Retha Warnicke

Retha Warnicke

Retha Marvine Warnicke (born 1939) is an American historian and Professor of History at Arizona State University. Warnicke graduated with a B.A. from Indiana University, magna cum laude, in 1961. She then moved on to Harvard University, where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in 1963 and 1969, respectively. During her junior year, she joined Phi Beta Kappa and in her senior year, she was granted the Listenfelt Scholarship, for outstanding Undergraduate History Major, following in 1961 with the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

From 1965 to 1966, Professor Warnicke was an instructor at Phoenix College. She went on to teach at Arizona State University (ASU) as a Lecturer from 1966 to 1967. She then left to pursue her Ph.D. before returning to ASU to continue as a Lecturer from 1969 to 1973. Warnicke rose through the ranks to Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor and finally Professor in 1973, 1976 and 1984, respectively. She was the Director of Graduate Studies at the History Department from 1987–1992, and she was Chair of the History Department from 1992-1998.

Professor Warnicke was the first woman hired in the History Department of ASU, and taught the first Women's History course ever offered there. Through her advocacy, lobbying efforts and participation in numerous search committees, the History Department began to add women and minority men to the department – and as a result, the History Department is nearly half female and has a large minority presence. In addition to her efforts in the History Department, Professor Warnicke has also devoted much of her time to affirmative action and faculty rights.

Professor Warnicke specializes on politics and protocol at the Tudor Court, Gender Issues in the Early Modern Period (1400 - c. 1700) and Jacobean Funerary Rites for Women. She authored numerous articles, including Inventing the Wicked Women of Tudor England: Alice More, Anne Boleyn and Anne Stanhope and Sexual Heresy at the Court of Henry VIII. She is also the author of The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England, which was published in 2000 by Cambridge. Her most recent book, Mary, Queen of Scots, which was published by Routledge in 2006, has received positive scholarly reviews.

She is best known for her controversial theories over the life of Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn. These theories were outlined in various articles in the mid-1980s; Anne Boleyn's Childhood and Adolescence and Sexual Heresy at the Court of Henry VIII. The theories were built on and elaborated in her 1989 book The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family politics at the court of Henry VIII.