Customer Reviews

The Tudors (A Brief Insight)

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I am working my way through the 8 entries in the Very Short Introduction series that were originally part of The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, and I have not been disappointed yet. This very worthy entry in the series, covering the reigns of the Tudor monarchs, has been 'substantially revised and updated', as of 2000.

Professor Guy introduces the chief protagonists and covers the main events of the period, as you would expect, but also challenges some widely-held views, some cherished myths.

History has been especially charitable to Elizabeth I and harshly critical of Mary, and a little reassessment never goes amiss. The Elizabethan age is routinely referred to as a Golden Age. Guy points out that, for working people, an age of rapid population growth and falling real wages may not have seemed quite so golden. He also suggests that Elizabeth's failure to curb government corruption and to maintain tax revenues contributed to the conditions that would ultimately lead to the Civil War of the following century. Mary, on the other hand, being in many ways a victim of ill luck, may not have been as villainous as popular myth often suggests.

Needless to say, a very short introduction can only whet your appetite, not satisfy it. This is both a good place to start and a useful source of fresh insights for readers that already have some knowledge of the period.

Next stop, the Stuarts.

I love this series of books, and have several of them. The Showtime series, The Tudors, inspired me to buy this one. But this book assumes that you know a lot about British history and personages, way more than most Americans would ordinarily know. The section, and it's a small one, about all the wives even begins by saying something like "there's nothing much more to say about the wives that you don't already know". Well, no. I don't know. And I wanted to find out. My bad. The Showtime series was lurid and scandalous, and this book finds that line of inquiry a bit too common for a "very short introduction" to 16th century England. I'm now looking for a "very short history of the Showtime series The Tudors".