I had fun doing the 2008 tally of the most common themes in the questions submitted to the Q&A blog, so I thought I would do it again with the 2009 submissions.
The total number of submission emails that I still had in my saved box from 2009 was 465, although not all of those ended up posted to the blog.
Anne Boleyn, once again, was Queen (if you’ll pardon the pun) of the Q&A blog with inquiries into every part of her life and death. The rest of her family cropped up quite a bit too, although I don’t think quite as much as they did in 2008. I think a lot of the interest continues to come from people watching and reading fiction about Anne, Mary, Jane (Parker/Boleyn/Rochford), George and their parents. The rest of the wives also cropped up a bit, but even combined I don’t think they got close to Anne!
Although there were still questions on the subject, the interest in possible mistresses and bastards of Henry VIII seems to have fallen off from 2008 and earlier. The Greys (of course Jane in particular) were asked about a bit and Mary I seems to have come up more, perhaps because of her character on “The Tudors”?
One thing that struck me were a large number of questions related to tangible items of the Tudors that still survive, be it buildings, personal and household items, portraits, modern descendants, fashion and jewelry and above all – tombs, graves and remains. I don’t know if we’re just a morbid lot or what, but graves and bones were very popular topics last year! Kind of related to the bones and bodies was an interest in medical issues, both physical and psychological. Trying to diagnose long-dead people with certain diseases (of the body or mind) is difficult at best, but I have to admit that the speculation is kind of fun.
A lot of questions had to do with the factual basis of fictional representations of the Tudors (tv, books, movies) and how reliable some non-fiction works are. With regards to the fiction, it’s great to see people wanting to dig deeper into the real history.
And finally, I’m guessing that a lot of teachers were doing Tudor crime and punishment this year since that showed up a fair amount and was almost always for a school project.
I’m looking forward to seeing what questions 2010 brings!
I love this analysis – thanks for taking the time to look at it….
Glad you enjoyed it! It’s actually a lot of fun to go through them all at once like that – some trends I don’t notice when I do them throughout the year show up when I look at hundreds all at once!