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269 this reviewer was the notion of present tense. W h e n the liturgy thanks God for 'having bestowed on us thy kingdom which is to come', it assumes that in the liturgy the kingdom is already present; the present tense can be used in literary descriptions of religious images ( ' a winged being who has just descended from heaven converses with a virgin'), just as visual dialogue between the mosaics and those w h o view them at St Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna bridges the interval of time which separates them; while on the other hand the need to view the pages of a book one by one works against the simultaneity which lies at the heart of liturgy. These observations, made by the authors of three chapters, are typical of the mutually reinforcing insights offered by the various authors. Their work will inform student readers and set their teachers thinking productively. John Moorhead Department ofHistory University of Queensland Saul, Nigel, Richard II (Yale English Monarchs), N e w Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xiv, 514; 26 plates, 3 maps; R.R.P. US$35.00. Writing the biography of a medieval subject is inevitably an intensel ironic process. Though medievalists in general compose their work in genres and formats foreign to the Middle Ages, biography, in particular, relies on assumptions about individuals, and individuality, which were apparently quite alien to pre-modern people. Almost any modern auto/ biography, for example, directs the reader to a consideration of h o w family and childhood dictate the psychological and social career of the subject. Such an explanatory framework is biography, in our terms. But i t can rarely be successfully applied to medieval people, whose notion oflife-cycle and development was very different to ours, whose childhood years are hardly ever chronicled, and w h o almost never indulge in the introspection so essential to twentieth-century life-narratives. Nigel Saul's outstandingly wide-ranging presentation of the life of Richard II paradoxically highlights this disjunction between genre and 270 Reviews subject. Saul is too fine a historian not to recognise the problems of the enterprise. A s he notes himself, chroniclers' accounts of Richard I I comprise 'a valuable series of snapshots' of the king, but 'they scarcely provide a rounded view of his character' (p. 448). Richard left comparatively few personal documents. The book, then, comprises a complex puzzle as to h o w historians can wrest from the sources material that enables something which looks like a modern biography to be written? Saul adopts two strategies. One, I think, is admirably successful; the other a little less so. Saul'sfirststrategy is to recreate the multiple contexts of Richard II's life by an intense focus on every detail of his surroundings and public persona. A n d it works; by building up, as it were, a detailed multidimensional model of eveiyrhing around the king, a distinctively Richardshaped space will appear. Saul has an immense capacity to fit multifarious detail into an architectural and convincing whole. Take, for example, Chapter Two: 'Background and Upbringing, 1367-77'. Saul approaches the topic through an ever-sharpening series of foci—England and Europe, the government, the court, the lineage of Edward HI, the chivalric renown of the Black Prince and his love match with his royal cousin Joan, princess of Wales, and finally the birth and childhood household of Richard himself. So persuasive is this route that the reader is almost seduced into forgetting that w e have no narrative from Richard himself about his childhood. Instead, details gleaned from an incredibly conscientious search of administrative and literary records—his French-speaking nurses, his childhood home—give us the illusion of afirst-handview into Richard's formative years. Where records fail, Saul judiciously uses comparative material. W e k n o w almost nothing about Richard's upbringing in particular, but w e can, as Saul points out, deduce what it must have been generally like from the evidence of other aristocratic households of the late middle ages. W h e n carried out at this level, such scholarship can amount to a sort of Geertzian 'thick...

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