Richard II (1377-99) came to the throne as a child, following the long, domineering, martial reign of his grandfather Edward III. He suffered from the disastrous combination of a most exalted sense of his own power and an inability to impress that power on those closest to the throne. Neither trusted nor feared, Richard battled with a whole series of failures and emergencies before finally succumbing to a coup, imprisonment and murder.
Laura Ashe's brilliant account of his reign emphasizes the strange gap between Richard's personal incapacity and the amazing cultural legacy of his reign - from the Wilton Diptych to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales.

Laura Ashe is Associate Professor of English and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her first book was Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 and she has edited Early Fiction in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucerfor Penguin Classics. The extraordinary flowering of English literature in the reign of Richard II features in much of her work. She is now writing the new Oxford English Literary History, vol. 1: 1000-1350.