Book Review: "Bloody Crown" by Michael Livingston
A New History of the Hundred (or maybe Two Hundred) Years War
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War, by Michael Livingston (Basic Books, October 2025)
At the opening of this excellent new book, the author Michael Livingston notes that for the typical anglophone reader, the memory of the Hundred Years War is all about the English. Agincourt (1415) and the famous “band of brothers” speech. Crécy, a battle won by Edward III in 1346, Poitiers in 1356, “and Joan of Arc’s victory in Orleans in 1429. Three won by English leaders. And the fourth, while an English defeat, is generally remembered outside France not for its role in an English loss, but for what it says about gender, faith, and hope.” But this isn’t a story about the English.
This all was started by the French, fought in what today we call France, and won by people who got to define what France would be. Livingston writes, “The events that we have collectively labeled the Hundred Years War are best seen as a sequence of steps in France’s struggle to define itself: its border, its powers, its place in the world.” In fact, Livingston argues it’s really a two hundred years war, tracing the conflict from its origins in 1292 and following the consequences to 1492.
When I (David) first started teaching my own college classes, we were in the middle of the second Iraq War in which once again a George Bush was fighting Saddam Hussein. So I talked about all the kings named Edward and Henry and Louis and we laughed about how confused students would be about the Iraq Wars in a few hundred years. Of course, I would then say, we don’t really know how it’s going to work out, what kinds of conflicts will happen next that future historians will see as part of the conflict. “No one,” I would say, “thought they were in the middle of the Hundred Years War.”
Bloody Crowns offers an engagingly-written chronological history of conflicts, with Livingston rising to the challenge of presenting centuries’ worth of machinations among rulers and their rivals. The book is at its most engaging in each set piece, as a battle unfolds, and Livingston deploys his expertise as a military historian and talents as a narrative craftsman to draw the reader into the moment-by-moment (when the sources allow) of battle. But underneath these dramatic moments lies a sophisticated analysis of changing ideas about power, fealty, and identity that drives the decision-making across the centuries.
Throughout, I really like how Livingston consistently manages to broaden the frame, making it clear both how arbitrary such frames are, but also the useful analytical work that such frames make possible. We’ll see all of this differently, for example, if we think of a TWO Hundred Years War, instead of just a ONE Hundred Years War.
Indeed, at the end of this long lovely book, I keep coming back to how compelling I find Livingston’s revision of how we think about big sweeping demarcations of time. It’s critical to how we understand causality, connections, and contingency in our own moment. It can, for instance, make us ask: “What Hundred Years War, or Two Hundred Years War, are we unknowingly in the middle of right now?”
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Matt and David are eager to review your book next! Reach out to us and let us know what you’re working on.
Correction: David mistyped some dates up top. They’re fixed now.
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