I am delighted to announce that my paper entitled “Large wen” or “swelling”? Exploring Myths and Misconceptions about Nicholas Sander’s Description of Anne Boleyn and Its Link to Witchcraft was published in the Royal Studies Journal in December 2023.
Here's an abstract:
Despite the recent surge in Anne Boleyn-themed books and articles, scholars still cannot agree on the subject of Anne and witchcraft. There are two polarising schools of thought: one is that Anne had “the physical characteristics of a witch,” based on the hostile account of Nicholas Sander, and the other that she was never “branded a witch in her own lifetime.” This essay argues that neither of these two views is correct and that there is enough compelling evidence to refute them both. It is time to return to the original source material and re-evaluate this part of the narrative of Anne Boleyn’s life.
And here is an excerpt from the introduction. You can read the entire paper here since it's an open access.
"One of the most enduring
descriptions of Anne Boleyn comes from one of her ardent enemies. In 1585,
Edward Rishton posthumously published the work of Nicholas Sander, Catholic
propagandist in exile, entitled De origine ac progresu schimsatis anglicani.[1]
The book was translated in 1877 by David Lewis as The Rise and Growth of the
Anglican Schism.[2]
Published in Latin in Cologne, Sander’s book quickly became a bestseller. By the
seventeenth century, Sander’s De Origine had been translated into
French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Spanish. The book was not
published in English until the nineteenth century, when the religious
controversies related to the reign of Henry VIII had long cooled down.
Nevertheless, the English people read Sander’s book in Latin with enthusiasm,
and it was especially popular with exiled Catholics during the reign of Anne
Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I. Sander’s work laid the foundation for modern
theories of portraying Anne Boleyn as a witch.
In 1989, Retha M. Warnicke proposed that Anne’s sudden downfall and execution were triggered by her miscarriage of a deformed male foetus in January 1536, which led to suspicions of witchcraft, adultery, and incest.[3] This theory hinges on Nicholas Sander’s description of Anne’s physical appearance and on his assertion that she had miscarried a “shapeless mass of flesh” in 1536.[4] Whereas the theory that Anne had given birth to a deformed foetus and this triggered her downfall has long been debunked by such historians as Eric Ives and Suzannah Lipscomb, the theory that Sander aimed at depicting Anne as a witch by describing her physical appearance is still credited in academia. Eamon Duffy in his 2017 Reformation Divided Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England repeats after Warnicke that “for Sander she [Anne Boleyn] was in fact a sort of witch, who enchanted the King, her seductive powers a triumph of artifice over nature.”[5] Yet it will be argued in this essay that Sander was not aiming at depicting Anne as a witch."
[1] Nicholas Sander, De origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani (Cologne, 1585), 17.
[2] Nicholas Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, trans. by David Lewis
(London: Burns and Oates, 1877).
[3] Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 241, 297.
[4] Sander, Rise and Growth, 132.
[5]
Eamon Duffy, Reformation Divided Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of
England (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 217.
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