Power, Propaganda, and Plantagenets

It may have come to your attention that I enjoy charting my way into things -- so why should the fantastic Plantagenets be any different?

My first meeting with Richard I took place in the pages of this book:

Isn't the cover art glorious? I was probably too young for the book at the time and I'm certain the cover had something to do with my decision to check it out of Bellaire Public Library. Apparently long-haired androgynous men have long been likely to catch my eye... As a young reader, I didn't recognize this work as a romance per se - just a well told story with historical leanings (I was impressed at the time with the little details about rushes in the manor house or how women pinned their cloaks) and maybe if I had known I would have been prejudiced about the whole thing. Either way, Roberson's Robin Hood won me over -- as did her depiction of Richard, about whom I wanted to know more.


In something like slow motion, I became a sort of Plantagenet fan (can one be a fan of the Devil's Brood?), tracing them onscreen and in print - and bumping into the legend of the outlaw of Sherwood along the way. I developed a fascination with Cary Elwes - one of the few Robins, as the script is quick to point out, that "speaks with an English accent," even taping Men in Tights from television (back in the dark ages before all this digital media, stored-in-a-cloud stuff).

 I enjoyed the sparring of Eleanor and Henry II in The Lion in Winter and in works like A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, and eventually moved into historical works as well.

Dan Jones' work was getting a decent amount of buzz on Amazon.com and other sites, so I settled in for several hundred pages of Plantagenets.

It was a long read - as one might expect for so very much history - but the small sections were very helpful in terms of finding resting places and I felt satisfied with all that I learned about the development of kingship and the expansion and shrinkage of the Plantagenet domains.

Unfortunately, I don't have nearly so much good to say about 1215. The chapters were lively and informative, but the book felt more like a general history of the time period than a work specifically devoted to Magna Carta. Worse, there was a bait-and-switch feel to the final chapters, where the authors basically concluded that Magna Carta has been inflated in the popular imagination anyway. Reading a few hundred pages about a topic to have the authors say, "well, this isn't nearly so important as you probably think, silly reader," isn't my favorite feeling. I think the chapters leading up to that ending would serve a general reader very well, but I felt that they relied too much on a few sources (not unusual for the time period, admittedly) and I didn't learn much.

The next Plantagenet-era works on my shelf include Troubadour's Song and The Greatest Knight. Until they come around, I wish you a lion heart for all things literary!

Oh, yes, - regarding the propaganda in the title: Don't you just adore Richard here? He barely spent any time in the country, sold everything that wasn't nailed down (and some things that might have been), barely spoke the language, and gets remembered like this. I hope his PR folks were amply compensated with castles and countesses!