Lionheart A Novel - By Sharon Kay Penman Page 0,344

to borrow the evocative phrase “whispers of the blood” from Dana Stabenow, author of the brilliant Alaskan mystery series. And I want to say Diolch yn fawr to my friend Owen Mayo for his kindness in vetting Morgan’s Welsh, which is Morgan’s native tongue but not mine. Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge my Facebook friends and blog readers for their encouragement as I worked on Lionheart. Too often, it can seem as if writers operate in a vacuum, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology that is no longer true. Think what Shakespeare could have done with his own Facebook page.

More and more of my readers have been asking me to include a bibliography for my novels. I have begun listing some of my sources on my website and blog, but that doesn’t help those readers without Internet access. So I am going to cite here the cream of the crop, those books I found to be most helpful and most reliable. The gold standard for Ricardian biographies remains John Gillingham’s Richard I, published in 1999 by the Yale University Press; he has also written Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century. I am not sure I could have written Lionheart without The Itinerary of King Richard I, with Studies on Certain Matters of Interest Connected with His Reign, by Lionel Landon; unfortunately, this book is almost as hard to find as the Holy Grail. The Reign of Richard Lionheart: Ruler of the Angevin Empire, 1189–1199, by Ralph Turner and Richard R. Heiser, does not address the most consequential and fateful event of Richard’s life—the Third Crusade—but it does cover the remainder of his reign, and has an excellent concluding chapter called “Richard in Retrospect,” which analyzes the way his reputation has fluctuated over the centuries. Kate Norgate’s Richard the Lion Heart, published in 1924, has stood the test of time surprisingly well. In all honesty, I have not read the second half of Frank McLynn’s Richard and John: Kings at War, but the half of the book about Richard is accurate and insightful. I also recommend Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth, edited by Janet Nelson; The Legends of King Richard I, Coeur de Lion: A Study of Sources and Variations to 1600, by Bradford Broughton; and The Plantagenet Empire, 1154–1224, by Martin Aurell, translated by David Crouch. And since so many of my readers have seen the wonderful but historically inaccurate The Lion in Winter , here are two excellent books about medieval sexuality: The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages, by Pierre J. Payer, and Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, by Ruth Mazo Karras; I hope to have a comprehensive bibliography about this subject on my website by the time Lionheart is published.

My favorite book about Richard’s mother is Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, a notable collection of essays edited by Bonnie Wheeler. There are a number of biographies written about Eleanor, more than Henry, which would probably not please him much. Just to list a few of her biographers: Ralph Turner, Régine Pernoud, Jean Flori, D. D. R. Owen, Marion Meade, and Amy Kelly, though the last two authors’ conclusions about the so-called Courts of Love are no longer accepted. I also recommend The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, edited by Marcus Bull and Catherine Leglu, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, by Ffiona Swabey.

I was blessed with a treasure-trove while researching and writing Lionheart—two chronicles written by men who’d accompanied Richard on crusade and two by members of Salah al-Dīn’s inner circle. I felt very fortunate to have access to Helen Nicholson’s translation of The Chronicle of the Third Crusade: The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, and Marianne Ailes’s translation of The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la Guerre Sainte. These wonderful books make fascinating reading and provide invaluable footnotes about the persons and places mentioned in the texts. Another crusader chronicle is The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation, by Peter W. Edbury, and then there is Chronicles of the Crusades, edited by Elizabeth Hallam. Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād wrote a compelling account of his time with Salah al-Dīn; in Lionheart, I quoted from the nineteenth-century edition, Saladin, or What Befell Sultan Yûsuf, translated by the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, but there is a more