ABSTRACT
At their best, landmark anniversaries of historical figures and events can prove to be opportunities to quicken the beat of scholarly interest in a given subject, to explore the connections and disjunctures between academic and popular engagements with the past, and generally to revisit with a critical eye the clichéd language and easy assertions that especially accrete around those parts of the past in which scholarly and popular interests most obviously converge. So it proved with the 2009 celebrations that marked the quincentary of Henry VIII’s accession to the English throne; these provided multiple occasions for reflecting on Henry’s complex life and no less complex afterlives. Numerous exhibitions and their catalogues, tightly themed academic conferences, highend television documentaries with aspirations to academic weight, scholarly and popular books, and articles all took up the theme of reassessing Henry VIII as both ‘man and monarch’.1 With that burst of reassessment and commemorative activity now in the recent past, though in some cases still ongoing, it would seem timely to take the opportunity to reflect on the state of the scholarship on Henrician England, and more specifically on its art, to ask whether the heightened interest in Henry and his world promises to catalyse new approaches or bids fair to reaffirm existing interpretive paradigms.
