Shardlake review – a gripping Tudor mystery that explores what fuelled the dissolution of the monasteries

By John Cooper, Reader in History, University of York

“This house is rotten to the core,” snarls Jack Barak, Thomas Cromwell’s man of business, as he condemns the Benedictine monastery of St Donatus to closure and oblivion. Based on Dissolution, the 2003 debut of detective novelist C.J. Sansom, Shardlake on Disney+ draws us into an enclosed world of corruption and murder as Henry VIII’s Reformation threatens the end of a thousand years of the monastic life in England.

Dissolution is part of the Shardlake series, which totals seven books…

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