Book Reviews
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Eleanor of Aquitaine was the daughter of a provincial Duke in France. Twice she married Kings and had many children, although she outlived most of them and several grandchildren, living into her ninth decade, suffering annulment and internal exile. Two of her sons became King of England and, through John “Sansterre”, she is the ancestress of…
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Almost every Ricardian knows about the famous novels ‘The Sunne in Splendour’ by Sharon Penman and ‘We Speak No Treason’ by Rosemary Hawley Jarman. Most know Majorie Bowen’s ‘Dickon’, Carleton’s ‘Under The Hog,’ and ‘The White Boar’ by Marian Palmer. More recent readers who are discovering the world of kindle probably have seen Meredith Whitford’s…
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I wrote a short story a couple of years ago, one of the first ‘Ricardian’ works I had ever written. So, when a best-selling Amazon author, Dan Alatorre (whose blog I follow), announced he wanted to make an anthology of stories from a variety of authors, all on a ‘scary’ theme, I remembered this story…
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This fictional tale for younger readers, by Stuart Hill, relates the story of the young Richard III and his lifelong friend Francis Lovell when, as boys, they trained to be knights at the castle of the Earl of Warwick, now known as the “Kingmaker”. I’m told it’s a charming story that introduces a new young audience…
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At last, another serious writer who champions Richard. Jason Goetz has produced a very even-handed account of how Richard’s dastardly reputation has come down through the ages…and he takes Richard’s side against the ten-times-more-dastardly Tudors. Goetz has written a series called Essays on the Classics! (The Great Books Revival), in which one of the people…
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It is unlikely you will ever read another book quite like this one. Ian Churchward describes it as ‘The story of how I wrote and recorded lots of Ricardian songs’ – the term ‘Ricardian’ denoting support for King Richard III. Ian sets the scene with amusing anecdotes about his early (pre-Ricardian) music adventures with different…
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If you support Richard III and believe history has “done him wrong”, for heaven’s sake do not read The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville and the Age of Chivalry by Christopher Wilkins. I made the mistake, and it soon struck me that the author had learned by rote every single myth about Richard, and…
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On a whim, I acquired a copy of The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, edited by Marion Glasscoe. It concerns the papers that were the proceedings of the Exeter Symposium IV: Dartington 1987. And the first of these papers concerns The Mystics and the Early English Printers, and is by George R. Keiser. I confess…
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The heights of the two younger York brothers has always been a mystery. Richard III had always been regarded as the smallest brother, both in height and build, and then Dr John Ashdown-Hill put forward his belief that the middle brother, George, Duke of Clarence, was the shortest brother. Read on….