Wolf Hall, take 2

[tempestsarekind]

Guess who's still struggling to read Wolf Hall? (I think I'm going to set it aside soon, if I keep having this problem, because right now I'm hypersensitive to this issue.) It's just that it feels demeaning, to keep taking ideas and beliefs that would have been normal to quite a few people if not everyone, and only holding them up as silly things

Comments

[angevin2]

The more I read about this book (which I haven't read, because I am a terrible, terrible early modernist*), the more I am amazed that my mom liked it, given how much she likes to feel like Catholics are still terribly persecuted. She was extremely offended, for instance, when The Tudors had Wolsey commit suicide.

(*And because what I've put together about it gives me the impression that it would feel like talking about Thomas More with my extremely anti-Catholic dissertation director, who is an Anglican doing Reformation studies at a Jesuit university and thus likes to think it's that rather than his complete lack of people skills that makes him unpopular.)

[tempestsarekind]

Heh. I've been putting off reading it since the book's publication (obviously), but people just keep assuming that I've already read it, and that I must have loved it (because they read it and loved it, so of course it would be right up my alley!). Which mostly just made me put it off more.

I think More turns out to be kind of a jerk, based on some reviews I read, so it is a bit surprising that your mom liked it! Although I think Wolsey is depicted in a positive way, so maybe that evened things out?

[a_t_rain]

Yeah, More is a massive jerk (in ways that, IMO, are not at all implausible, although I'd never imagined him in quite that light before).

[tempestsarekind]

I realize now that I have actually not spent very much time imagining Thomas More at all. :) Which is odd, because I taught Utopia and brought in pictures of the More family portrait for my students...