Volume 34, Number 10 · June 11, 1987
A Question of Upbringing?
By J.H. Elliott
Anne Boleyn
by Eric W. Ives
Basil Blackwell, 451 pp., $19.95
Louis XIII: The Making of a King
by Elizabeth Wirth Marvick
Yale University Press, 278 pp., $31.50
Anne of Austria: Queen of France
by Ruth Kleinman
Ohio State University Press, 350 pp., $12.95 (paper)
To write a royal biography in the dying years of the twentieth century looks at first blush like an almost willful exercise in nostalgia. How remote the majority of these figures of kings and queens now seem, trapped for all eternity by the starched protocol of the courts in which they passed their often inconsequential lives! Yet here are three more royal biographies to join the apparently interminable procession. One is the biography of a queen consort of England, one the partial biography of a king of France, and the third the biography of another queen consort, his long-suffering wife. None of them, however, falls into the category of popular, or romanticizing, biography. All are the work of serious scholars, and the product of many years of research. Between them, they suggest that there is life in royal biography yet.
Review, 4684 words
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