Teaching Historical Fiction: Hilary Mantel and the Protestant Reformation

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy as a case study for what historical fiction can contribute to our understanding of history. In particular, I will attend to what her novels reveal about the complex processes of historical and religious change that occurred during the Protestant Reformation, which marked its 500th anniversary in late 2017. Guided by my experience teaching Mantel’s fiction in courses on contemporary British fiction and historical fiction at a large regional university in the USA, I examine the ways that literature offers a unique perspective on major historical developments in religion and theology, especially by giving readers an opportunity to encounter, and indeed inhabit, religious interiority. By showing how new religious ideas and sensibilities develop, how they come into conflict with older viewpoints, and how they are by turns absorbed, adopted, challenged, resisted or rejected, Mantel discloses how religion is subject to the same historical contingencies as anything else. Far from being timeless and unchanging, it is contextual and more often than not syncretistic.