Re: 1001 Books You Must Trash Before You Die

On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:56:29 +0000, Tim McDaniel wrote:

In article <3smdnXcZlNWVB03anZ2dnUVZ_jKdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
mimus <tinmimus99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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?

Is that more to her point? As I recall, her point was that "Richard III
was a nephew-murthering devil" was all Tudor and later propaganda, that
nobody else during R3's life thought so. But English chroniclers, or
English people, were polarized based on their political allegiance and
location. The Croyland Chronicle (I think it was) was roughly
contemporary and screamed bloody murder about the northern soldiers
coming south to support R3, and some of the south rose to support Edward
V or Henry VII, but northerners seemed to have no problem at all with R3
(lots of support, no risings).

A foreign diplomat from a far-off power (that is, not the ambassador
from France, Spain, and such), with connections around the court (I
dimly recall he reported talking to the physicians of E5 and his
brother, saying he was afraid of the withdrawal frmo public view of his
patients), I think is more valuable as a source.

So things were a helluva mess and so's the history of it all (as usual).

Why not have a little fun with it, like Tey does?

Bah.

--

Ben Franklin brought the papers, and George Washington
the hemp, which smoked us all like busted scrot.

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