#me: i just spent $103 on an academic publication about being a teenage girl in the middle ages!

[circletofpearls]

Anne's girlhood has been overlooked in the popular imagination. It is also a period that has been misrepresented, reduced to the upper-class equivalent of reform school. But Anne Boleyn's French girlhood was neither a punishment for bad behaviour nor a hotbed of flirtation.

Instead, the girl-centred atmosphere of the French court was a quiet and intimate world defined by close bonds with other women, forged over the performance of music, shared religious beliefs, and love of learning.

During the years Anne Boleyn spent in France, she participated in female friendships that extended across nations as well as generations.

- Deanne Williams, Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Performance and Pedagogy