This is a solid, competent but slightly colorless account of one of the most colorful figures in late medieval English history, I knew Anthony Goodman from the Society of the White Hart ad he was very capable, but this was his last book, finished as he was dying. His wife and others did the final revisions. Joan of Kent was daughter of Edmund earl of Kent, younger brother of Edward II and executed for trying to free him by the government of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer who had deposed Edward. BY this time Edward as probably dead but Edmund as told he was alive. When Edward III took over, Edmund was rehabilitated and Joan ended up as the Kent heiress after her brothers died. She was supposedly married to William Montague earl of Salisbury but Sir Thomas Holland a tough soldier who did well in the Hundred Years War. claimed he had secretly married Joan earlier. Joan supported his claim and the pope dissolved the Montague marriage and declared her married to Holland.( Goodman accepts the Holland claim as true, though others suggest it was invented.) After Holland died, Joan married Edward "the Black Prince" son of Edward III, who died just before the old king,. leaving his young son Richard II as heir. In Richard II's early reign, Joan had a respected role as a moderating influence on court factions, though she suffered some indignities in the Peasants' Revolt (Goodman thinks some of these stories may have been confusion with Duchess Joan of Brittany, who was staying in London at the time.) She died during (and perhaps due to) a crisis when her son (by her Holland marriage) Sir John Holland killed one of Richard II's close friends, and Richard at first swore to severely punish Sir John, though he finally relented. This book can be compared with Penny Lawyne's biography, which is more feminist and more strongly pro-Joan, though Goodman is by no means hostile. ( )

A scholarly but I think quite accessible biography of Joan of Kent, a fourteenth-century English princess who gained notoriety because of her three marriages: successively clandestine, bigamous, and within the forbidden degrees of relationship. (For much of the Middle Ages in western Europe, Catholics required a dispensation from the pope in order to marry their first cousins. Joan chose to marry her cousin, the Black Prince, first, and ask permission later.) Anthony Goodman does a good job at pulling together the known information about Joan's life, and at fleshing it out through context. I could quibble with some of the ways in which Goodman frames Joan's exercise of power as "exceptional" (have we not been having these conversations about medieval women and power for decades now?), and the way in which he seems to posit this as a new possibility for aristocratic and royal women in the later Middle Ages. Still, this is a fine book, solidly written, and will likely be the go-to book on Joan for some time to come. ( )