Anne Boleyn's literary remains: attribution, circulation, reception

Anne Boleyn is one of the most renowned queens of the English Renaissance, a figure whose fame is driven by audiences’ insatiable curiosity with her rapid rise and catastrophic fall. This thesis pushes against the fascination with her biography to examine Boleyn in an entirely new light: as a sixteenth-century writer and literary figure. I assemble the remains of Boleyn’s writing to establish—for the first time—her literary corpus, considering works that have been definitively attributed to her and works which have circulated under her name and in her voice. Delineating Boleyn’s literary corpus in broad terms, I include texts of both stable and unstable attribution, lost works, and those whose authorship is marked by myth, legend, or forgery—complexities which have presented methodological problems for literary scholars. I anchor this study around case studies of four texts within Boleyn’s extended oeuvre—her Tower Letter, her Paris Book of Hours, and the songs ‘O Death, rock me asleep’ and ‘Defiled is my name’—all texts in which Boleyn’s authorship is either contested or entangled with historical rumour and dispute. Analysing the attribution debates surrounding these works from the perspective of their circulation and reception allows me to provide the first comprehensive literary history of Anne Boleyn. I engage with methodologies which grapple with questions of attribution, scrutinise reception histories and lost texts, and close read original manuscripts. My thesis asks why, when Boleyn’s afterlife is sometimes shaped by works with contested authorship, does her literary reputation remain beset by claims of forgery, assumptions of literary ineptitude, historical myth, and unexplored original sources. By addressing these problems, I challenge traditional ideas of authorship, provide entirely new textual analyses, transcriptions, and translations, and push the boundaries of how a corpus is defined. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Anne Boleyn was a Renaissance writer, patron, and mediatrix who was aware of her literary presence and influence. When her texts are read as the work of a Renaissance queen, they reveal her signature tropes and expert use of rhetoric to advocate for her person and character. They show how she promoted her political agenda and private ambitions and sought to influence and engage those of her circle in questions of faith. These readings establish new ways of understanding Boleyn’s textual agency and literary reputation. The literary remains of Anne Boleyn reveal her purposefulness, astuteness, and confidence as writer, and show that one of the most effective ways she ruled and reigned was through her engagement with textual culture.