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Isabella of Castile: Europe's First Great Queen . By
Author(s) -
Milward Peter
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the heythrop journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.127
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1468-2265
pISSN - 0018-1196
DOI - 10.1111/heyj.13125
Subject(s) - queen (butterfly) , citation , classics , art history , art , history , library science , computer science , biology , hymenoptera , botany
Before beginning this review, it is important to frame the commentary that follows with two caveats; first, that I (or we as academics), am not the intended audience of this book and secondly, that although I have some criticisms of this work which I will discuss further below, I did genuinely enjoy reading this. Tremlett has consciously written this for the mass market and ‘interested public’ and thus some of the critique that I have of this book could be seen as rather unfair, given the audience that it was directed towards. The narrative, even dramatic, style of this book and its sweeping statements make the book engaging for its intended audience, even if it is somewhat frustrating for a historian, who is used to nuanced analysis and cautionary caveats about the ways in which contemporary sources should be approached and understood. Using the name Isabella rather than the Spanish Isabel underlines the intended Anglophone mass market audience, although a Spanish language edition will surely follow as was the case for his work on Catherine of Aragon and his Ghosts of Spain book.(1) The division of the sources in the bibliography into those in Spanish and those in English and other European languages rather than the customary division between primary and secondary material is another indicator of these two key target groups of readers in both languages. However, the bibliography demonstrates that Tremlett’s biography is underpinned by substantial research including a wide range of primary sources and secondary works. Tremlett has been diligent, consulting not only the extensive historiography on Isabel’s reign and Iberian history in the period but also contextual works on Isabel’s peers, European history and queenship studies. It is this intensive, and indeed impressive, research that makes this book of interest to scholars, even if the text itself has been written with a different audience in mind and quotes and sources are (frustratingly) not always cited.