2013 read #118: Queens Consort by Lisa Hilton.

Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Elizabeth of York by Lisa Hilton
426 pages
Published 2010
Read from September 7 to September 12
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

There is, of course, considerable overlap between Queens Consort and two other reviews of medieval English royalty I've read recently, The Plantagenets by Dan Jones and especially She-Wolves by Helen Castor. But The Plantagenets satisfies itself largely with naming the queens before wading back into its masculine tale of bloodshed and bloody politics, while She-Wolves focuses on storytelling at the expense of scholarly rigor. Hilton leans heavily in the other direction, offering a readable but often dry recitation of events and personalities, relishing lists of household expenditures and enumerating Christmas gifts passed between retainers, while occasionally forgetting to relate broader events in any systematic, lucid manner. Hilton does not help matters by doing little to distinguish the welter of Eleanors, Edwards, Elizabeths, Isabelles, and other ubiquitous names among the aristocracy of western Europe. She also follows the annoying custom of referring to royals by their title, even if several different men might be known as the "Duke of Clarence" or whatever over the course of the time period, or even within particular chapters. But that's typical of books of this sort, so I can't fault her there. I just wish they'd hit upon a different, less bewildering practice.

I liked the chronological breadth of Queens Consort as well as the household minutiae Hilton provides. Any English history after Richard II is unknown to me; a couple years ago I read a book on the English Civil War, but I remember so little of the read that I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't a book on the Wars of the Roses instead. The quick sketch of the course of the Wars of the Roses was therefore welcome, even if I failed to keep track of allegiances, or for that matter which family was which. And of course any history told from a female perspective is a welcome shift in perspective.