New Thursday new review! I shouldn't promise this, I think I'll be missing next week because the next book on my shelf is a long one... As usual, this review plus quite a few others are all available on my blog: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/category/Book+Review

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Murder During the Hundred Years' War: The Curious Case of Sir William Cantilupe by Melissa Julian-Jones (Pen and Sword, 2020)

At first glance, the murder of William Cantilupe by what appears to be his entire household in 1375 feels like something straight out of Agatha Christie. His body was discovered by the side of a road, but upon initial inspection the coroner determined that he had been positioned there so as to appear as if he was murdered by highwaymen – his clothes were undamaged despite him having been stabbed multiple times in the torso. An initial visit to his nearby residence found it entirely empty – his wife and staff all having relocated very soon after his last reported sighting. Suspicions and accusations abound, and eventually two servants would be executed for the crime and several others declared outlaws for failing to turn up to court. His wife was eventually acquitted of the murder – history, however, has been less kind to her. The dominant narrative of William Cantilupe’s death has long been a salacious story of an adulteress wife having an affair with the local sheriff using her position of security to off her husband and marry her lover. Dr. Melissa Julian-Jones book discusses the Christie-esque aspects of the story, but also picks apart that traditional narrative to explore alternative explanations, and in the process reveals a fascinating story of elite and common society in late fourteenth-century England.

In places Murder in the Hundred Years War reads like a classic murder mystery, while other times it’s more of a True Crime documentary. The Agatha Christie element always looms in the background, the historiography of the subject makes that inevitable, but Julian-Jones also digs into the evidence, picking apart what may have happened like she was digging through cold case files. The evidence available is sparse, medieval trials didn’t really bother recording things like testimony or hard evidence, so even though we know quite a lot about the trial what we know is far outweighed by what we don’t. Julian-Jones does an admirable job at digging into the limited evidence and revealing well rounded historical characters from a handful of disconnected life events where these individuals broke into the historical record. She also makes great use of comparison, drawing on similar cases elsewhere in England, to show what we know about people in a given profession or how households were managed at the time.

Fans of microhistories will find a lot to love in this book – although I would warn any potential reader that they would benefit from having a good mind for tracking large numbers of characters with frustratingly similar names. Julian-Jones does an excellent job at distinguishing people, helpfully adding numbers to cases where multiple generations of a single family all had the same name, but it is still a lot to keep track of – particularly for someone like me who primarily studies the history of inanimate objects!

While the murder and its subsequent investigation and trial obviously take centre stage in the book’s narrative, a lot of the actual focus is on examining late medieval English society on a granular level. The social connections between elite families at the time, how households were managed, what life was like for servants, expected gender roles, and even domestic abuse all feature prominently in the story that Julian-Jones illuminates. You might come for the salacious murder story, but you’ll leave with a new understanding of the struggles of medieval women or the sense of solidarity many medieval servants developed while working in a lord’s manor, and it’s all fascinating.

I have to say that Murder in the Hundred Years War wasn’t exactly what I expected it would be, but I’m much happier with what I actually got. This is a fascinating window into late medieval England and one well worth a read for fans of murder mysteries as well those interested in a more bottom-up history of medieval society.

I am looking for books on South American conflicts, in particular, the Paraguayan War/War of the Triple Alliance(1864-1870), the War of the Pacific(1879-1883), and the Chaco War(1932-1935). The booklist for this sub sadly on had one book for the Paraguayan War and none for the others. Thanks for any help you can provide.

I really want to read the newly-published Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law (Anders Winroth and John C. Wei, eds.). But it's one of those books that is so long I'll probably never get through the whole thing.

Does anyone have book recommendations on the late Roman empire? I'm thinking about 400s-500s. Particular topics of interest include emperor Julian's reign and his attempt to bring back paganism, the attempt at restoration of the Western Empire by Justinian and Belisarius, mystery cults like Mithraism, and the origins of Christian doctrine / canon in this period. Thanks all!

Is Jean-Clemént Martin's book "La fabrication d'un monstre" good? I've heard some bad things about the lack of the notes and bad sources and one review outright claims that the book is too big for beginner and too un-professional for acacemics - on the other hand I often see this along with McPhee's book as one of the one to go to about Robespierre

Any books on the First Taungoo Empire?