Without hope of change
By some odd twist of fate, both of my current article-length projects ran into an identical stumbling-block: I started them under the assumption that I would see some sort of drastic change over the long haul--after all, both projects cover a century-long span--only to discover that, in fact, the subject matter proved stubbornly near-static. My anti-Catholic sermonizers spent a century trotting out the same arguments against the RCC, arguments that often looked suspiciously similar to the less complicated polemics of the sixteenth century. In the twentieth century, meanwhile, my romance novelists also spent a century producing the same narratives about Anne Boleyn, narratives that frequently arrived at suspiciously similar conclusions about the erotics (as it were) of Tudor political life. As Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt sometimes says, it's annoying when the evidence gets in the way of your argument. Ah, well: there goes the argument.
I think I fell into the trap of micromanaging my historicism. That is to say, I forgot that popular fiction and nonfiction both tend to be "conservative"--by which I mean not politically conservative, but conservative in the sense of relying on inherited forms, literary techniques, and, indeed, ideas. Such conservatism can generate something new, as when preachers adapt sixteenth-century apocalyptic discourse to the late nineteenth century. But it also means that the changes in question tend to be local adjustments, not seismic shifts. The Anne Boleyn novels, for example, often imagine totally egalitarian, entirely depoliticized romantic couplings as a counterpoint to the goings-on at Henry VIII's court; a couple of the most recent novels, Bertrice Small's The Last Heiress and Suzannah Dunn's The Queen of Subtleties, argue that such "real relationships" can be gay as well as straight. Now, putting some very large doses of anachronism to one side (Small's protagonist has a much-loved, very campy, and openly gay uncle--in the sixteenth century?!), these authors have clearly responded to a change in the cultural air; we're a long way from, say, Lozania Prole's Cranmer-as-gay-predator (no, please don't ask). But the novels register this change in a very conservative fashion: by extending the reach of a particular romance trope to cover a different group of people. The trope itself remains in play.