@drowenemmerson: Which Anne Boleyn myths do I wish would die already? Honestly? None of them. Of course, as a historian, I care deeply about what actually happened. Evidence and accuracy matter. Anne Boleyn was executed with a sword at the Tower of London in 1536, not with an axe. There is no good evidence that she had six fingers. She was not tried or executed for witchcraft. But simply proving an Anne Boleyn myth wrong is where things start to get interesting for me. For generations, visitors to the Tower of London were shown an execution block associated with Anne. It had nothing to do with her death. But those visitors stood before it, imagined Anne’s final moments and experienced her story through that object. So while the block tells us almost nothing about Anne Boleyn in 1536, it tells us an enormous amount about her extraordinary afterlife. The same is true of Nicholas Sander’s monstrous Anne, Anne the witch, the seductress, the Protestant heroine, the romantic victim, the ghost, and the many other versions of Anne created over almost 500 years. Myths are historical evidence too. Not necessarily evidence for the world they claim to describe, but for the world in which they were created, repeated and believed. The questions I’m interested in are: Who created them? Why did people believe them? What purpose did they serve? What can they tell us about attitudes towards women, sex, religion, power and the past? And perhaps most interestingly: what myths about Anne Boleyn are we creating now? Every generation has remade Anne in its own image. There’s no reason to imagine ours is somehow above that process. Five centuries of history suggest that Anne Boleyn’s myths aren’t going anywhere. Rather than simply trying to eradicate them, or getting a smug sense of satisfaction by labelling a misconception as a ‘myth’, I want to understand them, the people who created them, the people who believed them, and what they reveal about the worlds through which Anne’s story has travelled. I’ve loved exploring this with the brilliant Alfred Hawkins for a forthcoming peer-reviewed chapter on the mythology and memorialisation of Anne Boleyn at the Tower of London. I can’t wait to share more. So, which Anne Boleyn myth fascinates you most, and why do you think it survived? #AnneBoleyn #TudorHistory #TowerOfLondon #History #HistoryTok

@DrOwenEmmerson

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Wednesday 19 August 2026 20:04:05 GMT