Kathleen B. Neal, , Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2021, pp. xvii, 240.

The government of Edward I of England (1272‒1307) issued tens of thousands of letters in his name, thousands of which have been preserved in a variety of formats, including as stand-alone documents, as enrolled texts, and as reported in contemporary narrative works. Despite the vast number of royal letters, however, they have received surprisingly little scholarly attention as a literary genre, although many of Edward’s letters have been mined for information about a wide range of topics. Moreover, until very recently, the vast corpus of royal letters has not been used in a systematic way to gain insights regarding the thinking and character of Edward, himself. The present study by Kathleen B. Neal, lecturer in history at Monash University, goes a long way toward rectifying this substantial lacuna in the critical analysis of a key genre of source materials for Edward’s reign. Neal also succeeds in shedding light on King Edward’s approach to and conception of the practice of royal rule.