Blood sisters : the women behind the Wars of the Roses
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Victoria | Available |
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- ISBN: 0465018319
- ISBN: 9780465018314
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Physical Description
print
xxv, 390 pages : color illustrations ; 25 cm - Publisher New York : Basic Books, [2013]
- Copyright ©2013
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-370) and index. |
Immediate Source of Acquisition Note: | LSC 34.50 |
Additional Information
Blood Sisters : The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses
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Summary
Blood Sisters : The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses
To contemporaries, the Wars of the Roses were known collectively as a "cousins' war." The series of dynastic conflicts that tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in fifteenth-century England was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. As acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals in Blood Sisters , while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the male leads who fought and died seeking the throne, a handful of powerful women would prove just as decisive as their kinfolks' clashing armies. These mothers, wives, and daughters were locked in a web of loyalty and betrayal that would ultimately change the course of English history. In a captivating, multigenerational narrative, Gristwood traces the rise and rule of the seven most critical women in the wars: from Marguerite of Anjou, wife of the Lancastrian Henry VI, who steered the kingdom in her insane husband's stead; to Cecily Neville, matriarch of the rival Yorkist clan, whose son Edward IV murdered his own brother to maintain power; to Margaret Beaufort, who gave up her own claim to the throne in favor of her son, a man who would become the first of a new line of Tudor kings. A richly drawn, absorbing epic, Blood Sisters is a tale of hopeful births alongside bloody deaths, of romance as well as brutal pragmatism. It is a story of how women, and the power that women could wield, helped to end the Wars of the Roses, paving the way for the Tudor age--and the creation of modern England.