Why so much of the Tudors?

[HenriettatheChicken]

Just that really. Why so much about the Tudors, particularly Henry VIII? It’s been done again and again and again and we never seem to tire of it. What is it about that period that makes us all so fascinated?

AIBU to not tire of it, whilst accepting there are other interesting period that could be covered?

Sorry if you feel it's waffling. I was mostly thinking about the later period, immediately before the Tudors, yes.

But the whole 'filthy pleb conquered' idea is ... weird. And out of date.

This is not about fashion. It's about detailed source work. People started looking at the languages actually in use, and the way they were used, and found that it was common for people to slip fluidly between two or three of the 'main' languages of England.

I know you know when the printing press was invented; my point was that people tend to imagine it meant a sudden huge increase in books available and in literacy, and the picture is more complicated than that.

I don't think the coming of the printing press to England really influenced the resurgence of English - it'd be too late a development, surely?

I'm sorry if I offended you by saying these ideas are old-fashioned - but, honestly, they are. This is a subject on which an awful lot of research has been done.

Now, if you'd accused me of being 'woke' or bowing to fashion because I don't tend to use the term 'Anglo-Saxon' or 'Dark Ages' then I'd understand (even if I disagree). But most of what I'm talking about isn't considered trendy, edgy scholarship at all.

Yet you still talk about fashion.

The disregard and contempt of the conquering Normans for the Anglo Saxon conquered is not a matter of fashion. It’s a matter of fact. I really don’t know why you’re trying to keep flogging the dead horse, except that’s exactly what conquering peoples often do to the conquered, and in England it never really stopped. The mark is there on the language we are using. It did diminish, and that diminishment, an official one at least which nevertheless left the elites clear to start economic warfare, shows up most clearly by the time of the Tudors: although there was a beginning of rapprochement from the 14th century the increased spread of writing and literature thanks to the printing press permitted propaganda games more easily then, and Henry VII was clearly not totally inept. Perhaps that is your ‘later time’, so why keep on arguing?

But whatever game you think you’re playing is obscure and rather pointless to me. Scholarship? It’s called rewriting the past and is the tool of authoritarianism. Or just you being bored and looking for a kind of fun which is also obscure to me.

Ok, I don't think there's much point here.

What really turbocharged English was losing French possessions in the Hundred Years War.

Which ended in 1453 (in opther news, Constantinople fell, marking the fall of the Roman Empire)

Paving the way for the conclusion of the Wars of the Roses and ...

(dramatic trumpet stabs)

Henry Tudor ....

Well, maybe ... I dunno, I think you can make all roads lead to the Tudors if you want to, but I suppose what I'm saying is, there are other ways to look at it, and we are so used to thinking about the Tudors as a great turning point/central moment, that it's probably good for us to try to think of other things.

I mean, long after 1453, rural English people are still collecting French books to read; French remains a language of choice for aristocrats reading the prototypes of novels for centuries (and I know that tends to be seen as 'something different happening,' but I'm not sure it is really). Elizabeth I's precocious translation of Marguerite Porete's French text is part of all this - she's still very much embedded in a culture of language exchange that, to me, looks quite like what was going on a century or two (or even three) centuries before that.