King John (1199–1216) is full of surprises. Readers who remember him primarily as the evil prince who provoked Robin Hood to steal from the rich and give to the poor might be surprised to learn that he was one of the authors of Magna Carta, which last year celebrated its octocentenary, or that he was commemorated in Shakespeare’s lifetime as a proto-Protestant hero who valiantly opposed papal supremacy. But scholars who know Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John and its many sources might be equally surprised to learn that the “most important and consistent element in the cluster of John narratives” produced in the sixteenth century “proves to be neither the conflict with the pope nor the war against France. It is John’s war against his barons” (37). That is this book’s chief “surprise” (4, 6).

King John did not always defy expectations. Medieval historians had little patience with the apparent inconsistencies of his life and reign and so worked them into a plausible narrative for the benefit of future generations. But when in the sixteenth century the market for printed books required them to be distinct from one another, the historian John Stowe chose to differentiate his chronicles by including in them unique documents, such as the little-known but subsequently influential Dunmow Chronicle, which records that King John’s troubles with his barons that led to Magna Carta began with his sexual infatuation with the daughter of one, Matilda FitzWalter, who in later accounts would be conflated with the legendary Maid Marian. In his meticulous desire to reproduce all the materials available to him, Stowe did not necessarily mean to lend credence to this “feudal chivalric fantasy” (46), but it was not long before its dramatic potential came to the attention of poets like Michael Drayton, who, rather than looking for propaganda, were interested in the poetic possibility of rivaling Samuel Daniel’s popular Complaint of Rosamond. Drayton’s poem Matilda: The Faire and Chaste Daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater was just the start. By bringing this legend to light, Drayton also provided Anthony Munday, a fellow dramatist with the Lord Admiral’s Men, with the means of crafting an alternate history play that could compete with popular King John plays in the repertory of the Queen’s Men and Shakespeare’s playing company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. And the rest, as Djordjevic says, is history. The Dunmow Chronicle continued to exert a negative influence on King’s John reputation for at least another century, not because it was believed to be the most historically accurate explanation for the baron’s war, but because in the tradition of popular history it was the most interesting one: “In short, John’s character was as much a victim of literary and dramatic tastes and needs as of any concerted propagandistic motives and forces; certainly not less, and quite probably much more” (166).

This story of the Dunmow Chronicle’s reception and influence, though clearly and engagingly told, is one that Djordjevic is reluctant to tell, since as he admits it is not always possible to document the motivations of authors, nor even advisable for a historian investigating the “(ab)uses of historical memory” (6) to arrange disparate moments into too neat a “‘narrative’” (74). This is clearly not another opportunistic work seeking to distinguish itself by publicizing a little-known account of a well-known figure. Instead, Djordjevic’s primary goal, and indeed his greatest achievement, is to document the existence of a “topical cluster” of works concerned with King John that shows how at various points in time his reign has been historicized with the interests of the present in mind. The main reason this cluster has gone previously unnoticed is that scholars tend to approach King John through narrow disciplinary interests, whether it be Magna Carta for legal historians or his association with Robin Hood for literary scholars, when in fact the key figures responsible for shaping his legacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, like Drayton and Daniel, both celebrated poets and respected historians. King John’s life and reign demand an interdisciplinary perspective, and this is what Djordjevic promises to deliver, following the example of Richard Helgerson, through a close reading in historical context of the intersections between fact and fiction in a wide range of texts united by their common interest in a single figure. Such wide reading deserves a wide readership.