THE TUDORS IN LOVE

THE COURTLY CODE BEHIND THE LAST MEDIEVAL DYNASTY SARAH GRISTWOOD

Oneworld, 400pp, £20 Historian Sarah Gristwood’s sixth book, The Tudors in Love, has found a newish take on the most wellcovered dynasty on the bookshelves. She looks at their relationship with the medieval cult of courtly love and shows how the Tudor monarchs used it to enhance their own status. The Tudors, wrote Gareth Russell, reviewing the book in the Times, ‘were obsessed with reading about the doomed romantic royals who had gone long before them. Arthurian legend, with its distressed damsels and questing heroes, had a particular grip on their overheated imaginations. They delighted in troubadours singing of princesses trapped in towers awaiting rescue by gallant knights.’

Alison Weir in the Catholic Herald believed that the book is a ‘masterclass in marshalling a vast canon of research into a riveting pacy page-turner’, calling it a ‘treasure of a book’ by one of our ‘finest historians’. The reviewer on the website Tudor

Times was also impressed by the ground that Gristwood covered. At the heart of the idea of courtly love, the reviewer pointed out, ‘was the principle of non-consummation’ – a paradox in which women could not win. ‘If they succumbed to their lovers’ importunities, they were sinful and unchaste, if they maintained an icy distance, they were cruel.’ Gristwood looks at the importance of the Arthurian tales for the Tudors, particularly at the varying portrayals of Queen Guinevere and her famous love triangle, ‘as both the heroine of the tales ….and her role in the war that ended the king’s reign through her doomed love affair with Lancelot’. Russell praised Gristwood’s ‘superb’ skills in ‘distilling the vast amount of modern scholarship on this topic’.