..."scholarly" meaning non-fiction and thus excluding "The Daughter of Time", Josephine Tey's novel. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mildred_of_midgard asked me this, knowing I'm somewhat well disposed towards the last Plantagenet myself. Well, it's decades old, but I still think Paul Murray Kendall's biography of Richard is a good entry point. He lists and footnotes his sources well while also providing a readable narrative text, and where he inevitably speculates, he says that he does, instead of doing so, then in subsequent chapters treating the previous speculation as fact, which is an annoying habit biographers of many a historical person fall into. This said, it's been decades since I've read Kendall's book myself, so who knows maybe today I would feel differently? Who knows. (BTW, you might have come across Kendall before, Mildred, since he also wrote a biography of Richard's contemporary Louis XI.)
Now, as mentioned my own deep dive into the Yorkist Kings is rather dated, so I checked how the Richard III Society is doing these days, and lo, their website is very well organized and offers a lot to people interested. It reminds me of our Frederician Salon. Contrary to the caricature going on that the big argument for Ricardians is "he was nice and did nothing wrong" , the website offers a good introduction of what they're about, a bunch of interesting scholarly articles - like this one about the early pro-Richard historians, which includes some Georgian familiars like Horace Walpole, or this one about Richard's military career. (mildred_of_midgard is way more interested in military aspects of any given field of history than I am, gentle readers.) Best of all, they've actually uploaded complete translations of several key documents, like the Titulus Regius, i.e. the Act of Parliament in which Richard's takeover and the removal of young Edward the no longer V and his brother was given its official justification and which Henry VII ordered to be destroyed (only three copies survived, which is good, because the arguments used in the Titulus Regius aren't exactly the same as Tudor era historians claim they were. Long live the internet, say I, because back in the early 1990s when I had my big Ricardian phase I only ever read quotes from the Titulus Regius and any other document in biographies, and we sure as hell didn't have the chance to read a translation of the complete thing ourselves.
(Sidenote: The third Matthew Shardlake novel, Sovereign, has its lawyer detective hero find a copy of the Titulus Regius in York along with some other, though fictional documents, which perhaps helped awakening interest beyond Ricardian circles.)
The Website also offers a bunch of articles previously published in its journal, including one on what German merchant Niclas von Popplau actually wrote about his encounter with Richard III, and that was very interesting for me not because the guy is German but because the books I read only quoted the same three or four lines, the physical description of Richard, but not the rest (which includes among other things Popplau having heard the rumor about the princes being dead but speculating they're still alive though hidden and imprisoned somewhere), or that Popplau had a reccommendation letter from sister Margaret (of Burgundy) for Richard.
Inconclusion: as far as books go, start with the Kendall, and if you already know a bit about who is who (by which I don't just been the dramatis personnae in Richard's life time but who contemporary sources like Mancini or the Croyland Chronicle are, or even if you don't, check out the articles and documents at the website.
The other days
mildred_of_midgard asked me this, knowing I'm somewhat well disposed towards the last Plantagenet myself. Well, it's decades old, but I still think Paul Murray Kendall's biography of Richard is a good entry point. He lists and footnotes his sources well while also providing a readable narrative text, and where he inevitably speculates, he says that he does, instead of doing so, then in subsequent chapters treating the previous speculation as fact, which is an annoying habit biographers of many a historical person fall into. This said, it's been decades since I've read Kendall's book myself, so who knows maybe today I would feel differently? Who knows. (BTW, you might have come across Kendall before, Mildred, since he also wrote a biography of Richard's contemporary Louis XI.) Now, as mentioned my own deep dive into the Yorkist Kings is rather dated, so I checked how the Richard III Society is doing these days, and lo, their website is very well organized and offers a lot to people interested. It reminds me of our Frederician Salon. Contrary to the caricature going on that the big argument for Ricardians is "he was nice and did nothing wrong" , the website offers a good introduction of what they're about, a bunch of interesting scholarly articles - like this one about the early pro-Richard historians, which includes some Georgian familiars like Horace Walpole, or this one about Richard's military career. (
mildred_of_midgard is way more interested in military aspects of any given field of history than I am, gentle readers.) Best of all, they've actually uploaded complete translations of several key documents, like the Titulus Regius, i.e. the Act of Parliament in which Richard's takeover and the removal of young Edward the no longer V and his brother was given its official justification and which Henry VII ordered to be destroyed (only three copies survived, which is good, because the arguments used in the Titulus Regius aren't exactly the same as Tudor era historians claim they were. Long live the internet, say I, because back in the early 1990s when I had my big Ricardian phase I only ever read quotes from the Titulus Regius and any other document in biographies, and we sure as hell didn't have the chance to read a translation of the complete thing ourselves. (Sidenote: The third Matthew Shardlake novel, Sovereign, has its lawyer detective hero find a copy of the Titulus Regius in York along with some other, though fictional documents, which perhaps helped awakening interest beyond Ricardian circles.)
The Website also offers a bunch of articles previously published in its journal, including one on what German merchant Niclas von Popplau actually wrote about his encounter with Richard III, and that was very interesting for me not because the guy is German but because the books I read only quoted the same three or four lines, the physical description of Richard, but not the rest (which includes among other things Popplau having heard the rumor about the princes being dead but speculating they're still alive though hidden and imprisoned somewhere), or that Popplau had a reccommendation letter from sister Margaret (of Burgundy) for Richard.
Inconclusion: as far as books go, start with the Kendall, and if you already know a bit about who is who (by which I don't just been the dramatis personnae in Richard's life time but who contemporary sources like Mancini or the Croyland Chronicle are, or even if you don't, check out the articles and documents at the website.
The other days
