Ann WroeReseñas

a three hundred plus page book on a subject on which there is almost no historical record. The majority of the book describes Pilate based on fictional accounts from the middle ages such as "The Golden Legend" or "The Corpus Christi Play of the Middle Ages". I found it difficult to know what was historical and what was fictional. I found it helpful when her source was Josephus or Philo of Alexandria but there wasn't much. I learned about the role of a prefect and the Roman Emperor. The book has an excellent bibliography organized on primary sources, or on periods of time.

Biographer, obituarist (20 years for The Economist) and poet, Ann Wroe brings together in this volume some of the extraordinary lives that she has memorialised, entwined with some of her own memories and poems. People who will be familiar to most readers and many who will be unknown to most. Her intention has always been to seek the tiny, lesser seen, details that she thinks of as being where the soul in a person resides. Their authentic core perhaps.½

This is the kind of three-dimensional micro-history that can be produced only by an author who is deeply immersed in the primary sources—in the case of A Fool and His Money, it's Ann Wroe's knowledge of the fourteenth-century archives of the southern French town of Rodez that brings this corner of the medieval world to life.

I really appreciated how much detail Wroe was able to wrest from an often-fragmentary source base, and the sympathetic eye with which she studied her cast of quarrelsome characters. (The thread running through the book is a court case involving a pot of gold, but this is not the kind of true crime narrative you can construct with more modern sources—this is more a portrait of a community and way of life using a possible theft as a hook.) So too did I appreciate her thumbnail sketch account of what it was like to work at the archives in Rodez in the early 70s—while almost 40 years and about 500 kilometres separated my postgraduate research experience from Wroe's, there were some hilarious points of commonality.

This is definitely the kind of book that would have benefited from a map, however—I'm not a visual thinker and haven't been to Rodez, so I found it very difficult to picture how the City and the Bourg related to one another spatially.½

I'm rating this 5 stars because the research was so incredibly well done. The author did a terrific job of sorting out all the conflicting stories of this young man's life. She doesn't come to a conclusion of whether he was Richard, Duke of York or not but leaves you to draw your own conclusions. I will leave my decision with myself.

Oh, how I wish more historical biographies were written to be so engaging! I would love to see Ann Wroe try her hand at a similar biography of Judas Iscariot.

{The subjects of the obituaries} must have led interesting and thought-provoking lives. Whether they have led good lives, in the usual meaning of “good,” couldn’t matter less.

The Economist had been published weekly for more than 150 years before it introduced an obituary column in 1995, and this collection contains ~200 2-page entries about people (and one parrot) who died between then and the next 10+ years. Reading it feels like reading an encyclopedia and that’s not a bad thing -- one fascinating topic (person) after another, an eclectic group whose lives touch on seemingly every aspect and locale of the past hundred years in world history. I loved it.

I'd heard of perhaps a quarter of the people, but all of the lives and events were so interesting and informative that I skimmed/skipped almost none. A few of my favorites are about:

• Alex, the African Grey parrot (who apparently used words to truly communicate, not just “parrot” them);

• Ernest Hendon (who survived the Tuskegee syphilis experiment);

• Albert Marshall and Lazare Ponticelli (the last surviving WWI British cavalryman and French foot soldier, respectively);

• Tiny Rowland (possibly the most ruthless person in the collection, his obit opens with, “Hunting around for something not too brutal to say about Tiny Rowland now that he is dead…”); and

• Max Perutz (Nobel-winning molecular biologist known for his enthusiastic exclamations of, “Fantastic!”)

It’s usually considered praise if a historical work is said to “read like a novel”. That description fits Ann Wroe’s The Perfect Prince; the language Wroe uses is elegant and the story is absorbing. Wroe resists what must have been a nearly overwhelming temptation to turn this into a refutation or advocacy of a glamorous conspiracy theory by providing all the available data and letting the readers spin webs themselves.

The theories about Perkin Warbeck are:


* He was Richard, Duke of York, the youngest son of Edward IV, who had somehow escaped from his wicked uncle Richard III and made his way to the Continent (in 1483, at age 9). He had remained incognito until 1490 when he appeared in Ireland in the entourage of a merchant. He was recognized by former acquaintances and encouraged to reclaim his rightful throne from Henry VII; his attempts to do so, supported to varying degrees by various European monarchs.


