A modern historian leads visitors through the Tower of London while reflecting on Anne Boleyn’s imprisonment and execution. The accuracy of the guide’s account and the atmosphere of the site begin to feel disturbingly immediate, until scholarship, imagination and the supernatural can no longer be separated. The story uses a contemporary visit to examine how places preserve and reshape the memory of Tudor violence.
The supernatural element grows out of historical interpretation rather than replacing it. The guide knows how Anne’s story has been reshaped by tourism and legend, yet the physical spaces of the Tower make detached scholarship increasingly difficult. The story asks what happens when a historian accustomed to evaluating evidence encounters an experience that cannot be fitted comfortably into that method.
Philippa Gregory
32 books
Elizabeth Fremantle
7 books
C. W. Gortner
8 books
Margaret George
6 books
David Field
46 books