Though Richard Huscroft's Tales from the Long Twelfth Century: The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire is a work for nonspecialist readers, it is an excellent book. Huscroft's hope is to bring the Norman and Angevin periods in English history to a wider, nonspecialist audience by embedding the broader narrative within biographical studies of a range of individuals. In this he succeeds completely. While Huscroft does not offer academic originality or new insights for readers of this journal, he provides an excellent overview based on a thorough knowledge of the primary sources for advanced undergraduates or graduate students looking for a useful and well-written narrative of the Norman and Angevin period.

Huscroft's subjects are not just kings, as might have been expected. Instead, he uses characters often sidelined or even passed over in academic works to cast light on politics, religion, and society, as well as to recount the chronological history of the Norman and Angevin kings. Aristocratic mentalities and relations with kings are explored through Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk in the mid-twelfth century, and William de Briouze, who before his fall and his wife and son's terrible deaths, was a favorite of King John's. Bigod's motives in changing sides during the civil wars of Stephen's reign are well explained in terms of his need to maintain his family's status and lands, and even a loyalty to the Angevin cause, rather than as purely self-serving. Briouze's fate at the hands of John is given more nuanced treatment by the recognition that he had himself risen at the expense of others and had supported the regime which would eventually ruin him. Huscroft uses Henry I's son William Aethling, who drowned with the White Ship, and Henry II's son the Young Henry not only to examine the political difficulties faced by heirs to the throne in this period but also to explore issues of status and standing, courts and households, aristocratic culture from contemporary literature to the cult of the tournament, and the expense of the aristocratic lifestyle. Huscroft follows Joan, daughter of Henry II, through her marriages to William of Sicily and Raymond of Toulouse and her brother Richard's I proposal to marry her to al-Adil, Saladin's brother, to take the reader through Mediterranean cultural history, the crusades, Angevin political history in southern France and northern Spain, and the religious lives of aristocratic women. Herbert of Bosham and Stephen Langton allow Huscroft to engage with the schools of Paris and cults of saints as well as conflicts between church and state and the political theories of the period.

Also impressive is Huscroft's grounding in current scholarship and how alive he is to complex and difficult issues. Magna Carta, English engagement with Ireland, “empire,” “chivalry,” and the experience of aristocratic and royal women all receive nuanced and sophisticated consideration. Magna Carta's failure in its own time, and the importance of the seventeenth century rather than the thirteenth to its modern status are made clear, but Huscroft also emphasizes that while its clauses were “narrow, local and specific; often they are obscure and highly technical,” still it “albeit falteringly, enunciated embryonic notions that later grew into fundamental principles” (221). Unlike the authors of many popular histories—and academic works, too—Huscroft also genuinely considers the Angevin “empire” rather than writing a history of England with a brief nod to the kings' continental possessions. The Lusignan family of Poitou, the counts of Angouleme, and the barons of Brittany are crucial to understanding the unraveling of the realm under John, and their history and motives are well explored here. So, too, is Fontevrault's importance as a religious center for the Angevin family.

A nonspecialist reader coming to this book with absolutely no knowledge of this period might struggle—there is no broad introduction of the Norman Conquest for instance, but even the most basic awareness would be enough to make it valuable to undergraduate students. The different perspectives and alternative histories that Huscroft offers also emphasize that there is no meta-narrative of this period, but many different ones. His use of them might, perhaps, have the added benefit of encouraging students to think beyond their textbooks to academic journals, essay collections, and conference proceedings, where they can find more specialized versions of the same. There are few footnotes beyond citations of primary sources, but each chapter has a good basic bibliography. Perhaps prepped with something like John Gillingham and Ralph Griffith's Medieval Britain: A Very Short Introduction (2000) for a basic narrative, and with Robert Bartlett's England and Normandy under the Angevin Kings (2002) to follow up and to provide the academic depth and detail, Tales from the Long Twelfth Century is an exciting and engaging narrative full of insight from which students would gain much. For readers of this journal who have not looked at this period since their undergraduate days and for specialists, too, Huscroft tells a great story with verve, insight, and an eye for the telling anecdote, and his book serves as a reminder that what we do in our profession can be fun, too.