The Private Lives of the Tudors: Uncovering the Secrets of Britain’s Greatest Dynasty

Borman (Thomas Cromwell), a senior curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces organization, eschews the oft-told tabloid tales that emphasize the Tudor family’s colorful public personas to focus instead upon their private lives and daily rituals. The larger-than-life personalities and romantic misadventures of the Tudor dynasty, which ruled England from 1485 to 1603, have been thoroughly mined in print and on film; readers hoping for yet another sensationalist and titillating history are going to be disappointed. Borman doesn’t do much to further popular understanding of the period, and the amount of detail about the rarefied world that the Tudors inhabited can be overwhelming, but she does unearth some obscure and intriguing tidbits that have been overlooked by other historians. Among the details included here are accounts that Henry VIII so liked the puddings made by the only woman who worked in his kitchens that he bought her a house, and that Elizabeth I liked to wear a perfume that she herself had invented. Though all five Tudor monarchs made even their most private moments into courtly spectacles, including their bathroom customs and childbirth travails, Borman’s fine book goes far toward humanizing them. Recommended for serious devotees of the period. Illus. [em](Jan.) [/em]