Queens of the Conquest: England's Medieval Queens Book One (edició 2017)

I tried so hard to enjoy this book, and sometimes I succeeded. It's clearly deeply researched, and I appreciate very much how Weir intersperses the biographical information with background information about what life might have been like in the time -- sometimes this is setting, sometimes the theme is the economy or the church. It's a really great juxtaposition, and I think had the book been shorter, I might have really gotten into it -- The first two Matildas were really interesting to read about, but you know, inevitably, that you will come to Maud and Steven and it's just too depressing for words. Also, to be perfectly honest, I found Weir's understanding of domestic life and clothing to be lacking -- while the research and history that follows each Queen's governance is exhaustively thorough (charter by charter throughout their lives), the sections which dealt with what a medieval hall might have been like seem ripped from some dusty Victorian tome, the costuming work seems to be limited to looking at effigies and later reimagining (which takes you only so far) and there is a significant amount of newer work and hands-on research that paints a vastly different picture. I came to this wanting something other than what it was, so I find it commendable and also just not really what I hoped for. ( )

This is a valiant attempt to do something different in history, but it slightly fails in the execution. She lays this out as the first in a series of books focussing on the women who were crowned after the Norman conquest. This book being the first, taking in the first 3 kings to take a Queen, William I, Henry I and Stephen. Slightly confusingly they all married women called Matilda. And the first 2 Matildas go really well. There's a certain amount of information to call on, charters, chronicles, court rolls and the like, all of which can tell you where the Queen was at certain points, when she was acting with her husband and when on his behalf elsewhere.
It gets more confused with Henry I's second wife. Her life does not neatly align with her husband's being in her teens when she married him, he being in his 50s. Her life overlaps that of the next Queen Matilda, wife to Stephen, and her story sort of peters out. The reign of Stephen is greatly complicated by the civil war that broke out between him and the daughter of Henry I, the Empress Maud. In this section, the author feels obliged to include both Maud and Matilda, and it becomes a lot less easy to feel them as individuals. The chapters don;t concentrate quite so highly on the ladies, more the moves that are made in and around them. The book becomes a lot more coherrent in the final passages, when Maud has outlived both Stephen and Matilda and is acting as advisor to Henry II.
It is interesting how much clearer the lives of the first two queens were, when there was only one protagonist to deal with, Matilda (3) remains, to me, more of a mystery and is overshadowed or shown in contrast to Maud, such that she becomes less real somehow.
So excellent idea, and well executed for the most part. She writes readable history, without it feeling to have tooo many current values superimposed. There are a couple of weighty appendices, with letters and descriptions of the main chroniclers of the period, which was of general interest. I also found it interesting to know that in this period the nobility were taught to read, but not write, and they signed their mark, not their names. ( )

Excellent research a bit exaggerated in reach, the author speaks with much surety about poorly documented periods.
Interesting a bit long winded.
Mostly enjoyed it. ( )

Author of interest. ( )

Queens of the Conquest is a linear/chronological history of Norman England from the days of William the Conqueror through King Henry II, but it's told through the actions and relations of the queens, which Alison Weir calls by the following names: Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland, Adeliza of Louvain, Matilda of Burgundy, and Empress Maud. The history ends with the last Matilda's death in Normandy, after her son Henry has married Eleanor of Aquitaine, but it leaves out most of Eleanor's history for another book.

There isn't a lot to know about these early queens because of a lack of first-hand sources. There are more-or-less trustworthy accounts about them, the charters they signed, and letters they wrote, but direct evidence for who they were on a personal level or what they looked like is lacking. Thus, most of the book is a dry This Happened Then That Happened and So-and-so Says This Happened But That Guy Disputes It.

I was a little disappointed in the dedication to the chronological timeline and Weir's resistance to extrapolating or guessing about the womens' personal lives. I understand the reasons for both, and I certainly learned a lot more detail about the 11th and 12th centuries in England than I ever knew before, but I opened the book with a craving for details about how the women lived. This is not that.

The chronological timeline was also a bit difficult for me, because there would be asides that something was happening elsewhere while the queen was in a particular place, probably setting up the background for future events, but there were so many of these asides and general information that I had trouble keeping track. The queens' lives overlapped, especially the last few, so even while discussing Adeliza's activities as queen, we get asides about how Empress Maud is doing in Germany, before she comes into her own.

I greatly appreciated the genealogical charts and England/Normandy maps at the front of the book. There are several pages of plates with photos or illustrations of places or objects referenced in the text (especially the best guesses at the queens' appearances), and there are over a hundred pages of information about the sources, including full text of letters referenced or quoted.

Weir's writing is accessible and frank about what is or is not known, but the lack of personal details and heavy historical timeline makes for a dense and slow read. ( )