At the conclusion of her book about Richard I of England, Heather Blurton offers evidence of the late-twelfth-century king’s persistent cultural purchase in the twenty-first century. In 2013, Richard’s cause of death was the subject of an article in Scientific Reports. Testing of his embalmed heart confirmed that he was killed not by a poisoned arrow, as had long been rumored, but by a mundane crossbow wound that turned gangrenous. This attempt to disentangle conclusively, as if strands of DNA, Richard’s “life” from his “legend” evinces some of the challenges that writing a book about Richard I presents, challenges that Blurton’s book elegantly overcomes. Chief among these is that Richard’s legend has continued to be prominent and strangely relevant in the modern imagination, yet that legend is often irreconcilably at odds with what we know of his life. Though Richard was disinterested in England and physically absent from it for the majority of his ten-year reign, he has come to emblematize chivalry, good kingship, and the idea of England itself.
In Richard the Lionheart: In Life and in Legend, Blurton presents this puzzling dissonance as an open question, inviting her audience to tackle it along with her.Like other volumes in Reaktion’s Medieval Lives series, Richard the Lionheart is intended for a wide range of readers. Blurton strikes an admirable balance between scholarship and public writing, putting forward original arguments while addressing the kinds of popular queries medievalists are so often asked—how Richard came to be called Lionheart (15), for example, or the origin of rumors about his relationship with his French counterpart, Philip Augustus (17). Thus, even as she invites the reader to think with her, she posits two related hypotheses: that the “figure of Richard...lends itself to innovation alongside continuity” (8), and that “literary representations of Richard often appear at moments of literary innovation, at the birth of new genres” (8). Rather than trying to prise life from legend, Richard the Lionheart demonstrates that literature, broadly construed, has both been the purveyor and product of Richard’s legendary afterlives, and was fundamental to Richard’s life. Indeed, it was in his blood.
The Introduction focuses on what is known of Richard’s “life and times” (8) in order to consider in the book’s chapters the “cultural work” that fictional stories about Richard “performed in their own time and in ours” (34). Blurton rather masterfully sketches Richard’s biography, locating it within germane historical and cultural contexts while simultaneously outlining the history of scholarship on Richard, including disagreements and uncertainties. With this savvy opening gambit, Blurton clears space to present facts that have slipped from popular knowledge, such as Richard’s decision to massacre 2,000 Muslim hostages at Acre. The Introduction also helpfully presents the reader with a chronological framework within which the matter of subsequent chapters can be fitted. The book’s four chapters are not organized according to historical or biographical chronology. Instead, the book is a literary history with Richard, by turns, subject, author, and catalyzing absent presence.Interestingly, Blurton chooses to begin her account of Richard’s life and times not with Richard’s birth in 1157, but with the life of his paternal grandmother Matilda, including her two marriages, her fight for the crown during England’s so-called Anarchy, and the terms by which her son would ascend the throne as Henry II in 1154. Particularly for non-specialist readers, understanding the remarkable family and wider world into which Richard was born will be edifying. More importantly, the decision to begin Richard’s history with an account of his ancestry pays dividends throughout the book as Blurton returns to Richard’s literary genealogy.
The first two chapters examine the literature written during Richard’s lifetime as a site of innovation and a source of political wrangling. Chapter 1, “Richard I in the Words of His Contemporaries,” locates Richard’s reign, and that of his predecessor Henry II, within England’s twelfth-century history-writing renaissance. Beginning with Bede and pre-Conquest England, Blurton intertwines England’s historiographical tradition and the events of Richard’s reign as inscribed by twelfth-century historians, some of whom knew Richard personally and accompanied him on crusade, and all of whom, according to Blurton, were actively innovating within the historiographic form. The chapter focuses on the reign and character of Richard as recorded by Roger of Howden, Richard of Devizes, Ambroise, and Gerald of Wales, whose formal experimentations with “chronicle, satire, epic, and didactic [history], respectively” (38) created complicated and sometimes contradictory pictures of the king. In discussing each of these writers, Blurton draws the reader’s attention to the various audiences, inscribed or implied, for each work, and thus to how Richard’s fame, and equally his infamy, were shaped during his own lifetime.
