Reading the Adulterous/Treasonous Queen in Early Modern England: Malory's Guinevere and Anne Boleyn

The condemnation of Guinevere in the Morte Darthur may have shocked contemporary readers because no medieval queen was ever tried or punished with death for treason or adultery. In the early sixteenth century, by contrast, Queen Anne Boleyn was executed for crimes that enmeshed treason with adultery. Thus, the conceptual groundwork for killing a queen through an accusation of treasonous adultery likely lay not in legal or historical precedent, but in habits of reading inculcated by late medieval and early modern romance, particularly Malory's popular Arthurian story. The fictionalized history of Guinevere's condemnation to the stake may have enabled early witnesses of Anne's death to make ideological sense of this break from the past.