Anne Boleyn
They called Anne Boleyn the Great Whore. It is a Bible thing. Great Whore is a title from the Book of Revelation, and it is "end of the world" stuff.
An apocalyptic title is overdoing it a bit. They exaggerated the threat Anne posed. Or has history grossly underestimated Anne Boleyn?
Was Anne an existential threat to the Catholic religion and what is known as Abrahamic faith?
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I must thank historians Lucy Worsley, Suzannah Lipscombe and Tracy Borman
for introducing Anne Boleyn to me. I must thank William Shakespeare for humanism. I must thank Elizabeth I for Shakespeare.
Anne Boleyn
The Route to Anne Boleyn
Vladimir Putin in 2022 sent me on a journey to find the world's first existentialist. I was interrupted by the BBC in November of 2023 with the broadcasting of "Shakespeare, Rise of a Genius." It was to celebrate 400 years of First Folio, the publication of Shakespeare's plays. I found a theme in the plays which led to Anne Boleyn who was a humanist. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” The individual verses the collective is another way of looking at human existence.
In this episode, we examine the intertwining legacies of Anne Boleyn and William Shakespeare. Bridging Anne and her biographer I found Elizabeth I, the daughter of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII.
Ann revived the idea started by Jesus of Nazareth. His idea was that God is a man. Or as Anne herself might have said, God is human.
We explore the pervasive influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in modern Russian society and how it parallels historical suppression of truth by Catholics. Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth 1 hated Catholics. We must be humanist like Anne and Elizabeth and show hate to those who institutionalise delusion.
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