*He was an otherwise unknown illegitimate son of Edward IV posing as Richard. Everybody willing to comment, even supporters of Henry VII, seemed to think Warbeck had the “appearance” of nobility and did somewhat resemble Edward IV; nobody claimed he spoke English poorly or with an accent. He never claimed to be anybody except Richard or Perkin Warbeck, even under considerable persuasion.

* He was Perkin Warbeck (variously “Peter” or “Piers” or “Perkincinno” for the first name and “Warbeque” or “Osbeck” or all sorts of other variants for the second), the son of a boatman in Tournai in Flanders (Tournai is now in Belgium but at the time Perkin lived there it belonged to Burgundy and thus indirectly to France). Perkin ran away from home and somehow made his way to Portugal, where he became a page to the English merchant Sir Edward Brampton. He was “pretty” boy, fair-haired, fond of his appearance and of elegant clothes; when he accompanied his master to Ireland in 1490 disaffected Yorkists noted his vague similarity to Edward IV and decided to claim he was Edward’s miraculously escaped son. Warbeck fell in with the plan and, supported to varying degrees by various European monarchs, made several usurpation attempts.


* A sort of combination of the above. Warbeck really was the son of the Tournai boatman, but his handlers were so persuasive that he eventually really came to believe he was Richard of York; sixteen-year-old boys (that was his age in 1490) can be persuaded of a lot, especially if it involves becoming King of England. Although he confessed he was Warbeck when Henry VII captured him, he continued to act as if he were royalty (even when doing so didn’t work out well for him).
Whoever he was, he confessed to being Warbeck in 1499, on the scaffold before he was hanged; he was left dangling long enough to be dead before the disembowelment part of the proceedings and some of his advocates suggested his confession was a deal to arrange this act of mercy.


That’s one of the simultaneously interesting and annoying things about The Perfect Prince; Wroe is not an advocate – at least not an overt one – for any of these theories, just presenting the facts as known. The interesting part is the way she goes about it; as I said, this reads like a novel. The annoying part is there’s no introduction and no summary; no recapitulation of the data for or against each position. The “no background” part makes the work flow smoothly right into Perkin’s story but requires the reader to know the whole chronicle of the Lancastrian-Yorkist-Tudor conflict in the 15th century in order to figure out what’s going on. Well, I know it from previous history books, Shakespeare, and from years of playing Kingmaker; perhaps Wroe is counting on casual readers picking things up from Wikipedia – or maybe she isn’t interested in casual readers at all. The “no recapitulation” part is just a little unfortunate; there are so many aspects of Perkin’s story that are open to speculation that it must have taken iron discipline to avoid wallowing in them. Well, I don’t have iron discipline so I’m going to wallow away.


The big question is whether or not Perkin Warbeck was Richard of York; although it’s probably of some interest for psychiatrists nobody else cares that much if the son of a boatman suffered from delusions of grandeur or if he was a cunning opportunist. The answer to that question pretty certainly “No” – but there’s just enough doubt that 15th century websites must have be incandescent with flame wars between true believers on one side or another. There were a number of people around in 1490 who had seen Richard of York before his disappearance; in the absence of Tudor age-progression software, how reliable could they be at identifying him seven years later – even if they were completely uninterested in the outcome? His ostensible aunt, Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, positively identified Warbeck as her nephew – but she obviously had considerable reason to support the Yorkist cause. His ostensible sister, Elizabeth of York, never made any recorded comment one way or the other – especially interesting because Elizabeth was married to Henry VII and thus presumably would have been subject to considerable pressure to denounce Warbeck as an impostor. Similarly, the man who was generally believed to have killed the Princes in the Tower – Sir James Tyrell – was available; he had been pardoned by Henry VII and was serving as Governor of Guînes in France – but was not called to testify (admittedly it might have been a little awkward to have him show up and say “No, that’s not the boy I smothered”). Various court functionaries that had encountered Richard of York were recruited by both sides to give opinions (when Warbeck was finally captured, everybody Henry VII called to testify agreed he wasn’t Richard – but one might assume their judgment wasn’t unbiased). Warbeck himself claimed there were various “marks” on his body that proved he was Richard but never volunteered what they were and there’s no record of anybody else mentioning them.


