Customer Reviews

John the Fearless: The Growth of Burgundian Power (Longman Paperback)

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Vaughan's series of books on Valois Burgundy have long been a staple for anyone interested Burgundian history and culture. After a long stretch of being out of print, and very difficult to find, these new editions are sure to be welcomed by many historians. Added to Vaughan's work is a fantastic new introduction written for the 2002 edition by Malcolm Vale (another historian I would readily recommend).
While these works may be older, and more recent work has been done on Burgundy, Vaughan's scholarship is still first-rate. A must for the bookshelf of anyone interested in Valois Burgundy, or Northern Europe in the late 14th and 15th centuries.

The second volume of Vaughan's series on the dukes of Burgundy. John the Fearless usually comes across in history as something of a bad guy, but that's usually because the history in question is written as a history of *France*; Vaughan is writing a history of *Burgundy* (not just the duchy, but the whole collection of provinces cobbled together by the dynasty), and from that perspective John comes off a little better. Still a vain, greedy, manipulative, amoral, unfaithful, paranoid feudal dynast, but Vaughan would say he was no worse than any of his peers, just more successful that's all.

Not a history in the narrative sense: yes, it is mostly in chronological order, but Vaughan rather assumes that the reader knows the general sequence of events already, and something about the major players. Instead, it is analytic and institutional, concentrating more on how John administered and ruled his scattered and diverse holdings. The analysis is documented wonderfully well, with plenty of details and figures available thanks to the organized Burgundian bureaucracy, and lots of lengthy quotations from contemporary sources. On the other hand, after chapters full of carefully objective tone, with straightforward statements backed up by letters and figures, Vaughan can suddenly let drop some very subjective charges of hypocrisy and "palpable insincerity" without citing much of any proof at all except non-fulfillment. There's sometimes a drastic clash of tone, is what I'm saying.

Great, solid history writing, absolutely required for anyone studying the period in particular, but I would not recommend unreservedly it for the casual reader: it has more analysis than narrative, many more trees than forest.