Chapter 2, “The Lionheart and the Troubadours,” establishes Richard as hereditarily tied to, and an active participant in, the composition and patronage of troubadour poetry. Troubadour poetry was the earliest vernacular literary tradition among what Blurton calls “an explosion of imaginative literature in the French language” in the twelfth century. She includes romance, chansons de geste, and saints’ lives in this characterization. Brilliantly conceptualized, Chapter 2 locates Richard within the biography, if you will, of troubadour poetry: his maternal great-grandfather is known as the first troubadour; the genre originated and flourished in Richard’s French ancestral lands over which he ruled even before he was king; and he himself composed two sirventes that survive, making him a trouvère and peer of troubadours such as Bertran de Born (who composed songs against, and then for, Richard) and Gaucelm Faidit. Blurton teases out Richard’s character through topical songs, and also through his own political compositions, which are printed in full and translated, and which Blurton reads closely for clues about Richard’s nature, rhetorical skill, and use of poetry as a political tool.
Chapters 3 and 4 turn to literary and other cultural productions about Richard after his death. Chapter 3 focuses on the development of Middle English romance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and more specifically on the popular romance Richard Coeur de Lion, the earliest extant copy of which dates from c. 1330. Fundamental to the politically expedient establishment of Richard as proudly, devoutly English, the romance mixes history and fantasy as it, in all of its extant copies, narrates and burnishes Richard’s time on crusade. The chapter largely follows the romance’s narrative. For those familiar with the romance, this may feel a bit plodding, but Blurton takes the opportunity to set out our historical knowledge about Richard’s involvement in the Third Crusade vis-à-vis its “romancing” in Richard Coeur de Lion. The chapter will no doubt be interesting to non-specialist readers, though some of the arguments about Richard’s absence, the romance’s creation of his Englishness, and its political topicality during the Hundred Years’ War, are not likely to be revelations. As Blurton points out, some versions of the romance invent a mother for Richard other than Eleanor, and in doing so disclose an awareness of a key strand of Richard’s literary inheritance. A Plantagenet family story, which Richard himself was known to repeat, claimed a legendary ancestor had descended from the devil. Modern biographers of Richard have long cited this legend and Richard’s interest in it, but in the context of Blurton’s larger arguments and important reading of Richard’s mother in the romance, it becomes newly fascinating as an aspect of Richard’s literary genealogy and his own promotion of it.
In Chapter 4, “The Lionheart and the Prince of Thieves,” Blurton traces the integration of Richard’s legendary Englishness and kingship into the Robin Hood legend. Moving from Walter Scott’s Talisman and Ivanhoe to twentieth- and twenty-first-century films, the chapter studies the reappraisal of Richard in these narrative works. Returning implicitly to the book’s opening question, Blurton argues that it is precisely the contradictions between Richard’s life and legend that come to associate with some complexity Richard and the idea of right rule: “The narrative that Scott popularizes—of the troubles of England in the absence of her crusading king—provides a useful and durable framework for reconsiderations of both the nature of just rule and the value of crusade” (147). Richard was the subject of generic innovation during his lifetime, but the idea of him—as a crusader and an absent presence in England—becomes a space in which the value of twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars is alternately critiqued and affirmed long after his death.
The Epilogue begins with a meditation on the importance of Richard’s legend to the schooldays of Blurton’s father in south-eastern England. It then opens up into a discussion of the function of Richard’s legend in Victorian medievalism and twentieth-century English daily life before culminating with the facts and fiction of and around Richard’s death. The discovery of Richard’s embalmed heart in Rouen Cathedral in the nineteenth century and its scientific testing in the twenty-first century conclude the book.
Richard the Lionheart is at once careful and imaginative, opening up new possibilities for how to write and think seriously about the life and afterlives of Richard I. Where to begin a biography of Richard and what shape it might take have historically been vexing questions for those who write about him. In its structure and content, Richard the Lionheart answers these questions in new and compelling ways. Perhaps the book’s most significant contribution is Blurton’s conceptualization and articulation of Richard’s extensive literary corpus as intrinsic to Richard’s actual body, not in tension with it.