A review by rosemaryandrue
Queens of the Age of Chivalry by Alison Weir

challenging informative slow-paced

3.0

England’s Age of Chivalry was a surprisingly turbulent period marked by coups, civil unrest, and outright war on multiple fronts. We meet five queens in this book, including one of the most reviled and one of the most beloved in all of English history.

This is the third book in Alison Weir’s England’s Medieval Queens, in which she profiles the queens of medieval England from the Conquest to (I believe) the end of the War of the Roses. In this book, we meet the queens of Edward I, II, and III, as well as the two queens of Richard II. Of these queens, I was only familiar with Isabella the so-called She Wolf of France, so I was excited to dig into their stories.

This is a surprisingly sad and strange collection of queens, and I enjoyed getting to know all their stories in turn, seeing how their fortunes were tied to the men they wed and how well they managed to rule. Weir makes a good case for how the queens managed to influence England’s politics, whether it was done visibly or behind the scenes. She does a good job of bringing their personalities and the dynamics of their relationships with their husbands to light.

However, Weir does have a bad habit of falling back on lists and letters to demonstrate her points in some places – did I really have to struggle through so much of Isabella of France’s flowery correspondence to understand what was going on? I also thought that sometimes we spent too much time with the men in time periods where historical references run thin, with the queens only popping up with their clothes or presents documented. I wished we might have gone deeper into an analysis of their actions or the like in such cases.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.
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