lareinenoire | (no subject)

I really hope the Bod gets a copy of Michael Hicks' Anne Neville: Queen to Richard III because I am growing less and less inclined to purchase it, and I really need to read it.

Not that I'm looking forward to that. I had some spare time so I started flipping through it in Borders today and he succeeded in annoying me within about twenty pages by referring to Richard III as a paedophile because he married Anne Neville when she was fifteen.

If he's a paedophile, what does that make Edmund Tudor? He married Margaret Beaufort when she was twelve and she gave birth to Henry Tudor at thirteen. Not to mention the fact that Anne had already been married once before. Does that make Edward of Lancaster a paedophile too? Oy.

Seriously. This was normal. I'm not saying it was a good thing -- it probably wasn't -- but it was what people did.

I appreciate that *someone* is taking the time to write something about Anne Neville. It's about time someone did. That being said, maybe we could stop with the crazy conspiracy theories and weird statements that make no sense in context?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A pity, as I thought Hicks's Richard III book was good. I wonder if his editor/publisher suggested he put that it to make it a bit more "controversial"/"marketable"?

Simple fact: in the Middle Ages, physical maturity=marriageability. And if marriages were contracted before physical maturity, they were not expected to be consummated until then.

Maybe it was a marketing thing, but it just seemed so completely out-of-place. It's bad enough when characters in historical fiction start spouting modern theories/philosophies/lifestyle choices. But this was a biography, which is *supposed* to have more grounding in fact. The application of modern standards to medieval marriage annoys me on any level, but the fact that he makes the statement completely out of the blue without acknowledging that it was, in fact, the way things were done.

I have read a few reviews of the book that criticise Hicks for using the vehicle of Anne Neville to launch some sort of strange tirade against Richard III. Of course, that's really part of what my dissertation is about, so, paedophilia or not, looks like I'll have to read it. Sigh.

And Richard was only 19 or 20 at the time...
When I was at school, there were girls of 15 going out with boys of that age.

Me too. I remember a girl in my year who was going out with a med student, so he must have been at least twenty or twenty-one. Which is what leads me to believe there's something more going on than a marketing ploy.

It just saddens me that this is the only biography of Anne in existence -- I don't count Strickland since she's...well...Strickland.

Another thought: without doing this, what could he have written? To be perfectly frank, there is not enough material on Anne in her own right to warrant a full-length biography, as most of the relevant info had already been covered in his Richard book.

Had he signed up for a multiple-book deal with the publisher, and been forced to scrape the barrel to make one?

It was a brand new series, actually, called 'England's Forgotten Queens' and edited by Alison Weir. The first book was a new biography of Elizabeth Woodville that, though it's very obviously a whitewashing, is still quite well-written. I just felt this one was trying to be unnecessarily sensational when it already had a niche audience.

I do acknowledge that there isn't very much information about Anne Neville at all, but another alternative would have been a 'life and times' sort of book that pieced together the information there was with discussions of the time period, culture, so on. That would have been really interesting since most books about medieval women tend to stop before 1400 (with a few exceptions, as I've found).

I've just been turned off by the obvious use of modern standards to critique one specific medieval marriage (Margaret Beaufort was right there too, after all, and he didn't touch her). It's so obviously an agenda. I'm going to read the book -- I just have absolutely no desire to buy it.

It was a brand new series, actually, called 'England's Forgotten Queens' and edited by Alison Weir.

Weir? That may explain a lot... I know a lot of people in English mediæval history regard her as not much better than a historical novelist... Tends towards the romanticised and sensationalised...

And there's a reason a lot of these characters are "forgotten". They're consorts, and very few of them (Woodville being one of them) made an impact in their own right.

Have you raised these books on the

plantagenesta forum? Should provoke a fair bit of discussion there!

I know a lot of people in English mediæval history regard her as not much better than a historical novelist

Not to mention treating her own opinions like they're gospel. I'm not especially fond of her, as you can probably tell.

I had actually planned to ask if anyone on

plantagenesta had read Hicks' book. I believe I shall.

Good idea. I liked his original Richard book, but I do wonder what's going on with this one...