Another review this week, this time it's The Battle of Poitiers 1356 by David Green. As per usual, you can read the original review on my blog at https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/the-battle-of-poitiers-1356-by-david-green and/or read other book reviews I've written at https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/category/Book+Review.

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While hardly unknown or obscure, I’ve generally been of the opinion that the Battle of Poitiers is unfairly overshadowed by Crécy and Agincourt. While Crécy is noteworthy for being the great early English victory that reinvigorated a too expensive war, Poitiers and its aftermath really set the foundation for what would come next in the Hundred Years War. Still, there are far fewer books dedicated to Poitiers than to either Crécy or Agincourt, which is why I was interested to see that David Green had written one. David Green wrote what is probably my favourite general history of the Hundred Years War but before that he was best known as a scholar of Edward, the Black Prince, which makes it only logical that he would have written a short history of the prince’s most famous victory. The Battle of Poitiers 1356 is an excellent overview of the battle and its most famous participant, fitting quite a lot of information into a relatively short book.

David Green’s expertise in the history of the Black Prince really shines through in The Battle of Poitiers. He centres the events of the battle within Edward’s overall military career, from his participation at Crécy while still only a teenager to his premature death from disease. Poitiers was the prince’s crowning achievement and Green does an excellent job placing it within that context. The downside of this approach is that we get less of an impression of how Poitiers fit into the military careers of its other famous participants, most notably King Jean II of France, whose capture was the battle’s most impactful outcome. Jean II and the Dauphin, later Charles V, are not absent from the book but it is very much a story from the perspective of Edward with the French figures as minor players. It would have been nice to see a greater deconstruction of the impact the battle had on the lives of those two French royals since it so defined the end of Jean II’s reign and the beginning of Charles V’s.

The book is a very easy to read, Green is a great writer, but it is also written with the assumption that the reader has some knowledge of the Hundred Years War. That’s not an unreasonable assumption, I doubt many people who have never heard of the war are buying books on Poitiers, but it is just something to be aware of. I would advise you to read a general history of the war, or at a minimum the Edwardian section of the war, before picking up a copy of The Battle of Poitiers. That is really the only background you require, though, as Green’s writing is clear, and he does a good job of conveying all the important information. The book includes extensive background of the events leading up to the battle as well as an important discussion of its aftermath up to the Treaty of Brétigny and beyond.

The only real flaw with the book is that it was written twenty years ago, which means that it is based on slightly older scholarship. This is probably me being a little avant garde but I could definitely nit pick at some of the conceptions of late medieval warfare on display in The Battle of Poitiers, most significantly in how it represents the effectiveness of the crossbow and longbow. It’s not like Green is wildly off base on any of this, and the book generally reflects what the dominant opinion was at the time, but since it’s my area of specialty it really stood out to me! This probably won’t bother most readers.

An interesting way in which the book seems a little ahead of its time is in providing biographies of all the key players in the battle in an appendix at the end. While this is focused on the nobility rather than the common soldiers, it is a bit reminiscent of how more recent prosopography projects have put the lives of the soldiers more front and centre in military histories of this period. This section, along with another appendix dedicated to wargaming the battle, and the several battle maps included, makes The Battle of Poitiers particularly useful for any tabletop gaming enthusiasts interested in replicating the battle with miniatures. It stops short of having a full wargaming scenario with rules, but it would be a very valuable resource to those interested in modelling history on the tabletop.

With the main narrative of the battle totalling up at just over eighty pages, and the appendices adding about another forty to the total length, The Battle of Poitiers is hardly a long book. There is probably room for a more detailed and in depth history of the battle, but as an introduction to one of the Hundred Years War’s most impactful battles this is an excellent place to start.

I've recently found myself reading a few books on Soviet academicians and scientists, and figured I'll share my thoughts on what I read:

• Russian Academicians And The Revolution: Combining Professionalism And Politics by Vera Tolz (1997): This looks at the Russian Academy of Sciences and how it interacted with the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 30s, with a subsequent focus on a few main individuals (Nikolai Marr, Sergei Oldenburg, Ivan Pavlo, Aleksei Krylov, and Vladimir Vernadsky). Tolz shows how the Academy worked within the new reality of Bolshevik Russia to establish itself, and while it retained autonomy for some time, was eventually brought under control, in part from some leading figures taking charge. I did enjoy this, as despite being heavily academic, Tolz writes very clearly.

• The Linguistic Theories of N. Ja. Marr by Lawrence Thomas (1959). As the title suggests, it looks at the theories of Nikolai Marr, who was active in the 1920s, and had some far-out thoughts (take a look at his Japhetic language family, for example). I am not a linguist, not have any training in it, so most of this went right over my head, but it was read in part because of a project I'm working on about Marr (for my own self-interest). I would not recommend reading it unless you understand linguistics.

• Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars by Ethan Pollack (2006). A thorough academic look at six key academic figures in the Soviet Union, and how their work was critiqued in the 1940s and 50s (I've completely blanked on who it was about, but Lysenko and Marr were two of them). Pollack is a historian of the Soviet Union, so it follows that trend, and while it can be dry at times it was really informative, and interesting to see how each case built on the preceding one.

• Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905-1953 by Simon Ings (2016). A popular history of Russian scientists, but the title is really misleading: Stalin plays almost no role here, and the bulk of the book is on stuff before he came to power (but I guess adding Stalin's name is what sells). Ings is a science writer, not a historian, and it shows he knows science quite well, but I just couldn't get into this book. A shame, as the stuff they worked on was quite wild at times. It also serves as sort of a prequel to the above Soviet Science Wars, which looks at the after-effects Ings notes here.

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