The Making of “Wives of Agency” (Progress Update #2)

Update

Since my last update I’ve been working to expand my basic matrix of events (accomplishments when I don’t have clear dates) for the wives, and so far so good. Reminder that this is what the previous matrix looked like:

Now it’s starting to look like this:

It’s definitely not perfect, especially given how many accomplishments aren’t easily dated and the continued lack of information about Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. I’ll continue to work to fill this out, and hopefully soon, I’ll begin to add the placeholder events into the timeline and work to write official descriptions of them.

Challenges

As previously mentioned, I’m still working to research especially the executed wives, who were specifically removed from the historical narrative by Henry VIII. It is likely that for entries for Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, I will need to be clear that they are speculative, and fill in information that would likely be correct, especially about their upbringings as an English noble-woman raised in France, or an English middle-class woman taught about music.

I also was a bit ambitious last update when I said I wanted to find more media, because the work on research and building this matrix of events, has taken up the time that could have been for media searching.

Next Step

While I would like to find more media, I think the immediate next step would be continued research, but also the beginning of the timeline population and description writing. As this is a public facing project, I know I will need to keep the descriptions short and simple like museum labels, which means I’ll likely need to edit my initial descriptions away from my academic defaults.