A substantial number of European monarchs and nobility backed Warbeck’s claim; Margaret of Burgundy, of course, but also Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian, James IV of Scotland, and miscellaneous minor German princes. James IV went so far as to marry Warbeck to Lady Katherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly. Lady Katherine was the most eligible bride in Scotland at the time; daughter of a major nobleman and reportedly (alas, no portrait survives) exceptionally beautiful. Naturally all of the backers had cynical reasons to discomfit the King of England – but they also had reasons not to casually support usurpers to a throne.


Warbeck’s initial attempt was in Ireland in 1491 but he didn’t attract any supporters; he returned to the continent. In 1495 he made another stab at it, landing a force of mercenaries in Kent; they were slaughtered on the beach and Warbeck didn’t even get off the boat. He sailed to Ireland and besieged Waterford, but got nowhere there either; then sailed to Scotland where he became friends with James IV and married the beautiful Katherine. However, a brief invasion of England (the force penetrated four miles) ended without much accomplished – nobody flocked to Richard’s cause. James IV put him on a boat (perhaps aptly named the Cuckoo) with Katherine and (maybe) a son and sent him off; Warbeck eventually ended up in Cornwall in 1497. Here things initially went better; Cornwall was in the middle of one of the frequent peasant revolts and Warbeck was able to organize an army/mob and march on Exeter. This ended badly; Warbeck fled to an abbey for sanctuary but “voluntarily” agreed to surrender.


Henry VII initially treated him fairly well – he appeared at court, dressed nobly. However, he was also closely watched – which makes the next event fairly strange. Warbeck reportedly slept in the same bed as two of his warders – but was able to get up in the middle of the night without disturbing either of them, climb out a window, and run away. This, again, is real fodder for Tudor conspiracy theorists – it sounds a lot like Henry VII set up the escape to give him an excuse to treat Warbeck more harshly. Warbeck was captured out of sanctuary again, and this time lodged in the Tower in a room below Edward, Earl of Warwick (who had been there since 1485, when he was 10 years old). Warwick was George of Clarence’s son (George was the guy drowned in the butt of Malmsey) and thus Richard of York’s cousin and the most plausible “real” Yorkist heir. He and Warbeck supposedly conspired to escape yet again (the evidence for this supposed escape attempt is extremely thin); they were quickly convicted (observers noted that after enthusiastic interrogation, Warbeck’s face no longer resembled Edward IV’s). Both were sentenced to the traditional hanging, drawing and quartering. This was a minor problem for Henry VII, since if Warbeck was really a boatman’s son from Tournai he couldn’t be a traitor to the King of England because he wasn’t an English subject; this technicality was quickly brushed aside by accusing Warbeck of being an “enemy of the King”, a charge which apparently was never used before or since.


As mentioned, Warbeck confessed he was not Richard of York on the scaffold and was left hanging until dead. Warwick’s sentence was commuted to a simple beheading. Henry VII paid for Warwick’s funeral and he’s in his family church; however, there’s no trace of Perkin Warbeck. His body was taken to the nearby Austin Friars church (the head went to London Bridge) but there was no record of it when antiquarian John Stow visited the church while preparing his Survey of London (published 1598). Part of the church was demolished in 1600; the remainder burned in 1862. It was reconstructed but the Luftwaffe demolished it again in 1941. The church currently on the site is still another reconstruction; thus the chance that whatever remains of Perkin Warbeck could be located for DNA testing is extremely small. There’s a Perkins family in Wales that claims descent, and his widow Katherine did move to Wales; but despite various rumors there’s no proof that she ever had children by him. Poor Perkin doesn’t really come across as a romantic here – but his widow didn’t remarry for years, and always wore black.


