The Last Knight

I have just finished reading another excellent book, The Last Knight, by one of my favorite authors, Norman F. Cantor, professor emeritus at NYU and formerly of Princeton. He has also written one of the definitive intellectual histories of the Middle Ages, a book called Inventing the Middle Ages, and a fabulous book on plague history: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. Needless to say, when I saw this newer book by Dr. Cantor I had to read it, and once I got started I was rarely able to put it down. Thankfully, Cantor's books are all easy reads, as he approaches most of his books with a layman's perspective, never sounding off-putting. Of all the authors I have read on the Middle Ages, he is certainly the most approachable. His latest effort is quite approachable but does ask the reader to have a little background in Medieval History and the Hundred Years War. Still, it is not so much as he does explain the background details rather well.

The book itself concerns John of Gaunt(Ghent), founder of the Lancastrian dynasty (his son was Henry IV), and uncle to the last Plantagenet king, Richard II (deposed by Gaunt's son, Henry IV). Gaunt was one of the last great magnates of the Middle Ages, as after his death, the power begins to rest in nations and the middle classes, though only slightly so until the 1500's and really nations do not become 'nations' until the Treaty of Westphalia which ends the Thirty Years War in 1648. Still, as Gaunt passes, the seeds of the modern world, for good or ill, have been sown. One other interesting note about Gaunt, his grandson through his daughter Phillipa would help usher in the age of discovery in Portugal. Henrique never made it to the throne of Portugal, but would garner much more fame through his more well-known sobriquet as Prince Henry the Navigator who started Portugal, and the rest of Western Europe down the path of Discovery (that the Chinese had already laid out for them).

C.