About book The Maid And The Queen: The Secret History Of Joan Of Arc (2012)
If you read one book about Joan of Arc, it should not be this one. If you read three, though, this should be the third.First read Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" to get the best possible picture of the Maid and her times. Then read "Joan of Arc: Her Story" by Pernoud to appreciate the depth of her achievement. Then you should read this book and find out what REALLY happened.This is the story of Yolande of Aragon, Joan's secret patron and maybe the one who set the whole thing up. This is political revisionism of the highest order, revising everything that happened and casting it in a new light. When asked why Yolande's influence has gone so long undetected, Goldstone writes "there is no better camouflage in history than to have been born a woman.*"The book has the best explanation of the assassination of John the Fearless I've read yet, and has a lot to say about Agincourt. It's a rare history that manages to be as interesting when Joan is dead as when she is alive, but Goldstone pulls it off. She also leaves some tantalizing hints about Margaret, Henry VI of England's wife and a possible trigger for the War of the Roses.*slight misquoting because the first time I wrote this review out Goodreads ate it, and between then and now I took the book downstairs, and I'm not going to go get it just to look it up twice. Sorry, Goodreads, you blew this one. This book introduced me to new pieces in the mysterious history of Joan of Arc. I read another book by this author about Michael Servetus and I gladly gave it 5 stars, so I was very excited to read this book as well. I was incredibly interested in learning about the government and politics that took place several hundred years before Joan of Arc was even born. It even helped me clear up what was factual vs fiction in Shakespeare's King Henry V, which happens to be a favorite of my daughter and myself. With so much info given on other people, I was kind of disappointed with the lack of info written about Joan. We glossed over her battles and deeds way too quickly. It did a very good job of explaining the effect that others had on Joan's success, almost too good sometimes. Maybe I'm just over infatuated with Joan, but it was a little hard to hear that she didn't miraculously do everything all on her own. But as a result, I found another heroine in life: Yolonde of Aragon.
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Impossible to follow unless you're a history buff
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