The slut shamed Anne Boleyn by Kyra Cornelius Kramer  

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The slut shamed Anne Boleyn by Kyra Cornelius Kramer

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The Jezebel Effect: Why the Slut Shaming of Famous Queens Still Matters

on Kindle, Kyra Cornelius Kramer has written this thought-provoking guest article on Anne Boleyn for us here at The Anne Boleyn Files. I do hope you enjoy it. Over to Kyra…

In 1532 a priest named William Peto preached an Easter sermon in which he asserted that that Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who were in the congregation

, were just like the Old Testament tyrant Ahab and his painted queen Jezebel.

Ahab was considered to have been a king who had turned his face from the correct path of worshiping God, and it is was clearly an insult to Henry and a jab at his break from Catholicism. However, Jezebel was considered WORSE because she was seen as the harlot who had used sex to enslave Ahab and turn him from the Lord. Anne, like Jezebel, was therefore the scheming temptress who had dragged a formerly-good king down into the muck with her womanly wiles. In spite of the historical evidence to the contrary, Anne Boleyn’s reputation as a jezebel and harlot has clung to her name like the stench of skunk spray for five centuries.

Anne Boleyn is, in the opinion of many, “the most controversial woman in English history. She is shaped by preoccupations with the mystery of female power, described as a witch, bitch, temptress, cold opportunist… a woman whose power is feared, her gender mistrusted”.

She has been castigated as “a whore, a home wrecker, [and] a soulless schemer”.

. In novels and plays, on television and in the movies, Anne Boleyn continues to slink about as the ultimate femme fatale. Even today history buffs online comment that Anne was “a piece of work” who “deserved to die” because she poisoned Henry’s first queen, calling Anne a “sociopath”, “cruel and crazy”, a “wack-job”, a “horrible person” who “stole someone’s husband”, and “sly” … all before declaring Anne did things she patently and

, Susan Bordo talks about how many media representations of Anne, “inevitably led to recycling the image of Anne Boleyn as the seductive, scheming Other Woman. That’s the classic soapy element of the story, after all: sexpot steals husband from mousy, menopausal first wife. [Michael Hirst, the creator of the Showtime series The Tudors] says he never intended this, and attributes it less to the script than to “deep cultural projections.” He had initially seen Anne … as a victim of her father’s ambitions, and believed he was writing the script to emphasize that. He was surprised when “critics started to trot this line out: ‘here she is, just a manipulative bitch.’ Well, actually I hadn’t written it like that. But they couldn’t get out of the stereotypes that had been handed down to them and that’s what they thought they were seeing on the screen. It didn’t matter what they were actually seeing. They had already decided that Anne Boleyn was this Other Woman, this manipulative bitch”.

Even some academic historians have jumped on the slut shaming bandwagon. In 2010 historical biographer G. W. Bernard wrote a book about Anne Boleyn in which he said, “it remains my own hunch that Anne had indeed committed adultery with Norris, probably with Smeaton, possibly with Weston, and was then the victim of the most appalling bad luck” of having her actions come to light.

This led to tabloids and newspapers trumpeting headlines such as, “Anne Boleyn DID have an affair with her brother: The poem that ‘proves’ the adultery of Henry VIII’s queen”.

The biggest flaw in Bernard’s theory is that most of the dates during which Anne had been accused of having affairs can still be

almost five centuries after the fact. On this very blog, Claire Ridgway has even compiled all the evidence against Anne to give an outline of the dates in which Anne supposedly had affairs in one handy post and shown them to be malarkey, yet these facts apparently don’t count when contrasted to Bernard’s “hunch”.

did Anne Boleyn do to be called a trollop for five centuries? She refused to date a married man until she knew he was getting a divorce. She refused to have sex with her fiancé until he put a ring on her finger. She gave birth to a daughter and had two miscarriages (perhaps three). All the evidence shows she was innocent of the adultery and incest of which she was accused. What on earth did she do that made her the ever-ready villainess of Tudor myth?

Like any good slut shaming narrative, what she did is not as important as the cultural motif she can be shoehorned into. Any of her actions that flat-out contradict her supposed harlotry are ignored or dismissed. She refused to date a married king? Well, since Henry VIII didn’t reward his mistresses as handsomely as did other royals, “it cannot be considered an act of great virtue that Anne showed no eagerness to become the king’s mistress”.

