Of the events to mark the five-hundredth anniversary in 2009 of Henry viii's accession, the most notable were the British Library exhibition ‘Henry viii: Man and Monarch’, guest-curated by David Starkey with the catalogue edited by Susan Doran, and a colloquium at Hampton Court of which the tangible result is the work under review. Sixteen contributors, mostly British, here bring together revised versions of papers on topics drawn from their specialist studies of politics and religion, art history and architecture, literature and drama in Henry's reign, followed by a brief afterword from Steven Gunn. Although not as genuinely interdisciplinary as it purports to be since most contributors are reluctant to cross their own disciplinary boundaries, the volume overall is wide-ranging and amounts to a useful addition to the shelves of academic libraries. Highlights for this reviewer include essays by Maria Hayward on Henry's use of confiscation to augment his supply of worldly goods and art works, Brett Dolman on the pitfalls of interpreting the portraits of Henry's queens, Eamon Duffy on the significance of Cardinal Pole, Susan Brigden on European Catholic plans for a crusade against England after the executions of More and Fisher, and Tom Freeman on the reliability of John Foxe's account in the Acts and monuments of a plot to arrest Queen Katherine Parr on a charge of heresy in 1546. Freeman's in particular is a virtuoso performance and a masterpiece of sleuthing. Other contributors deal with such varied subjects as gift exchanges, diet and medical matters, the reception and interpretation of art historical works and notably Holbein's Whitehall mural, the diplomacy of Henry's divorce from an Italian perspective, gender and status in John Heywood's The play of the weather and the gender issues latent in the fall of Anne Boleyn. A couple of contributors, notably George Bernard on Henry's religion and the Reformation, contribute essays that reflect on work that they have recently published at much greater length. Readers of this journal will most enjoy Eamon Duffy's essay, which offers some alternative interpretations to those of Professor T. F. Mayer on Pole, although I was surprised that Duffy was so ready to credit Robert Parsons's story that Henry's corpse was exhumed on the orders of Queen Mary i from its resting place in Jane Seymour's grave at Windsor and burned to ashes. Apart from other considerations, when the grave was opened in 1813 in the presence of the Prince Regent, Henry's skeleton was seen to be intact and some beard was still visible on the chin.