This is a discriminating, thoughtful, and evidential study that seeks to establish a literary (i.e., rhetorical) approach to historical narrative, particularly the multi-authored, multivocal account of English history commonly (and misleadingly) referred to as “Holinshed's” Chronicles. As Djordjevic makes clear throughout his study, he is concerned with “discovering how Holinshed and his team of historiographers read their sources and how they retold the medieval material they found” (13). These, of course, are treacherous waters, made all the more perilous by the fact that the 1577 version of Holinshed's text and the more well-known 1587 version (i.e., “Shakespeare's Holinshed”) differ in ways that create sometimes nuanced, sometimes startling changes of narrative perspective. Moreover, it is just this sort of multivocality created by separate versions of the same historical narrative written at different times by different hands that plunges the reader into a series of necessarily oblique commentaries that, according to Djordjevic, rather than propounding a clear and uncomplicated historical point of view create a narrative often provocatively at odds with itself. Under Djordjevic's critical scrutiny the Chronicles becomes a tense, multivalent, and kinetic locus of competing historical perspectives, where form is content, and where readers are repeatedly being forced to make interpretive choices that more univocal narratives consign silently to the author alone.

After a brief Introduction in which Djordjevic outlines the methodology of his book, he provides six pithy chapters that give close readings of the Chronicles even as they assimilate much earlier and later historical perspectives on the events Holinshed and his fellow authors describe. These range from a useful segment on how we as moderns should understand the cultural plane of reference that embraces the rhetoric of chivalry, to an extensive examination of the narrative layering and semantic complexities of the section of the Chronicles covering the period from 1377 to 1485. What follows are two highly detailed chapters on first, how the Chronicles stresses the importance of prudent foreign policy by establishing the need for a hostile “other” (i.e., the French) and second, how Holinshed's text urges the necessity of prudent domestic governance by citing examples of past civil wars. The study draws to a close with an examination of the way in which Holinshed's Renaissance audience — his “commonwealth of readers,” as Djordjevic calls them — directly mirrors the role of the commons in Sir Thomas More's History of Richard III by functioning as a “community of exegetes” (212), and ends with a re-articulation of how rhetorical style in Holinshed's narrative in particular, and in the chronicle in general, works to produce content, and proceeds to demonstrate how this characteristic carries over even into historical narratives of the Caroline period.

It would be impossible in this small space to give a full sense of the character of Djordevic's argumentative strategies throughout these full chapters, but one or two examples of his method may perhaps suffice. The most extensive sequence in the book is the chapter entitled “Hearing the Trumpet” (59–118) in which Djordevic examines the reigns from Richard II to the accession of Henry VII while deftly balancing three separate concerns: the interests of the original author and reader contemporary with the events described; the sixteenth-century chronicler, who retells this narrative; and the present-day reader, who is aware of his or her own cultural constructs as well as the polyvocal nature of the medieval narrative later influenced by the Renaissance reader's cultural codes. The chapter could stand alone as an introduction to the Chronicles focusing on linguistic change and its effects on the expression of ideas. Also of note is the chapter entitled “A Commonwealth of Readers” (207–36), which locates a “sudden change in style and imitative models in the narrative [that] occurs at the date 1483” (207), the year Richard III ascended the throne, and attributes this change to the inclusion of More's history in the Chronicles. The argument here is eye-opening; in short it demonstrates how a seemingly univocal narrator (More) gets absorbed by Holinshed's polyvocal narrative to create just another voice among many — one that, despite its distinctness, seems to embody Holinshed's own narrative intent. Here, as throughout the book, Djordevic examines a plethora of textual evidence both from Holinshed and from a variety of sources to bolster his argument. The chapter amounts to an important rethinking of More's text as well as his place as a Tudor historian.

Djordjevic's book is lucidly written and admirably free of inflated, abstract, and needlessly pretentious jargon. Its arguments are pointed, precise, and evidential. Those unfamiliar with Holinshed will find it extremely useful; those who believe that they already know the Chronicles well will find in it much to augment and perhaps to challenge their thinking.