Persuasive fictions1996

This important new study constitutes an attempt to understand the means by which crucial aspects of the political process were conducted in the reign of Henry VIII. To this end, Greg Walker adopts a variety of approaches, from the straightforward historical narrative to an analysis of courtly iconography. He considers a broad range of evidence, from the trial records of a convicted heretic to the murals on palace walls; from the despatches of ambassadors and military commanders to the fictional creations of poets and prose writers. But the study is united by a central concern and purpose, namely to get beyond the orthodoxies of historians and literary scholars to the ways in which contemporaries experienced and expressed their political and religious beliefs and ambitions, and thus to appreciate how that most enigmatic of notions 'political culture' was constituted in the period.