#reading16

(…) O próprio mundo mudou. Houve um tempo em que um viajante, se tivesse disposição e conhecesse apenas uns poucos segredos, poderia levar sua barca para fora, penetrar o mar do Verão e chegar não ao Glastonbury dos monges, mas à ilha sagrada de Avalon; isso porque, em tal época, os portões entre os mundos vagavam com as brumas e estavam abertos, um após o outro, ao capricho e ao desejo do viajante. Esse é o grande segredo (…): pelo pensamento criamos o mundo que nos cerca, novo a cada dia.

Anne, moreover, left no journel, no memoranda and very few letters, so her inner life must similarly be inferred from externals, for instance, what she believed from what she chose to read and promote. To make matters even more difficult, Anne was such a contentious figure that much of the evidence of observers is either adulatory or bitterly hostile. Writing a biography of Anne Boleyn has all the challenge, excitement and confusion of police detection. It is no surprise that conclusions differ. Yet although we cannot recover Anne in sharp focus, she does come through as more than two-dimensional, more than a silhouette.

Anne was sharp, assertive, subtle, calculating, vindictive, a power dresser and a power player, perhaps a figure to be more admired than liked. But against that is Anne's greatest distinctiveness, something she shares with only one other English queen: she married for love. Her relationship with Henry was deeply personal in a way kings had risked only once before, and never did again until the twentieth century. The couple's attempt to have an affectionate marriage, with perceptible hints of modernity in the context of a Tudor court, explains much of the life and death of Anne Boleyn.