Blood and Roses: The Paston Family and the Wars of the Roses - Softcover

Helen Castor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571216714 ISBN 13: 9780571216710

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2005

Synopsis

The War of the Roses turned England upside down. Between 1455 and 1485 four kings lost their thrones, more than forty noblemen lost their lives on the battlefield or their heads on the block, and thousands of the men who followed them met violent deaths. Yet almost nothing is known about the thoughts and feelings of the people who lived through this bloody conflict. Almost nothing, but not quite. As they made their way in a disintegrating world, a Norfolk family called the Pastons were writing letters - about politics, about business, about shopping, about love and about each other. Using these letters, the oldest surviving family correspondence in English, Helen Castor traces the extraordinary history of the Paston family across three generations. Blood & Roses tells the dramatic, moving and intensely human story of how one family survived one of the most tempestuous periods in English history.

About this title

About the Author

Helen Castor is a medieval historian and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her book, Blood & Roses, a biography of the fifteenth-century Paston family, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's Beatrice White Prize in 2006. Her second, She-Wolves, was made into a major BBC TV series. Joan of Arc: A History is her latest published book. She lives in London with her husband and son.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Referring to publication of the Paston letters, the "literary sensation" of 1787, Horace Walpole said, "I cannot bear to be writing when I am so eager to be reading." The letters are a collection of roughly 1,000 documents written by four generations over the course of some 70 years that provide astonishingly intimate insight into late medieval English life during the tumultuous War of the Roses. The Pastons began as peasant farmers, rose to the status of minor Norfolk gentry and strove mightily to improve their lot through the courts, business and marriage. In this multigenerational biography, Castor tells their story as a sweeping whole and allows readers to understand these people's mental world, one so alien to us and yet strikingly familiar in the most unexpected of ways. Much of their story revolves around the acquisition of land and how they tried (not always successfully) to keep it out of the hands of their sometimes violent neighbors. Castor, a history fellow at Cambridge University, nicely summarizes the complexities of 15th-century politics and culture without losing her momentum. Beautifully paced and splendidly retold, Castor's tale of one family trying to survive and thrive against the odds is popular history at its best. 8 pages of color photos, 1 map. (Apr. 11)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571216714
• ISBN 13: 9780571216710
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 347