Retha Warnicke

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Professor Retha M. Warnicke (b. 1939) American historian, Professor of History at Arizona State University and an Alumna of Harvard University where she gained her Ph.D.

Professor Warnicke is an expert on politics and protocol at the Tudor Court, Gender Issues in the Early Modern Period (c. 1400 - c. 1700) and Jacobean Funerary Rites for Women.

She is the author of numerous articles; including Inventing the Wicked Women of Tudor England: Alice More, Anne Boleyn and Anne Stanhope and Sexual Heresy at the Court of Henry VIII. She is also the author of The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England, which was published in 2000 by Cambridge. She has just completed writing a book about Mary, Queen of Scots that is being published by Routledge.

She is most famous for her controversial theories over the life of Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn. These theories were outlined in various articles in the mid-1980s; Anne Boleyn's Childhood and Adolescence and Sexual Heresy at the Court of Henry VIII. The theories were built on and elaborated in her 1989 book The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family politics at the court of Henry VIII.

Warnicke's Theories on Anne Boleyn

She argued against the general theory that Anne Boleyn was born around 1501. She argued, instead, that Anne was born in 1507.

The popular rumours that Anne had several small deformities - like an extra fingernail or moles are incorrect, since rumours of deformities only began after Anne's death and no-one who met her ever commented on them

"... the two [descriptions] cannot logically be reconciled to each other. Had there been even a hint of a deformity in Anne's appearance, the Venetian, as well as the Imperial ambassadors... would have eagerly revealed this intriguing fact to their respective governments."

"For many historians Anne remains the lady with the extra fingernail who was too flirtatious, even if in a harmless courtly way, for her own safety and well being. The result of this interpretation is that the responsibility for her tragic death resides with her, the victim, rather than with the king and his ministers, the ones who orchestrated her execution."

Most importantly, she argues that Anne miscarried of a deformed fetus in January 1536 which fuelled 16th-century fears of witchcraft and sexual deviance and led to her execution in May - "In an attempt to understand her by the terms of her society, information from a wide range of sources will be used to support the argument that she miscarried a defective fetus in 1536. It was because Henry VIII viewed this mishap as an evil omen, both for his lineage and his kingdom, that he had her accused of engaging in illicit sexual acts with five men and fostered rumors that she had afflicted him with impotence and had conspired to poison both his daughter Mary and his illegitimate son, Henry, duke of Richmond."

Warnicke's theories were harshly criticised by some other historians - particularly E.W. Ives and G.W. Bernard. She defended her arguments in a 1993 article The Fall of Anne Boleyn Revisited, although she did not insist on the various elaborations as rigorously as before. She suggested that Ives's theory on Anne's fall (that it was caused by foreign policy and palace politics) was based on an over-reliance on Spanish sources and that his theory on her youth was ridiculous. She was even harsher with G.W. Bernard's suggestion that Anne might have been guilty of adultery in 1536. It is a dubious assertion with no reliable documentary proof. She concluded:

"As long as the lurid charges against the Queen exist only in unsubstantiated indictments and contradictory diplomatic writings, historians ought to remain sceptical about factional theories of her adulterous guilt or of factional politics. At the least, they owe it to the past not to further obscure the past."

Her theories were severely distorted in Philippa Gregory's novel The Other Boleyn Girl.

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