Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery is a really interesting book with several authors. This fairly weighty book was written by Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor. While having that many different authors can make for a book that jumps around a little in literary style, whoever the editor was did an excellent job on smoothing most of the rough edges off.
To quote from the book jacket "...Chaucer was celebrated as his country's finest living poet, rhetorician and scholar:the pre-eminent intellectual superstar of his time. We have a great deal of information about his life. And yet nothing at all is known of his death." The book goes on to advance the theory that perhaps Chaucer was murdered, or if he himself wasn't killed, perhaps his reputation was. The lack of information about his death and about his manuscripts (or lack thereof) is explored and discussed very throughly. Chaucer's political and religious run-ins with Archbishop Thomas Arundel and other notable figures of the period and his dodging of heresy charges due to his development of the English language as a respected means of communication are covered in depth.
While the book and its dedicated authors never really answer their own question of 'How did Chaucer die?' they have put forth a huge amount of effort to give the reader as much information about the time, place, and players as they can. This book is an excellent read for history majors, fans of mysteries, and other inquisitive sorts. Be warned that there is no solid ending though so if that frustrates you, skip it.
The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, And The Expulsion Of The Jews From Spain by Erna Paris is also a very good book, although not in the same style at all. One of the more frustrating things for me in my field of study is that I was born and raised in a former colony of England. That makes it very hard to find good books, in English, written about Spain. Most of my contemporaries know about conquistadors and Columbus, but not much else about the exceptional history of Spain. That's one of the reasons I prize this book aside from the copious end-of-chapter notes.
"Celts, Romans, Visigoths, and Moors;pagans, Christians, Jews and Muslims. It was a rich, multicultural stew that bubbled and simmered over the Iberian Peninsula for more then a thousand years producing a unique, pluralistic society...That Spain was, for centuries, the most tolerant nation in Europe, and subsequently became the most zealously intolerant, is the heart of this book." Ms. Paris uses written records of the time and lots of research to reveal how people in Spain at one point lived side by side in relative friendliness until the combined pressure of changing politics and religion pushed them to a breaking point. She points out the similarities between the circumstances in Spain at the time, late 19th and early 20th century France and Germany, and many of the current issues facing the world now. I firmly believe that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it badly and this book in its final chapters points out some fairly scary parallels in the fight of Church vs. State that the Spanish Crown then and the current governments of the world face now.
I strongly recommend this book to people with a little time to chew it over. It does use many excerpts from period sources, although thankfully they've all been modernized in spelling and punctuation to make an easier read. If you're interested in how people failed at segregation in the past, this book will have you fully engaged. It's not a casual read, but it's worth it.
Now for the book I can not recommend to anyone although I have been forced by my history professor to read it. The Stripping of The Altars by Eamon Duffy starts out with a really interesting hypothesis, and totally fails to back it up in a way anyone could stand to read.He states firmly his “conviction that the Reformation as actually experienced by ordinary people was not an uncomplicated imaginative liberation...but...a great cultural hiatus, which dug a ditch...between the English people and their past.”[xiv, Duffy]. He is of the opinion that the Protestant Reformation was not an anticipated event, looked for by reformers and people all over Europe, but rather something sort of awful that ruined a way of life forever and prevents us from ever knowing what it was like beforehand. While it is true that many great things were lost, the sheer number of examples that Mr. Duffy can provide us proves that it's clearly not gone forever.
He goes on,and on, and on some more, for 593 pages. Most of them are filled with lists of things that actually survived The Reformation and the some of which even survived the Puritan Interregnum of the English Civil War. He talks about the medieval Catholic Church in England and its centrality to every day life. However, his insistence that The Protestant Reformation wasn't welcomed or wanted practically anywhere outside of Court rings false as does his repeated statements that all of the 'traditional' religion was lost forever by force. I've stated before that I don't care for massive lists in books, but this one really does feel like the author is trying to salvage a weak argument by throwing up smoke-screens of stuff.
I think that while many things changed in England and the world, they weren't all lost. Some of them, like pictures of Mary holding the baby Jesus, became a symbol used only during parts of the year. Others are issues kept alive by vigorous debate and questioning even now, like Transubstitution and Purgatory. The painted saints images and stained glass are gone and are a great loss to the history of England, but I maintain that the sheer amount of evidence that Duffy was able to find to write his book counteracts his claim of “a great cultural hiatus”. In short, pass on this book unless you're really having trouble sleeping. It's become my favorite non-prescription sleep aid this semester and I look forward to the end of year so I can finally quit reading it.
Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery, Dolan, Terry; Dor, Juliette; Fletcher, Alan; Jones, Terry;Yeager, Robert
2003 St. Martins Press, New York, NY
ISBN 0-312-33587-3
The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, And The Expulsion Of The Jews From Spain , Paris, Erna
1995 Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY
ISBN 1-57392-017-7
The Stripping of The Altars , Duffy, Eamon
1992, Yale University
ISBN 978-0-300-10828-6
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