REVIEWS 230 elucidation of this facet of the book’s argument would have been helpful, since “the vision’s ability to impart transformative knowledge to its recipient” (2) is clearly at the heart of Barr’s readings, which are committed to “examin[ing] use of the vision as an epistemological tool in both kinds of vision text” (8). Such an intervention would also strengthen the interesting corollary of Barr’s argument that dream vision poems “are an essential complement to visionary literature because they are able to show visions that fail to communicate knowledge to their dreamers” (8) and inform our understanding of what it means to be, as it were, “willing to know God”—as well as to fail in this pursuit . This book’s major contribution to the critical landscape of late medieval visionary writing—in its multiple and interrelated generic manifestations—is a commitment to rethinking traditional critical categories, and therefore implicitly argues for the pedagogical value of reading these texts in tandem. The project ’s intent is somewhat undermined by the methodological difficulties revealed in its execution—bringing this array of texts together is a useful exercise which nonetheless creates all manner of tensions (whether these are formal or historical) that threaten to drive them apart as a cohesive corpus. This demand for breadth also at times necessitates intrusive rhetorical scaffolding to restate the book’s central arguments—what binds the chapter together—rather than let the readings develop independently in other interesting directions. One underdeveloped thread of the book involves the role of allegory in these vision texts, alluded to on pages 4–5, but never developed in more satisfying depth; another relates to the role of St. John’s Apocalypse, and related religious and apocryphal material within, or at the cusp of, the corpus Barr defines. The chapters could go further in probing the relation between language and signification (62, e.g.). The most pressing questions the book raises, though, concern aspects of gendered devotional experience, which are often mediated institutionally. While medieval visionary women “may have been particularly vulnerable to charges of inauthenticity and heterodoxy” (12), they nonetheless incorporate and appropriate orthodox practices, such as when relationship between female mystics and ecclesiastical authority negotiated through the deployment of liturgical language (71). Barr’s readings, though far from conclusive, are suggestive of the ways in which the epistemology of vision literature reveals “gendered” engagement with the constitution of knowledge. SARA TORRES, English, UCLA G. W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2010) 256 pp. G. W. Bernard’s recent monograph on Anne Boleyn offers a fresh portrait of the infamous wife of Henry VIII. Far from being the chaste and innocent victim of the king’s designs, in this account Anne is a flirtatious and pleasure-seeking queen who had extramarital affairs with at least three men. While Anne was therefore guilty of several of the charges concerning her illicit relations, she was less active in the political and religious processes of the period. Bernard shows Anne as having very little involvement in the development of the events leading towards the break with Rome, and with Protestant reformers after her marriage. Ultimately, Anne Boleyn “no longer emerges as such a leading REVIEWS 231 player in the politics and religious ferment of the late 1520s and 1530s” (193). Although scholars often credit Anne with promoting Protestantism because of her religious sympathies, Bernard suggests that the queen’s patronage of reformed individuals was too sparse to infer her regular participation. Her influence is evident in only three instances—the appointment of William Barlow, the advancement of Hugh Latimer, and the financial support offered to Nicholas Shaxton—and these acts could easily be attributed to compassion rather than “pious commitment” (113). In Bernard’s estimation, Anne’s sponsorship of Protestant churchmen largely reflected her advocacy of royal supremacy over papal power, rather than a desire to further the Reformation in England. Furthermore, Anne’s notorious contribution to Wolsey’s fall was in effect minimal, as relations between the two were still friendly in 1528. Assertions of Anne’s centrality in these events have stemmed from sources written in hindsight , and efforts...