Books: Out of the Shadow

CATHERINE OF ARAGON — Garrett Mattingly—Little, Brown ($3.50).

When he read the letters of the Spanish ambassadors at the Tudor court, Author Mattingly realized, he says, "that the Queen Catherine they were talking about was a different person, more cultured and thoughtful, more forceful and decisive, than the one I had read about elsewhere, and . . . that the key ... to much of what went on in England for a third of a century, lay in the personality and the decisions of this queen."

Most people still think of Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, as a woman...