Re: 1001 Books You Must Trash Before You Die

On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:48:47 +0000, Tim McDaniel wrote:

In article <ZKGdnXzaPf_H9k3anZ2dnUVZ_qLinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
mimus <tinmimus99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:55:22 +0000, Tim McDaniel wrote:

Josephine Tey, _The Daughter of Time_

Excellent book. Her best. And great fun.

It's a steaming pile of horse***. As I wrote back in 2001,

I don't remember all the details clearly, and I don't want to
bother rereading it. I think she makes much of the fact that
there were no contemporary chronicles accusing Richard III of
doing any murders. Did she not know about Dominic Mancini, or did
she ignore it because it was inconvenient? It was written up
before the end of the reign, and a foreign envoy had no particular
reason to buy into any anti-Ricardian propaganda.

I should have noted: a foreign envoy of an Italian city-state who had
no dog in that fight. Mancini's reports were researched and published
before _The Daughter of Time_.

More to her point, I think, were any English accounts, anonymous pamphlets
or not, copied or printed, burned in a public square or not, published in
England during the time of Richard III?

I was looking up printing just now, and it had just begun in English about
this time with Caxton, and I noted that he dedicated his second printed
book in English, _The Play of Chess_, to the Duke of Clarence, presumably
the very one you remark below . . . .

To go by the article I'm seeing, Tey also wrote that Richard III had no
motive to have his elder brother's sons murdered and thereby make
himself the unquestioned Yorkist heir male to the throne. That is
beyond ridiculous, especially considering the royal claimants that had
been killed since 1460.

I may have to reread a good scholarly history of Richard III, then go
thru Tey with a manure spreader, just to get a thorough slagging onto
the net once and for all.

Save it for contemporary "history"-- we could use a lot more stuff along
the lines of _House of Bush, House of Saud_ . . . .

Nota bene: I'm not in the "Richard III, the Devil Incarnate" camp at
all. Yeah, I'd call him grasping and bloody, but I'd say he was no
better or worse than many of the other nobles of his period. See what
he and his brother the duke of Clarence did to their mother-in-law with
their brother the king's approval, or Warwick's actions, or the
Parliamentary attainders, or a lot of the other late 15th C history of
England.

Nothing surprises me about the European "nobility", or for that matter the
Catholic Church, after Gregory of Tours.

--

Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes
now wryte egges or eyren?
Certaynly it is harde to playse euery man
by cause of dyuersite and chaunge of langage.

< William Caxton

.