Remained chaste? She was just keeping Henry entangled in her guileful web. Got her head chopped off? It’s implicitly her fault for “miscarrying of her savior”;

if she had given Henry a son then he wouldn’t have had to look for a reason to kill her. The constant cultural message underlying every negative interpretation of Anne Boleyn’s life is that power-hungry strumpets get what’s coming to them.

actions were her fault. Inasmuch as Henry “frequently made a public fool of himself in his fervor for Anne and his love for her”,

Anne has been blamed for “making” the king act like a buffoon. Much of the hatred of Anne Boleyn in her own time stems from the fact that a “love-struck middle-aged man was an unsettling sight. When that ageing man was a king… the uneasiness grew, for here was an all-powerful being in thrall to a woman… the obvious way to absolve that feeling of unseemliness in the spectator was to blame Anne”.

Everyone blamed Anne. Katherina blamed Anne for Henry’s desire for a divorce. Wolsey blamed Anne for his political and economic losses, not the king and certainly not his own actions. Chapuys blamed Anne for the schism between Catholicism and England, not the actions of the Holy See that had inspired an entire reform movement throughout Europe. Princess Mary blamed Anne for the king’s emotional cruelty toward his once pampered eldest child. A large chunk of the population blamed her for Henry’s lusts. It must have been very hard for the English when Anne was dead, because she took the ultimate scapegoat with her to the grave.

Anne’s true crimes were not those of sexual impropriety, but those of gender inversion. She was too “masculine” to be a good girl. A man — a

no less — fell in love with her and acted “feminine” in his adoration, which had to have been her fault somehow. She was too smart to be discounted, and she was determined to bring about religious reform that would flout the existing conventions. Like other evangelical women she was outspoken about her religious opinions. She made a mockery of the status quo. Everything that was supposed to mark the attributes of a “good girl” – that she be passive, demur, humble, effacing, docile, and dominated – were reversed in the bold and determined Anne Boleyn.

If she wasn’t a “good girl”, then Anne was by default a

one. Bad girls are almost axiomatically called sluts because slut is the ultimate label of feminine badness. Since Anne was a bad girl, she was QED a slut. Once a woman has been labeled a slut, any sexual deviance – including incest and bestiality – can be attributed to her, creating a vicious circle wherein rumor of harlotry becomes “proof” that she is a harlot.

Anne Boleyn continues to be condemned as a trollop even today for fictitious sex with multiple lovers (one of whom was her own brother), but the real reason she is still slut shamed is because she defied gender norms and the ideology of ‘natural’ behavior in women.

Have you heard that Catherine the Great died having sex with her horse? Or perhaps you prefer the story that Anne Boleyn had six fingers and slept with her brother? Or that Katheryn Howard slept with so many members of the Tudor court that they couldn’t keep track of them all? As juicy and titillating as the tales might be, they are all, patently untrue.

Modern PR firms may claim that no publicity is bad publicity, but that, too, is untrue. The fact that Cleopatra is better known for her seductions than her statecraft, and that Jezebel is remembered as a painted trollop rather than a faithful wife and religiously devout queen, isn’t a way for historians to keep these interesting women in the public eye, rather it’s a subversion of their power, a re-writing of history to belittle and shame these powerful figures, preventing them from becoming icons of feminine strength and capability.

Slut shaming has its roots in our earliest history, but it continues to flourish in our supposedly post-feminist, equal-rights world. It is used to punish women for transgressions against gender norms, threatening the security of their place in society and warning that they’d better be “good girls” and not rock the patriarchal boat, or they, too could end up with people believing they’ve slept with everything from farm animals to relatives.

Available from Amazon.com, Amazon UK and Amazon’s other Kindle stores.

Kyra Cornelius Kramer is a freelance academic with BS degrees in both biology and anthropology from the University of Kentucky, as well as a MA in medical anthropology from Southern Methodist University. She has written essays on the agency of the Female Gothic heroine and women’s bodies as feminist texts in the works of Jennifer Crusie. She has also co-authored two works; one with Dr. Laura Vivanco on the way in which the bodies of romance heroes and heroines act as the sites of reinforcement of, and resistance to, enculturated sexualities and gender ideologies, and another with Dr. Catrina Banks Whitley on Henry VIII –

Blood Will Tell: A Medical Explanation of the Tyranny of Henry VIII

Kyra is also a regular contributor for the Tudor Society’s

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy the following articles:

Henry VIII, Syphilis and Mistresses by Kyra Kramer

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Henry VIII, Kell Positive Blood Type and McLeod Syndrome: Part Two – Guest Post by Kyra Kramer

Delahunty, Mary. 2013. “Liars, Witches and Trolls: On the Political Battlefield.” In

Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen

Hull, Liz. 2010. “Anne Boleyn DID have an affair with her brother: The poem that ‘proves’ the adultery of Henry VIII’s queen”.

