Richard The King: Medieval political history at its best
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Richard Lionheart is far too often portrait as a romantic figure of public imagination, hero like, captured and imprisoned, beloved by the people, the good one compared with his brother and successor John, the near saint like king in the Robin Hood myth. Well...too good to be true?
John Gillingham presents in his absorbing and well-written biography a "new" Richard, not feckless but astute, not romantic but businesslike, and wholly engrossed in his business of kingship to amassing power. Here is a great king, a medieval ruler at its best. But it is not a whitewash. Gillingham does not create a Richard, whom we could call a good man, but shows him as an extremely impressive ruler.
It is a splendid book that should appeal to students of the time but as well to the general public. I learned a lot about the real Richard. Gillingham gives the reader a convincing interpretation of the significance of the reign of Richard Lionheart
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The definitive life of Richard the Lion Heart
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Someone said - and I cannot now recall who - that there would be no need for fiction if history were well written. John Gillingham proves this point for he is one of that rare breed: an eminent historian who can write. Admittingly Richard's life is the stuff of fiction - the deadly family quarrels, the adventures of the third crusade, the bitter rivalry with Phillipe Augustus and his tragic death - and this book can be read as an exciting narrative by the general reader; but Professor Gillingham also deals in depth with the many aspects of Richard's life and kingship, exploding many of the fairly recent myths, such as that of his so called squalid death. This is John Gillingham's third biography of Richard and the most academic; however he has that rare quality shared only by a handful of historians (Veronica Wedgewood and Stephen Runcimann are others) who can write a readable academic book. This book is one of the English Monarch series now published by Yale; do not think that all the books in this series are as well written as this one.
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Excellent book, setting the record straight on Richard I
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Updating and expanding upon Gillingham's previous biography on Richard, this is a superb biography. Gillingham fully explains the political and social back-drop to Richard's many achievements and thereby dispells the Victorian myth of 'Richard the bad king'. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
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