"Within three generations (1426 to 1485), and through the dark and dangerous years of the Wars of the Roses, the Pastons established themselves as a family of consequence, both in their native Norfolk and within court circles. Ambitious and highly mobile - womenfolk as well as men - they kept in touch by correspondence, usually but not invariably through the medium of a clerk." Richard Barber uses his wide-ranging knowledge of the medieval world to set the correspondence in context and follow the fortunes of the family. The letters vividly convey the urgency, and sometimes the violence, of the family's preoccupations: defending property, fighting court cases, making the right alliances, and, on the domestic side, managing their estates, conducting their courtships, stocking their cupboards. Selected and presented here with a linking narrative, they bring the middle ages triumphantly to life.
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. Richard William Barber is a prominent British historian who has been writing and publishing in the field of medieval history and literature ever since his student days. He has specialised in the Arthurian legend, beginning with a general survey, Arthur of Albion, in 1961, which is still in print in a revised edition. His other major interest is historical biography; he has published on Henry Plantagenet (1964) and among his other books is the standard biography of Edward the Black Prince, Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitaine. The interplay between history and literature was the theme of The Knight and Chivalry, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1971 and he returned to this in The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (2004); this was widely praised in the UK press, and had major reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post. His other career has been as a publisher. In 1969 he helped to found The Boydell Press, which later became Boydell & Brewer Ltd, one of the leading publishers in medieval studies, and he is currently group managing director. In 1989, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, in association with the University of Rochester, started the University of Rochester Press in upstate New York. The group currently publishes over 200 titles a year.
