Albrecht Classen, Criticism of the Court and the Evil King in the Middle Ages: Literary-Historical Analyses. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books, 2024, x, 290 pp.

On this volume’s back cover is praise of it by scholars outside Europe (at Princeton, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Australia’s UNE), and by this reviewer. He referred to the author’s “fresh insights” upon the theme of despotism in medieval texts, and how his book would be “the essential guide to how pre-modern writers saw the problem of royal tyranny and found solutions to it.” What follows repeats that verdict.