Le Pitch
Présentation de l'éditeur
Agincourt (1415) is an exceptionally famous battle, one that has generated a huge and enduring cultural legacy in the six hundred years since it was fought. Everybody thinks they know what the battle was about. Even John Lennon, aged 12, wrote a poem and drew a picture headed 'Agincourt'. But why and how has Agincourt come to mean so much, to so many? Why do so many people claim their ancestors served at the battle? Is the Agincourt of popular image the real Agincourt, or is our idea of the battle simply taken from Shakespeare's famous depiction of it? Written by the world's leading expert on the battle, this book shows just why it has occupied such a key place in English identity and history in the six centuries since it was fought, exploring a cultural legacy that stretches from bowmen to Beatles, via Shakespeare, Dickens, and the First World War. Anne Curry first sets the scene, illuminating how and why the battle was fought, as well as its significance in the wider history of the Hundred Years War. She then takes the Agincourt story through the centuries from 1415 to 2015, from the immediate, and sometimes surprising, responses to it on both sides of the Channel, through its reinvention by Shakespeare in King Henry V (1599), and the enduring influence of both the play and the film versions of it, especially the patriotic Laurence Olivier version of 1944, at the time of the D-Day landings in Normandy. But the legacy of Agincourt does not begin and end with Shakespeare's play: from the eighteenth century onwards, on both sides of the Channel and in both the English and French speaking worlds the battle was used as an explanation of national identity, giving rise to jingoistic works in print and music. It was at this time that it became fashionable for the gentry to identify themselves with the victory, and in the Victorian period the Agincourt archer came to be emphasized as the epitome of 'English freedom'. Indeed, even today, historians continue to 'refight' the battle - an academic contest which has intensified over recent years, in the run-up to the sixth hundredth anniversary year of 2015.
Revue de presse
Anne Curry analyses the evidence with the authority of the doyenne of Agincourt historians ... [an] excellent narrative of the fighting. (
Lawrence James, The Times)
Nobody knows more about Agincourt than Anne Curry... Her new work addresses the reasons for Agincourt's enduring fame. Clearly, much of it was down to Shakespeare, who was at his roaring best when he dramatized Henry Vs day of triumph in the late 1590s, a time when the English public was especially hungry for cod-medieval jingo. What is less well known, but illustrated beautifully by Curry's book, is the fact that the immortalisation of Agincourt started long before Shakespeare. (
Dan Jones, The Sunday Times)
Interesting, commendably accessible, and admirably well researched. (
Susan Elkin, Independent on Sunday)
Curry compiles an exhaustive list of Agincourt's resonance throughout French and British letters and art, and she is especially incisive on the 600th anniversary of the battles about its evolving and often ambiguous message to the sometimes allied, sometimes warring French and British. (
Victor Davis Hanson, Times Literary Supplement)
Gives a good account of Agincourt's after-life in Shakespeare's Henry V, and in myth, legend, literature and propaganda ... (
Malcolm Vale, London Review of Books)
Wonderfully accessible ... By exploring English history from a truly intriguing angle, Curry's insightful book shows us how the myth of Agincourt, harnessed by jingoism, has been used to convince the country on repeated occasions of its own invincibility. Fascinating stuff. (
Tim Williamson, History of War)
Entertaining and readable. (
Francesca Trowse, Military History)
If one accepts that fact can be separated from fiction, Curry's Agincourt can hardly be bettered. (
Oxford Journals: French History)
What can one le
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