The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440-1627

Queenship and Power

by Kenneth A. Loparo

An examination of fifteenth-century British queens through literature and history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, British Literature, Medieval History

279 pages, Hardcover

First published June 8, 2012

Reviews

[Deyanira C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nonfiction book .
And basically this presents an analysis of the information we have of the plantagenet women .
I really enjoyed this one as I never thought and I agree with the author in many ways, this is not a biographical book but it explains interesting facts still is not an historical telling, it is just an analysis which can help you to understand why we believe what we believe, I mean what we know about many woman in the war of the Roses is for Chronicles or other text and many of them can't be taking seriously so this analysis will help to understand that.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the things that most interested me in university is how people's reputations change over time. Think of King John and his negative (to put it mildly) portrayal during his life and throughout the Middle Ages only for his reputation to (slightly) improve as he became a useful symbol of dissent against papal pretensions for early Protestant reformers. This book focuses on Margaret of Anjou, Cecily Neville, Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville and Elizabeth of York in the chronicles, ballads, drama and poetry of the late fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries. (Although Eleanor Cobham and Elizabeth "Jane" Shore are discussed even more than some of these women.)

I found this book very interesting. I have not read many of the works discussed and, with the exception of Shakespeare, nothing recently. More familiarity would have helped me and I admit to getting a little lost in the chapter on Hall and Holinshed. While the general conclusions the author reaches on the uneasiness male authors faced when confronted with a female in her role as consort, a position with, of course, potential influence on the king, and the different ways they responded, combined with tensions in earlier sources themselves, perhaps won't cause too much surprise, this is a book where the main arguments are buried in the detail. Since she looks at the evidence by genre/author rather than by each consort the book would have benefitted from a conclusion to tie the author's conclusions together regarding the portrayal of each of the women.

A good read, but a word of warning. This is not a biography of any of the Plantagenet women mentioned, and anyone expecting this will be disappointed.