The Wives of Henry VIII is a wonderful account of the lives of the six women who married the controversial Tudor king. Antonia Fraser has written extensively on many subjects, but is particularly interested in British royal history. Her writing is clear and accessible, and almost invariably interesting.
Fraser says 'the six women have become defined in a popular sense not so much by their lives as by the way these lives ended.' Largely, they became identified as stereotypes. Fraser's stated intent in the book is to examine the real women behind the stereotypes, to find the human strengths and frailties behind the historic labels.
The first comprehensive treatment of stereotypes and stereotyping, this text synthesizes a vast body of social and cognitive research that has emerged over the past-quarter century. Provided is an unusually broad analysis of stereotypes as products both of individual cognitive activities and of social and cultural forces. While devoting careful attention to harmful aspects of stereotypes, their connections to prejudice and discrimination, and effective strategies for countering them, the volume also examines the positive functions of generalizations in helping people navigate a complex world.
Our brains use shortcuts for social identification, swiftly categorizing others—and ourselves—to avoid the energy-intensive processing of conscious thought. Often we do not even realize how extensively subconscious stereotypes shape our reactions, as two feature articles in this issue reveal. The first, “The Social Psychology of Success,” by S. Alexander Haslam, Jessica Salvatore, Thomas Kessler and Stephen D. Reicher, looks at behavioral aspects. It explains how people’s performance is shaped by awareness of stereotypes. The second article, “Buried Prejudice,” by Siri Carpenter, digs into the neuroscience of implicit bias and how it affects cognition. Even basic visual preferences are skewed toward in-groups; studies show that we remember faces better if they match our own racial group.
Women are a major subject of Chaucer's writings, and their place in his work has attracted much recent critical attention. Feminizing Chaucer investigates Chaucer's thinking about women, and re-assesses it in the light of developments in feminist criticism. It explores Chaucer's handling of gender issues, of power roles, of misogynist stereotypes and the writer's responsibility for perpetuating them, and the complex meshing of activity and passivity in human experience.