’s only when you watch how steadily Wooding poles away from personalities and toward larger societal and political forces that you realize just how refreshing such an approach can be when it’s done with this much verve and lightly-worn erudition.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.