The amount of research necessary for this is amazing, involving not only English but Flemish, Burgundian, French, German, Scots, Irish and Portuguese archives. There are some pictures or the participants (the one of Warbeck is a chalk sketch copy of a lost portrait, but he does look a little like Edward IV – although, then again, maybe the artist emphasized that). As usual, I could have used a couple of maps. The references are extensive but unfortunately not cross-referenced to the text by note numbers, but just organized by chapter and topic. The bibliography is also extensive and polyglot. The index seems a little sparse, and is idiosyncratically organized; for example Margaret of Burgundy is not listed under “Margaret” but as “Burgundy, Margaret of York, Duchess of” which is not what I was expecting based on how she’s referred to in the text; however I was eventually able to find everything I was looking for.


Recommended highly, but with the caveat that you better have at least some knowledge of 15th century English history. The complexities and personalities of the time are fascinating; you could probably make a bunch of good novels or maybe a TV series about it.

Wow.

This is a beautifully written mosaic of the life and times of the world's most famous equivocator. Ann Wroe paints this moasic by artfully using all the classical resources at hand - biblical, apocryphal, legend etc. All the while, she has fun with it, and by doing this, she challenges the reader to think of the possiblities and draw their own conclusions. Ultimately, she weaves this into a tale that is both entertaining, moving, educational and masterfully written.

To write a biography of Pilate is to start, literally, without anything tangible outside of the common biblical sources. We do have a few non-biblical sources, but they are scant and incredibly vague. I would venture to guess, 99 percent of his life can't be independently verified. So, this book stands as a testament to Wroe's skill and deftness that she can piece together over a 300 page book on the man! This is a book that attempts to capture his life from cradle to grave. A bold task indeed.

That being said, this book isn't a biography in a traditional sense. Given the little evidence on the historicity of Pilate, one has to speculate. And speculate Wroe does: She speculates and offers multiple birth places, multiple upbringings, and ultimately, multiple paths of his adulthood that lead him to his storied clash with Jesus. This speculation continues on with the trial and execution of Jesus, his removal from governance, exile in later life, and ultimate death.

I think that speculation is part of the fun, part of the creative license Wroe uses to lay out all of the possible Pilates for the reader - the saintly Pilate, the removed, detached and callous Pilate, the remorseful, sorrowful Pilate, the hesitant Pilate. This book really gets one thinking.

Of course, one looking for just the facts may not apperciate the openness displayed here. This book isn't a book a reader can go to for clear, objective answers. Wroe lays out the puzzle pieces and the let's the reader decide how they should go together (for Wroe, they can go together in multiple ways). Some readers are turned off by that, and I can sympathize with that sentiment. But, I don't think we can expect all the answers with the little evidence we do have.

Aside from Pilate, there are other things to like about this book: I have always found this time period and early Christian history fascinating. Wroe immerses the reader into early post Republic Roman History. She masterfully describes the Roman political way of life, and day to day duties of a prefect- all fascinating to me. This book is worth reading just for Wroe's engaging examination the times, and it may lend itself to further reading and examination by the reader

Recommended.

One of those microhistories that might have been good, but ends up being way more tangent than story, and doesn't even have the consolation of an interesting ending. Entirely skippable.½

read 1 every day. very enjoyable and informative reading. i don't have good, specific long term memories of it. oh well. most of the people i'd never heard of.

Great book - a wonderful, concise history of one of the greatest mysteries to come out of one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time. While reading it, I couldn't get Mark Umbers' portrayal of Richard, Duke of York from "The Princes in the Tower" out of my mind.
Thoroughly recommend this book if one is interested in the years following Richard the Third's death at Redmore Plain.

How do you write a whole book about a man we know very little about? Ann Wroe has managed to envelope the known with information about life at the time in Judea, and what it would have been like to a governor in a small corner of the Roman Empire for an unpredictable and terrible emperor. With that is added lots of superstition and fiction created about Pilate in the centuries since; these tend to be a bit tedious, especially because of what it is - superstition and fiction. Although it goes to show the fascination that people have for this man, with many people over time making their apologies for Pilate sentence on Jesus. This overlooks, of course, the fact that Pilate is not the central player in the trial and death of Christ.

Still, it's a wonderful book to read. A bit long, but enriching.

