Anne Curry continues to position herself as a superlative scholar of late Medieval English wars and especially of soldiers. Her earlier book on the Battle of Agincourt is now clearly the standard narrative, and her more recent co-authored The Soldier in Later Medieval England (2013), prepared in conjunction with a massive data-collection project (currently chronicled on the website www.medievalsoldier.org), provides an almost incomparable look at the who and even the why of late medieval armies. In some ways her new book, Agincourt, provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse at her process: how thoroughly she examines the relevant sources, while simultaneously moving far beyond the early fifteenth century to examine the lasting cultural relevance of Agincourt in English intellectual and especially popular culture.

In the introduction Curry clearly establishes this larger purpose. This book is not about the battle as such. It is instead about the recording of the battle by contemporaries, their immediate understanding of its significance (or not), and then the long and changing perception of the battle up to the present day. In essence, the book consists of those two parts: a close reading of the early chronicles (both English and French) followed by a longer discussion of memory, legacy, and commemoration. Curry sensibly begins with a brief narrative of the campaign and battle, but she more or less assumes that the reader knows the basics, and indeed, perhaps cannily chose not to include a traditional military historian's battle map—canny because some of the discussion in the later chapters is about how the exact location and disposition of forces remains disputed and has been partially built by that messy process of memory and commemoration.

In chapter 2, Curry delves into the chronicles, providing a marvelous discussion of how they were created, the extent to which they reflected administrative documents, and how each may have influenced the other. This whole chapter could be used with profit in a classroom to outline how chronicles were written, what sources they used, and how they in turn established historical “truths” repeated down the centuries. Also embedded in this discussion is the deep interconnection between religious belief and martial behavior, including mobilization, something that is all too often neglected or obscured in traditional military histories of the period.

The line between the contemporary chronicles and later written “memory” can be very fuzzy (since the chroniclers were “creative” and because they nevertheless set the narrative for many later writers), but for Agincourt there is a kind of sharp line drawn by Shakespeare. Curry acknowledges the significance of Shakespeare by giving him his own chapter. As was his wont, Shakespeare gathered together bits and pieces of real history from assorted chronicles (and thus perhaps not even that “real”), added the political and social issues of his own day, and then threw in a dollop of pure fiction to create the compelling image of a desperately outnumbered English army (probably not the case), a valiant king, effete and feckless Frenchmen, major Welsh participation, aristocratic conspiracy, atrocity paired with chivalric restraint, and so on. Many of these themes get treatment throughout the book as Curry explores their validity, but this chapter focuses on the many ways that Shakespeare's version of events came to dominate the popular image of Agincourt after the seventeenth-century revival of interest in his works, and indeed how Henry V made Agincourt a seminal event at all. Prior to Shakespeare's treatment it was but one English victory among several, and not all that meaningful in and of itself. Shakespeare's narrative of the battle dominated English memory of it thereafter, but that memory was put to a variety of different uses or took different forms depending on conditions in Britain and Europe more generally. Curry traces these fluctuations in the remaining chapters, showing, for example, how Agincourt's long use in an anti-French, British-identity building role shifted to mutual friendly commemoration during World War I. Perhaps the most interesting shift in the evolution of Agincourt memory has been the role of the yeoman archer. Up through Shakespeare's narrative and well beyond, English martial culture downplayed or simply ignored the archers' role in the battle. As British culture democratized, however, the yeoman archer became the symbol of a supposedly deep-rooted, more egalitarian Englishness. In a similar way, the Welsh shored up their own separate identity by claiming a role as a majority of those archers, which they in fact were not.

Curry's work therefore has no single thesis except the deep documentation of the invention of tradition and its continual shifting. The memory of Agincourt did not evolve in a single direction, it fluctuated to meet political and identity needs that themselves shifted over time. There is a great deal to soak in here, and there is no denying the thoroughness and quality of her research. There is also great value for anyone interested in critical reading of sources and how they influenced each other in the process of creating a history that might be more imagined than actual.