The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived.

So the poem goes, and so goes popular culture: the Tudors, Six, Wolf Hall, and a whole cottage industry of stories about the Six Wives of Henry VIII. But what happens when we stop looking at these women as sketches and start thinking about them as serious political actors who were trying to shape the history of England? Come for the drama, stay for the geopolitics. (We promise, it’ll only be more interesting. You’ll get some ghost stories, too.)

Lucy Kaufman is the Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Alabama, where she focuses on the social history of the fast-changing world of Elizabethan England. A graduate of Yale and Cambridge, Lucy taught at the University of Oxford before coming to Alabama. Her first book, A People's Reformation, explores the foundations of the Church of England and the everyday people…