The Middlesex and Kent Indictments – Do the Dates of the Alleged Crimes Make Sense?, The Anne Boleyn Files

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Categories: Anne Boleyn Myths, Boleyn Myth, Books, Representations of Anne Boleyn

Tags: Anne Boleyn, Anne Boleyn slut, Kyra Kramer, representations of Anne Boleyn, The Jezebel Effect

Anne Boleyn – The Boleyn Family’s Meal Ticket?

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"The slut shamed Anne Boleyn by Kyra Cornelius Kramer"

19 Responses to “The slut shamed Anne Boleyn by Kyra Cornelius Kramer”

I thought this was a fascinating article, Kyra. Brilliantly written and spot on. Thank you.

Very interesting. I always thought that one problem unique to Anne Boleyn being slut-shamed is a medieval convention against blaming the monarch (Henry) for anything — so his ministers or his women were traduced (plus, Katherine and Mary would have had strong emotional reasons for blaming her not him). If people had called Henry an abusive murderer (and his treatment of Mary is emotional/psychological abuse IMO), they would have been killed.

An excellent investigation. I look forward to reading your book. I have always believed that the Malleus Maleficarum was responsible for a lot of slut-shaming. It was an incredibly important medieval text – widely read – on every official desk – and it blamed women for all the evils in the world, since Eve first “seduced” Adam. If a man lusted after a woman it was her fault. If he left his wife for another woman she had bewitched him. I think Anne Boleyn was a very public victim to this mindset. Please check out my blogs on this for more information than I can offer here.

The title of this book places it right at the forefront of the literature for the snapchat age.

Slut shaming terminology has no place in any serious review of the charges against Anne Boleyn in HER TIME. Anne Boleyn is not a 21st century social media creation, she is an historical figure at a pivotal time.

I honestly think so much of the pretend arguments is just to drive book sales for people making money off the Tudors, which I don’t mind if done well like Mantel and Kominsky. But really, this sounds like rubbish for teenagers and certainly not for a mature, educated audience.

They do say “don’t judge a book by its cover” and I would add “Don’t judge a book without reading it”. This book is written by an academic who is a medical anthropologist and who knows what she’s talking about. All of the women discussed in this book have been “slut-shamed” and it’s something that should be taken seriously. I see comments every day about Anne Boleyn being a witch and whore, and it’s the same with women like Cleopatra. What do most people know about her? Is it close to the historical Cleopatra? I doubt it.

I appreciate the time that authors, historians and experts take to write articles for The Anne Boleyn Files, particularly as I know how much hard work it is, so I would really like for these visiting writers to be treated with respect and courtesy. To write that someone’s book sounds rubbish and to accuse them of making pretend arguments to make money just is not respectful.

Judith, I agree with you to some extent, but I’d like to point out that authors don’t always have much say over cover art, blurbs, publicity, or even their own book titles. Publishers want to sell the”product” and if the author isn’t well-known, that can mean bringing it to the potential audience’s attention by (almost!) any means necessary. (Think of the tacky, anachronistic cover art that’s used to promote both intelligent and sleazy historical fiction.) Yes, I’d rather read Ives and Mantel, because I know what I’m getting there, but I think their publishers also treat them, as proven and distinguished writers, with greater respect.

P.S. I was speaking in general terms; I didn’t mean to imply that Ms. Kramer’s publisher doesn’t treat her well, since I’m not familiar with her situation.

It’s true that they had no term for ‘slut-shaming’ in the Tudor era, but nonetheless calling Anne a “naughty piakie” and a “goggle-eyed whore” to punish her for Henry’s desires IS textbook slut shaming. Slut shaming women in the past facilitates slut shaming in the present, and I wanted to be sure the terminology was clear. Personally, I would rather communicate in the vernacular than obfuscate in the verbiage.

This an excellent article, Kyra, and very much on target. Thank you.

Re the dates of the alleged crimes and disproving those charges, Hilary Mantel has said something rather strange that I’ve been wondering about. In a 2012 article in the Guardian newspaper, “Anne Boleyn: witch, bitch, temptress, feminist”, Mantel said “It is said that the details of the indictments do not stand up to scrutiny, that Anne could not have been where she was alleged to be on this date or that. But this misses the point. If Anne was not where everybody thought she was, that did not count in her favour.”

What’s with the “not where everybody thought she was”? Did “everybody” think she was where the accusations said she was?

The whole paragraph that contains those lines is rather strange and in a way sly. Mantel says “it is possible that she (Anne) did have affairs”, but her arguments are instead about whether the accusations seemed wildly implausible at the time (she thinks they clearly didn’t, not even the one alleging incest), and there’s nothing that would let readers know it’s respected historians, rather than “Anne’s supporters”, who have the views she dismisses as “missing the point”. But it’s the “where everybody thought she was” that puzzled me.

