Fear and Loathing in the Middle Ages

I do enjoy historical fiction and my favourite authors are Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory. Gregory’s A Respectable Trade is one of the finest novels of the slave trade that I have ever read, highlighting a little known aspect of it. So perhaps it was the surfeit of Plaidy and Gregory I had been reading and re-reading that made me toss aside Karen Harper’s The First Princess of Wales barely a third of the way through. Or maybe it’s just because this is a very bad book.
It was the cover that drew me in. If I’d seen this on the shelves under its original 1984 title of Sweet Passion’s Pain with no doubt a bodice ripping cover to match, I would have passed it over instantly.
But obviously the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, caused a marketing rethink. A change of title, a classically inspired cover, and suddenly we have what looks like a serious and scholarly recreation of the life of one of history’s most fascinating women, Joan of Kent, the wife of Edward Plantagenet, the Black Prince.
Unfortunately what we have inside is still the same bodice ripping trash, with a near rape every ten pages or so. Even given the morality of the times, this is distasteful, especially when you realise that Ms Harper has done virtually no research on her subject - or if she did, has utterly ignored it.
When this book opens, the real Joan of Kent - the Fair Maid of Kent, as she was later known - was about 10 or 11. At the age of 12, she was married to a far older knight, a man in his 40s. Not unusual for the middle ages, but Ms Harper has decided Joan must be quite a bit older for this story, since clearly the reading public will not enjoy reading about a 11 year old girl being raped by one future husband, while being married off to another.
Basically, Ms Harper has taken what is possibly a tragic story of the treatment of very young girls in medieval; times and turned it into a breathless excuse for the usual `hot’ romance treatment.
On Joan’s behalf, I am offended. As the mother of daughters, I am offended - since when did sexual abuse become the light hearted stuff of trashy romance novels? Does it matter if it was 500 years ago? It was still wrong.
Dress it up all you like, Three Rivers Press, all the pretty cover does is serve the purpose of spices and herbs at a medieval banquet - it covers the smell.

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