I bought this book on Amazon.com after reading various reviews of it on blogs on the internet. It is a really great book, love the fact that I can open it to any page and in a few minutes read one of the obits. The obituaries are more like a short biography and are fascinating. The subjects who are immortalized in these pages are one of a kind and inspirational. Reading the achievements and possibly the backgroudn behind it of the subjects, whether famous or not, inspires me to work harder and not give up on my dreams and ambitions. My husband loves reading The Economist Book of Obituaries the same way as me a little at a time, It is great for those of us who love to read but only can steal a few minutes at a time before getting interrupted..

Ann Wroe has written a fabulous book, bringing to life the personalities and politics of the Middle Ages, and given the relative lack of primary sources at her disposal, has done well to flesh out this story to the extent that she has. She is to be congratulated on her extensive use of contemporary European sources which show a very different view of the Pretender to the usual English sources.

Engish sources were sure of the Warbeck story from as early as 1493, but Europeans were far less sure, and Wroe shows European monarchs such as Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian and Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella referring to Richard as the Duke or even as the King of England until a late date - and in Maximillian's case, until the end of his life. Whilst various European rulers certainly had political reasons for supporting a pretender, and may have known that this one was an imposter, their correspondence gives no clue of such knowledge; at times there was doubt and uncertainty as to whether he was Richard of York but they also had doubts that he was Perkin Warbeck. And in the case of Maximillian, Wroe shows him attempting to intevene to save Richard's life long after any political advantage could possibly have been gained from it - not something the Holy Roman Emperor would generally do for boatmen's sons from Tournai.

Wroe is also excellent at sorting the surviving documents and references into the possibly / probably accurate and those constructed or amended for propaganda and political purposes and is good at emphasising the likely sub texts in all of these, including Perkin's Confession which she demonstates to have been, at the very least, amended by other parties

I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to know more about a great story and interesting footnote to English history. But be warned - Wroe, probably wisely, does not attempt to come to a conclusion about Perkin Warbeck's identity despite some sources (such as Wikipedia) stating that she thinks Warbeck actually was Richard of York. Rather , Wroe shows that even now we can't be sure who he was - and perhaps its not important.

Perhaps the story is better read as a conflict between 2 constructed identities - the Richard, Duke of York identity constructed by disaffected Yorkists and the Perkin Warbeck identity constructed by Henry VII and his supporters. Probably he was neither of these people but Wroe shows why it was that the Perkin identity became accepted, depite its flaws, and how close he came to reaching the tipping point of being accepted as Richard of York.½

Three books dig for insights into the shadowy ruler and his wife

What a disappointment. Repetitive and over-written, but obviously a work of deep research and scholarship. This story had all the elements of a fascinating window into a different aspect of a period of English history which otherwise has been well covered. A book of the movie would probably produce a much more pacy tale.½

This is an excellent book -- makes one totally rethink Pontius Pilate½

What was really revealing about "The Economist Book of Obituaries" was how lacking we are in the specifics of our most recent history. What better way to know what was going on in the lives of our parents and grandparents. Any person written about in the book has a distinct relevance to our lives and the lives of our closest relatives. Ever want to know about Cup O' Noodles, frozen dairy whipped topping, people who pioneered efforts in nutrition or dieting? You can find small but complete examples of each person's focus. Teachers, firefighters, gardeners, politicians are all represented. One person's life sees the beginning of a trend, another the end. The most touching stories were those of individuals finding one thing that they were passionate about and making that their life's focus. There is a strong lesson about doing one thing and doing it as perfectly as you can. In reading this book you get a smorgasbord of topics and people from all around the world and see lives that were all lived through the last one hundred years. Everyone should start reading the daily obituaries to see where we are coming from, and where we are going. -KA

I am drawn to this type of book and really enjoyed picking at it over time. Interesting and well written, these are not your standard obituaries. They instead act as a small window into the lives of the people they are meant to honor. The photographs provide an appreciated connection and I would definitely recommend this.

I love books that give me a glimpse into somebody else's life, allowing me to see what it would be life to live some other way. You couldn't ask for a better example of this than the Economist Book of Obituaries. It's not the sort of book you read in a sitting, it's best enjoyed in small doses. Here you'll find the lives of the rich and famous, but also the quietly unknown, placed side by side. The writing is elegant and full of interesting details. It made me wonder how my life would sound summed up on the page. Highly recommended.