“Anne’s supporters hate anyone who says so, but it is possible that she did have affairs. The allegations seem wildly implausible to us, but clearly did not seem so at the time. It is said that the details of the indictments do not stand up to scrutiny, that Anne could not have been where she was alleged to be on this date or that. But this misses the point. If Anne was not where everybody thought she was, that did not count in her favour. If she had risen from childbed to meet a lover, that showed her a monster of lust. It is the incest allegation that seems lurid overkill. But the 16th century did not invest incest with especial loathing. It was one of a range of sinful sexual choices. In the days when brothers and sisters seldom grew up together, genetic attraction no doubt occurred more frequently than it does in the nuclear family. If the allegations were true Anne’s conduct was, contemporaries agreed, abominable. But they did not assume her innocence. Led by love or lust, people will do anything. Look what Henry had done.”

I’ve never understood what Mantel was getting at with her comment “If Anne was not where everybody thought she was, that did not count in her favour” as it is she who actually completely missed the point. Anne was exactly where she was meant to be – recovering from childbirth, with Henry VIII etc. – it was just that the indictments made out that she was somewhere else and therefore cannot be taken seriously.

I just read the article and I don’t get her comment either. Mantel seems to be addressing the idea that Anne gave birth then hopped out of bed and cheated on Henry, which seems unlikely to me. After I gave birth I, the last thing I wanted was sex. The historical record seems to be this. (from a response to G.W. Bernard, who wrote a book stating he believes Anne committed adultery)

Though documents of Anne’s trial no longer exist, the indictments against Anne do remain. Analysis has shown that the majority of the dates and places mentioned as to where Anne’s improprieties were said to have occurred, are impossible. Bernard agrees, stating those are “quite impossible” (either something is possible, or it’s impossible – there is no middle ground), adding that “other sources show that Anne and her supposed lover simply could not have been together on that day in that place.” He concludes: “Only six of the twenty dates and places in the indictment studies were even theoretically possible, it has been suggested; for the rest it can readily be shown that Anne or her alleged lover could not have been at that place or on that day.”

So I don’t know what Mantel is basing her idea that Anne being absolutely no where in the area of the men she was accused of sleeping with somehow proves that she did commit adultery. I know that the discrepancies in the dates have led some biographers to conclude that they were trying to accuse Anne of being a witch, without actually accusing her of being a witch, but unless Mantel believes in witchcraft and that Anne practiced it, I don’t know what she is going on about.

A beautifully written article, and fascinating subject. I have always felt bad for Anne, for the terrible hand she was dealt.

Very interesting article. I am going to read your book

Henry is the King of (pun intended) denying responsibility for any and all of his unpopular actions. Wolsey dies,, it was Anne’s fault. Divorcing Katherine, never would have thought about it if Anne hadn’t bewitched him. Execute Anne, Cromwell talked him into it. Henry liked to view himself as a victim of all these horrible, horrible people who made him do bad things. He conveniently ignored the fact that the bad things ended with Henry getting pretty much exactly what he wanted and the bad, bad people pretty much ended up executed by Henry, who was forced to do it by the next bad, bad person.

Slut shaming Anne played into this tactic of Henry’s and worked to his advantage. It was also a good way to keep future Queens in line, knowing that false accusations of adultery could be made if the queen in question let him down.

Poor Anne is still being slandered to this day. This subject is just so very interesting. Sounds like the book is going to be fantastic!

On a related note, I’ve often reflected on how influential this aspect of the controversy surrounding Anne may have been in cultivating her daughter’s image as the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth had to carefully navigate gender perceptions while taking the “masculine” responsibility of ruling a nation, and presenting herself as the icon of feminine sexual virtue was probably the most effective way to walk that thin line.

Excellent article. I have to admit the sub title is unfortunate and a little off putting but that should not stop anyone from reading the book. I have read the other scientists book on the possibility of a blood disorder being responsible for Henry’s latter deads, which is well researched and well argued, academic and probably too educated for JudithRex. I did not agree with everything in the book, but many of the arguments are compelling. I enjoyed the article and agree that too many novels and dramas emphasis the alleged sexually predatory nature of Anne Boleyn, taking the image to extremes. I don’t know if I would agree with the view that she was entirely virtuous in the run up to the throne, but she was not guilty of the terrible sins and crimes against the person of the King that she was accused of. I can’t know how I will receive the book, I have not read it, but it sounds like a realistic debate on the issues of female sexuality and how it was defined and controlled by the constraints of Tudor to Edwardian double standards. I consider myself a well read and well educated adult and I for one intend to read and analyse the book, which I am certain will be successful and well received.

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