Both Jonathan Sumption's The Hundred Years War, Volume III: Divided Houses and the new translation of Simone Roux's Paris in the Middle Ages received praise in the July 10 issue of The TLS.
In his review of Sumption's latest contribution to the epic history of the Hundred Years War, Critic Chris Given-Wilson wrote:
There is no other book which tells the story of this phase of the war [1369 to 1399] so fluently or in such absorbing detail, or which conveys so graphically "the savagery, the utter savagery", to say nothing of the sheer pointlessness, of it all. Divided Houses is a compelling, sustained exercise in original research: all in all, a remarkable achievement.
Here's a quote from Alex Burghart's review of Paris in the Middle Ages.
Simone Roux's new history of medieval Paris, beautifully translated by Jo Ann McNamara, is at once an academic and a human history. . . .Roux reveals the multiple and overlapping grids of government that ran through Paris (monarchical, ecclesiastical, civic), and the differing and developing professional classes that inhabited and prospered in them. . . . Yet the history goes far beyond cold administrative mechanics or economics, and digs down into the workaday life.
Naturally, we're pleased to be able to share these quotes with those who don't have easy access to The Times Literary Supplement or its archives.
