“They buried him at Worcester”: Heritage sites, historical fiction and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall

While Hilary Mantel’s Booker-Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall has been subject to a range of critical approaches since its publication, no study yet exists which interrogates the novel’s interactions with the historical architecture and heritage sites it imaginatively occupies. Taking as its jumping off point an analysis of the representation of Arthur Tudor’s chantry chapel within Wolf Hall in conversation with its architectural counterpart in Worcester Cathedral, this paper explores the intersections between the material history present in heritage architecture and the historical fictions that invoke those locations as their settings, asking what kinds of knowledge and effects those intersections produce.