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Reviewed by:
  • Tales from the Long Twelfth Century by Richard Huscroft
  • Ardis Butterfield (bio)
Richard Huscroft, Tales from the Long Twelfth Century ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 336 pp.

Through the Chaucerian ruse of ascribing tales to tellers, Huscroft renders the twelfth century as a cast of characters, portrayed, as Dryden put it, with "their humours, their features, and the very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them at the tabard." I do not mean to imply that Huscroft creates fictions; a solid substructure of fact holds each portrait in place. But he does tackle the task of historical portraiture with a storyteller's techniques: from the teasingly unspecific titles ("The Earl's Tale"; "The Princess's Tale"; "The Friend's Tale") to the opening gambits ("The king knew what to expect as he waited for the next man to enter the room. …"; "The latest journey had been long and difficult. …"; "William de Briouze was a desperate man"). The result is a compelling version of historical biography that artfully combines reassuring notes of judicious caution with the racy detail loved by medieval chroniclers: thus we get the story from Gerald of Wales that the English were first drawn to Ireland because Dermot MacMurrough, Irish king of Leinster, burned with love for a rival's queen and abducted her, as well as the proviso that the political and military realities of the situation were certainly more complex and were fed by Dermot's weakness and unpopularity.

Huscroft's skill is such that those wishing to remind themselves of the great romanticized (even Disneyfied) figures of this period—Eleanor of Aquitaine, her second husband and third (or fourth?) lover Henry II, Thomas Beckett, Richard the Lionheart, or wicked King John—will find them again through the subtly indirect testimony of lesser but tightly drawn individuals: a son, a friend, a minor noble, or elderly chatelaine. By placing marginal characters center stage, he helps us see the stars more clearly. It is a sparkling and memorable read: pedagogical alchemy. [End Page 160]

Ardis Butterfield

Ardis Butterfield, currently a visiting fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, is the Marie Borroff Professor of English and professor of French and music at Yale University. Her books include Poetry and Music in Medieval France and Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War, which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received the R. H. Gapper Prize of the Society for French Studies.

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