Greg Jenner - Ask A Historian

To my wonderful wife, Kate, who has been my steadfast
companion and champion throughout

Hello, how are you? Keeping well, I hope. Obviously, I dont know when youre reading this, but Im writing it on 23 December 2020. Ordinarily, Id be driving to Kent to celebrate Christmas with my family tomorrow evening (Im half-French, so we traditionally do it on Christmas Eve, and then drive back on Christmas morning to spend time with my wifes family). Sadly, this year hasnt been like the others. The Covid-19 pandemic has robbed so much from so many, and lockdown means many millions of people arent seeing their loved ones at this special time of year. The majority of the country has had to socialise through the technological gateway of screens and speakers, and, while its effective enough, Im definitely not alone in yearning for face-to-face interactions with friends, family, colleagues, and strangers.

I am a natural chatterbox. I love to talk, and listen, and laugh. As a podcaster, Ive been privileged in my opportunities to keep talking and laughing throughout this accursed year. But Ive profoundly missed real human interactions, and one of my favourite things that was snatched away by the virus was the chance to meet people around the UK. You see, when I first agreed to write this book, I planned to gather up your historical questions in person, while touring my previous book, Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity. I was going to come to your town, excitedly waffle on about celebrity for an hour, and then throw open the Q&A so that you could ask me absolutely anything. Id have done my best to answer the questions live on stage, but would then have answered them properly in a book. This book.

Well, that didnt happen. Dead Famous had the unfortunate luck of launching one week into a global emergency, during which bookshops closed, events were cancelled, and the publishing industry went into temporary meltdown. It was somewhat less than ideal, and the lack of promotional events meant I had no audience questions for Ask a Historian. So, I had to change tack. The queries Ive answered in the upcoming pages have instead been sourced from an online questionnaire, with the exception of some memorable classics that Id been asked in previous years. I promise you with hand on heart that these are all genuine questions from members of the public (though I have a sneaky suspicion that one of the most difficult might have come from my literary agent, Donald), and Ive included each questioners name when they were happy to share them.

I am a public historian. My job is to encourage a love of historical learning, and I find it fascinating to see what people want to know. I also enjoy the sudden jolts of self-awareness when they chuck tricky questions at me, and I realise I dont know how to answer them. Doing audience Q&As on stage is always risky, because I have no idea what lethal grenade is being lobbed my way. Having read a couple of thousand books in my career, Im usually able to give a vaguely coherent response, but every now and then I get totally blown away.

The best questions are often from small children whose intellectual creativity hasnt been drummed out of them yet. My fave was a young girl who asked, Did Jesus Christ know about dinosaurs, and was he sad that they had all died? This produced a wonderful effect in the room; the audience initially burst into laughter Ah, arent children adorable! only for the chuckles to gradually morph into a muffled chorus of muttering, as the realisation dawned that this little girl had posed a theological quandary difficult enough to fluster even the Pope. I dont recall how I answered it, but Im pretty sure I didnt cover myself in glory, presumably making some waffly admission that the Bible is somewhat unclear on divine dino-remorse.

Wading through the questions submitted for this book, there were a couple that were equally flummoxing. The best was the marvellous: Did anyone ever paint a tunnel on a wall and fool someone into running/driving into it? The questioner was anonymous, so I can only presume it came from Road Runner who was plotting another humiliation for Wile E. Coyote. Intrigued, I looked at early Hollywood history to see whether Cecil B. DeMille had ever built a movie set in the desert, only for some unfortunate drunk driver to smash into it. Sadly, I couldnt find anything. And it felt overly tangential to pivot instead to the use of military decoys in the Second World War, when the Allies made fake armies of inflatable tanks and dummy planes in order to throw the Nazis off the scent of D-Day. Alas, Road Runners question defeated me. Beep, beep.

The successful questions which youre about to encounter are a brilliant mix of the familiar, the important, and the charmingly obscure. I was really heartened that people wanted to know about global history, as well as the usual Nazis and Tudors (wow, people really love Anne Boleyn!), and I enjoyed catching up on the latest archaeological research for some of the questions about Stone Age life. Occasionally, people made the reckless mistake of asking for my own personal opinions. Thankfully, my patient editor, Maddy, gently intervened when my impassioned rants veered wildly off course and turned into epic essays with TOO! MANY!! EXCLAMATION!!! MARKS!!!!

In general, Ive tried to keep the tone light, cheerful, and informative. I hope each answer does a decent job of outlining what you need to know, but my even bigger hope is that youll take a look at the recommended reading list and will use it to embark upon an even more fulfilling journey of discovery. The wonderful thing about asking questions is the answers often contain the seeds of yet more questions, producing a lovely feedback loop of constant curiosity. Ideally, this book wont just satisfy your historical appetite, but increase it too. In which case, allow me to raise a toast: heres to a lifetime of asking: Yeah, but why ?

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoy the book.

Best wishes,

Greg

I probably get asked about Anne Boleyn more than any other person. She is one of the most famous women in British history, having been the second of Henry VIIIs six wives and the first to have been executed. Her gradual rise, and then sudden dramatic fall, has been a compelling story for five centuries, and every new generation of writers seems to want to chuck more fuel on the roaring flames of her notoriety. Im afraid, MH-B, your teacher had fallen for something rather dubiously modern.

Speaking as someone who works in broadcasting, Boleyn is ratings gold dust; Im writing this in November 2020, and, in the past twelve months alone, there have been three major TV documentaries about her, two on the same channel in fact, that same channel has just announced that a third drama-documentary about her will air next year. We are a nation obsessed, as Dr Stephanie Russo demonstrates in her excellent book, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen, which recounts all the ways shes been reinterpreted over the centuries.

The problem is, so much of what we enjoy about Anne Boleyns story is either dodgy guff, or was politicised misinformation designed to destroy her reputation during a trumped-up treason trial. Despite countless biographies, novels, TV dramas, films, and documentaries, the real woman is strangely elusive, and you can very easily make the oppositional cases for her as being both unfortunate victim, crushed by powerful men, or conniving femme fatale who got her comeuppance. What we can say with certainty is that at no point in her lifetime was she accused of witchcraft, or of possessing a third nipple.