Horrible Histories for Adults

• The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England by Dan Jones. A marvelously readable historical epic intended to bring the Plantagenets out from the shadow of the Tudors. I had not realized till reading this how rare it was for the English throne to pass smoothly from one generation to the next.  In Plantagenet times it was more likely to be contested by rival claimants and determined by battle, intrigue, even murder.  

• The Borgias: The Hidden History by G. J. Meyer. This new account of one of the most notorious families in history reveals the real people behind the legend.  Were they as bad as we have been led to believe?  The Borgias are also the subject of a recent TV series starring Jeremy Irons and the book Blood and Beauty by popular historical novelist Sarah Dunant.

• The Murder of Tutankhamen: A True Story by Bob Brier. Brier, a paleopathologist, performs high-tech autopsies on ancient corpses. Studying X-rays of King Tut’s mummy he determines that the boy king died of a blow to the head. Then he follows a trail of evidence in wall paintings and hieroglyphics to reveal intrigue in the Egyptian court and the probable identity of the murderer.

• How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate by Wendy Moore. History’s horrors don’t always take place on a grand stage, but in the intimate lives of seemingly ordinary people. The villain of this story is Thomas Day, an 18th century English gentleman who decided to create the perfect wife, docile and subservient to his every whim, by adopting two orphan girls from the Foundling Hospital and training them for the role. Whichever grew up to best fulfill his requirements would win the dubious prize of his hand in marriage. This amazing story, truly history proving stranger than fiction, reveals the dark side of Enlightenment ideas taken to extremes.

• The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen by Susan Bordo. No Horrible History list would be complete without the Tudors, the endlessly fascinating dynasty that we can’t seem to stop reading and writing about. Most historians now consider Anne to have been innocent and framed by Thomas Cromwell (see Hilary Mantel’s Booker prize-winning novels).  Bordo re-examines the evidence and shows how the image of Anne has changed through the centuries since her death, reflecting changing religious beliefs and attitudes to women. I was surprised to learn that Anne is a feminist heroine to young women and even has her own Facebook fan page!
  
  
  
  
  

Labels: Books, History