Isabel of Burgundy

by Aline S. Taylor

Isabel (1397-1471), third wife of Philip the Good Duke of Burgundy, played a powerful role in the court politics and foreign affairs of this small duchy until her machinations led to her banishment. Taylor's accessible narrative history sets Isabel's life and her struggles for personal and financial independence against the fascinating backdrop of civil war, family feuds and warfare, notably Burgundy's betrayal of Joan of Arc.

Genres: France, Biography, History, Nonfiction, Medieval, European History

219 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2001

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Isabel of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy was just so cool you know? She was a powerful woman in the era of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses, living through the expansion of the Burgundian duchy and the fraught tensions between her husband, Philip the Good, and son, Charles the Bold, and their tensions with the Kings of France, often astutely managing the delicate balances of alliances, political nuance, tight finances…

I picked up Aline S. Taylor’s biography of Isabel after discovering this (which is also the only biography about Isabel) and my opinion remains unchanged. Isabel is just a cool, oft-overlooked woman. My opinion of this biography, however, isn’t so high.

Isabel of Burgundy is a biography written in the narrative pop history mode. It’s engaging and easy to read but it has the common pitfalls of narrative pop history. Scholarly debates are passed over, theories and speculation are glossed over and combined into one narrative. There are lot of statements telling us how Isabel “must have” thought or felt at any given moment and times where Taylor avoids using qualifying words to tell us how Isabel thought and felt. I often felt like writing “source???” in the margins. Is what Tyler says actually true or just what she supposes Isabel must have felt? A lot of the time, I think it’s the latter and I think that’s problematic in a biography. Speculation isn’t history – I would much rather have a picture of the historical record as it is than be given a pile of speculation dressed up as Actually True History.

This issue is extenuated by the fact that there is no bibliography or reference list and Taylor’s citations are minimal – largely, she uses them to source direct quotations and often those come from different biographies, such as Richard Vaughn’s biographies of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, rather than original sources. In fact, probably the highest compliment I can give Taylor is that after reading her biography, I ordered Vaughn’s biography of Philip the Good.

I also found the structure of the biography a little confusing. I was disappointed there was so little content about Isabel during the Hundred Years War which Taylor largely avoids discussing. The only real notable exception is the thorough coverage of Joan of Arc’s rise and fall. This coverage takes up a large portion of the beginning of the biography and I couldn’t work out why – as Taylor admits herself, Joan and Isabel never met, there are no common parallels in their lives. Later, Taylor discusses the redemptive retrial of Joan and suggests that Charles VII would use this to attack Burgundy – but she doesn’t carry through with this point, which would make Joan’s story actually relevant to her book’s subject. The final section of the book deals with the alliance between Burgundy and England, cemented by Isabel’s son, Charles, marrying Margaret of York, the sister of the newly crowned Edward IV. So Taylor gives us an information dump of the English court during Isabel’s tenure and follows it up with a blow-by-blow summary of the Wars of the Roses. In this, Isabel – who has all but retired from court – recedes into the background. Was this just filler? Or did Taylor end up running out of steam when it came time to discuss and integrate the Wars of the Roses into Isabel’s story? It was disconcerting to have spent so long with Isabel to have her pushed into the background of her own biography. Yet a subject like the alliance between Burgundy and England during the Hundred Years War is barely touched on, there’s no mention of Anne of Burgundy, the sister of Isabel’s husband and the wife of John, Duke of Bedford, the English regent of France and another awesome but actually-forgotten medieval woman, not even in passing where it might be appropriate to say “Isabel’s sister-in-law Anne had been married to Bedford but with her death, the alliance became strained”.

There were also times when Taylor’s history was just flat out wrong. She states that Isabel’s mother, Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal, was the daughter of John of Gaunt (right!) and cousin of Henry IV of England (wrong!). Henry IV was Gaunt’s son so Philippa was Henry’s sister, not his cousin. I suspect rather that Taylor meant that Philippa was the cousin of Richard II of England. On another occasion, Taylor says Isabel was the niece of Henry Beaufort (true enough) and then says Bedford was Beaufort’s brother (wrong, he was Beaufort’s nephew). I can appreciate that this isn’t that relevant to Taylor’s subject but the father of Henry IV is such basic, rudimentary knowledge of late medieval England. It’s in Shakespeare, it’d be in any history of the Wars of the Roses, if only in a family tree, and I’m sure even if Wikipedia didn’t exist when Taylor was writing her biography, there would have been plenty of other websites that gave that information. Most of that also applies to Henry Beaufort and Bedford. It’s astounding that Taylor got it wrong – and while I wouldn’t throw out the entire book because of her mistake, it does make me feel suspicious of the work behind it.

Is Isabel of Burgundy worth reading? Sure. It’s an easy enough read, Isabel is fascinating. But it is a massively flawed work of history, often frustrating and misleading.

[Susan Abernethy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Link to my review of this book:

https://flhwnotesandreviews.com/2017/...

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Historically royal marriages were for political reasons and when the Duke of Burgundy took a Portuguese princess as his third wife, he got more than he bargained for. Isabel was an intelligent and more than capable woman who ran Burgundy in her husband's absences but was no match for the ambitions of France and of Burgundy's own ministers. She eventually lost everything.
Taylor pieces together Isabel's life using as many primary sources as available from the late 1300s and early 1400s in a text designed for those with some background in the era.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I made it through this, because I wanted to see how it ended. It was a bit of a slog, though. It was as if the author sat surrounded by historical sources and simply pieced them together to write a book rather than creating something new. I appreciate that this is what you get sometimes when reading history, but still...

[Missi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it... never really learned anything about her before and there is good information on Jeanne d'Arc and Edward IV, too.