A great way to learn a little bit about contemporary figures that I might otherwise not have heard of. I like to think of each entry as a short story.

It has taken me a month to plough my way through this book, which is far too long and could easily be 250-300 pages instead of 500. The author is clearly very literate and has done her research, but the end result is mostly very dull and at the same time excessively flowery - the writing style is like wading through treacle much of the time. Disappointing.

I cannot say much more than the previous comment! The book is about my hometown of Rodez - up to now, most families stayed the same since the middle-ages, and like then, everybody knows everyone. So once a treasure is discovered, nothing should be disclosed, by fear of losing said treasure to others; as in all Southern towns, people get excited on such matters, and the legal wrangles of the case are a (sad?) reflection of the political interest and the cupidity of the hierarchy at the time. In the end, it all comes back to the poor shop-owner's inability to win his case (in all probability). I wish the book would spend less pages trying to discuss about current employees of the archives (or the author's personnal views on turning up at Rodez) and get on with discussing this medieval case, which is, after all, the main subject of the book. It would then be a more academically sound publication.

This is not the sort of book you pick up, read straight through, and set down. But it is a very valuable thing to have around, both as a reference work and as an entertaining and informative reading experience. The Economist magazine is a serious newsweekly published from Britain -- but it prides itself justly on excellent writing, especially in its more featurey sections. It sounds a bit odd to class obituaries with features, but these are really profiles that both illuminate who a person was and put them in the context of their times. The subjects naturally tend to be public figures (otherwise why would the Economist and its readers even know that they had died?) but there are a few lesser-knowns that were my favorites. The writing is always graceful and occasionally wonderful, such as this lede on the essay about a Frenchwoman who, at the time of her death, was believed to be the world's oldest person: "For 100 years nothing much happened to Jeanne Calment."

Wroe discovered [this] story by accident in the moldering court documents in the town archives. That she was in the town at all was unintentional. In fact, the generally accepted reason that there were so many surviving documents in the archives was that the town itself—an out of the way place in southern France called Rodez—was so unremarkable that nothing of import had ever happened there.

Perhaps not. But one thing that did happen there was that one day in early 1370 two workmen, attempting to repair a drainpipe that ran through a section of the town, were excavating the ground floor of a clothes-seller’s shop (for the pipe ran directly under it) and discovered a kettle filled with gold coins. Legal chaos ensued. The shopkeeper, Peyre Marques, insisted the gold was his, buried long ago for safekeeping although he had since forgot exactly where it had been placed. But other parties laid claim as well. The gold wasn’t in the shop, it was under the shop, and thus might actually belong to the man who owned the ground upon which the shop was built. And even that might be in dispute, for as often happens in very old towns, legal jurisdictions become entangled. Rodez was a “partitioned” town, partly under the authority of the archbishop, partly under the authority of the local duke. As it happened, the rather unclear line of demarcation ran right through the unfortunate Peyre’s shop.

Because there is nothing like a pile of money to bring out everyone’s self interest, the case of Peyre Marques and his pot of gold dragged on in the courts for quite a long time, and the records, depositions, transcripts, lawyers’ arguments and witness testimonies all survive, which is what allowed the author to use the case as a framework in which to recreate a vivid picture of life in a medieval walled town, and bring to life one of its more foolish, even pitiable citizens. Indeed, there is some evidence, as Wroe points out, that by the end of the lengthy case poor Peyre was showing signs of Alzheimer’s or dementia, although naturally such conclusions are only speculation. It is a story filled with honorable men and shady characters, with greed, corruption but also good intentions and well-meant advice. And the reader stands with Peyre through it all as the author literally builds the town of Rodez around him, almost stone by stone, until he feels like he could walk the streets and not get lost, shake the hand of the lawyer and plead his case to the overlord.

Although the one thing he cannot do is find out what happened to the gold. Despite the remarkably well-preserved documents of the case, the one thing that is missing is the judge’s final decision. History is laughing at us. full review