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Chargement... Æthelred: The Unready (2016)par Levi Roach
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Excuses, excuses! A good biographer needs to have some sympathy with his subject in order to portray him properly. But that does not justify glossing over failures. Æthelred Unraed -- Ethelred un-rede, Ethelred the redeless, Ethelred no-counsel, Ethelred the ill-advised, wittily but unfairly labelled in modern English "Ethelred the Unready" -- came to the throne in dreadful circumstances: he inherited the crown as a child after his older half-brother Edward the Martyr was murdered before he could have children. By the time Ethelred died nearly forty years later, he had bankrupted his kingdom to pay off Viking raiders, had been overthrown once, had seen most of his children die, had gone into exile, had returned, and was on the verse of being overthrown again. It was a terrible time in England. The big question is, how much was Ethelred's fault, and what could he have done about it? He certainly wasn't to blame for his brother's murder. He wasn't to blame for the existence of the Vikings. But for the response... that was largely under his control. And he had two basic answers to the raiders. The first was the paying of "Danegeld," that is, tribute to go away. But, as Kipling wrote, "once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane." They just kept coming back, in more and more force. Arguably paying Danegeld was sensible the first time or two, since it would let England fortify and prepare for the next incursion. Except... Ethelred didn't. He made some minor defensive preparations, which were ruined because he couldn't keep his squabbling subordinates in line -- but if author Roach is to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt it), his main "defense" and his second response to the raiders consisted of trying to get his people to conform to a certain reformist view of the church. I dunno about you, but if I'm being invaded, I'd rather hire soldiers than argue about how to pray for help! Of course, if Ethelred couldn't control his barons, and so couldn't hold an army together, then maybe church reform was all he had left. But if Ethelred couldn't control his barons, whose fault was that? The constant tendency of this book is to defend Ethelred, which I don't think is reasonable; the basic fact is, Ethelred was a lousy king. That's why they called him unread, the ill-advised: no one had any good suggestions to deal with the situation. To cover up the absurdity of trying to defend Ethelred Roach is forced into endless analysis of charter evidence, often pushing his logic through three or four levels of inference. Most of his individual inferences are reasonable, but when he is forced to make that many logical leaps, it becomes a certainty that some of the leaps are leaps too far. And those endless chains of inference really weigh down the book. There are endless pages of detailed analysis that push Roach into creating paragraphs that are a page, or even two pages, long. It is very tedious, especially when you just want him to get to the point! The book really needs more structure, just to help the reader know when to set it down for the night and go to sleep. I ended up skimming a lot of those pamphlet-sized paragraphs just because I couldn't take another twenty-sentence exposition of why it's significant that Bishop X witnessed a charter above Ealdorman Y, or why it's important that this word was used instead of that. This book is, I think, important for historians, in that it offers a lot of original ideas and provocative suggestions. I suspect that at least two-thirds of those original ideas are wrong, but some are probably right, which gives it value. Future historians can weigh the ideas, keep the good, and toss the rest. But as a book for a casual reader trying to understand England in the period before the Danish and Norman conquests, this is too nitpicky, too tedious, and, flatly, too ready to excuse an incompetent king.
Roach's writing wears its deep knowledge and understanding lightly, giving readers an accessible glimpse, grounded in firm scholarly foundations, of the ever-enigmatic king. By virtue of being a part of the vaunted Yale Monarch series, this book will remain a standard text for decades, and quite happily, it is a book that deserves to be thought of that way. Appartient à la sérieYale English Monarchs (978 - 1013; 1014 - 1016)
An imaginative reassessment of Æthelred ";the Unready,"; one of medieval England's most maligned kings and a major Anglo-Saxon figure The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred ";the Unready"; (978-1016) has long been considered to be inscrutable, irrational, and poorly advised. Infamous for his domestic and international failures, Æthelred was unable to fend off successive Viking raids, leading to the notorious St. Brice's Day Massacre in 1002, during which Danes in England were slaughtered on his orders. Though Æthelred's posthumous standing is dominated by his unsuccessful military leadership, his seemingly blind trust in disloyal associates, and his harsh treatment of political opponents, Roach suggests that Æthelred has been wrongly maligned. Drawing on extensive research, Roach argues that Æthelred was driven by pious concerns about sin, society, and the anticipated apocalypse. His strategies, in this light, were to honor God and find redemption. Chronologically charting Æthelred's life, Roach presents a more accessible character than previously available, illuminating his place in England and Europe at the turn of the first millennium. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)942.01History and Geography Europe England and Wales England Anglo-Saxon B.C. 55 - A.D. 1066Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Roach does well with limited sources to construct a pacy and even handed narrative. But ... sadly for the lay reader, there are just too many characters with the same or similar names. There are 2 Aelfgar's, 3 Aelfgifu's, 5 Aelfric's and, well you get the picture. The index for characters who's names start with Ae goes for two pages. There is of course nothing the author can do about this, but it makes it hard to keep track. And as a significant part of Aethelred's rule, when not fighting the Danes or Vikings is spent on monastic reform, with the best will in the world, the eyelids start too droop. ( )