Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

order and to keep ethnic labels in good heart. Reading this volume should convince the reader that more than one Ireland can be constructed from a sensitive reading of all the evidence. That is why the authors and the editor deserve our congratulations. But when, oh when, will the scholarly world in Ireland learn that if its exciting and important work is to be properly appreciated, an ample supply of maps and genealogical diagrams properly located in the text is not a luxury but a necessity. REES DAVIES All Souls, Oxford THE DISSOLUTION OF THE LANCASTRIAN Kingship. Sir JOHN FORTESCUE AND THE CRISIS OF MONARCHY IN Fifteenth CENTURY ENGLAND. By Anthony Gross. Paul Watkins, Stamford, 1996. Pp. xvii, 146. £ 29.00. Dr Gross shows that Sir John Fortescue was a practical political pro- pagandist before he became an abstract political theorist. His celebrated treatises reshaped older publications originally devised for particular occasions. If unsurprising, these conclusions have never been so effectively demonstrated. Whilst focusing on the detailed study of texts and their provenance, Gross's investigations range widely across the centuries and into such specialist areas as alchemy, fifteenth-century attitudes to madness, the London book trade, and the priorate of St John. New dates and origins are proposed for Fortescue's Governance of England and De Laudibus and a role is attributed to him in the Somnium Vigilantis of 1459 and in Lord Chancellor Alcock's parliamentary sermon of 1472. Fortescue formulated his ideas early, by 1458, and kept recycling them. In support, Gross cites a memorandum of 1468-70 itemizing Fortescue's earlier pamphlets and his participation in Henry VI's neglected alchemy commission of 1458. Intended to transmute base metals into gold to pay the king's debts, to correct the currency shortage, and to cure the king's malady, the commission produced a (lost) report later reshaped into the Governance. 'We are not entitled to assume, therefore, that Fortescue approached the task with scorn.' The commission included both Fortescue and the Londoner Thomas Cook, here exposed as a Lancastrian sympathizer when Fortescue was Queen Margaret of Anjou's chancellor-in exile; several versions of Fortescue's works, some unique, derive from Cook's library. Not only was the illness of Henry IV already regarded as the punishment of sin in the 1450s, so Gross argues, but Henry VI's own madness, in the light of contemporary attitudes, 'can only have appeared as