Heather Blurton, Richard the Lionheart in Life and in Legend. London: Reaktion Books, 2025, 199 pp., color ill.

King Richard the Lionheart has long been recognized as an extraordinary personality, glamorous, highly educated, politically and military astute, admired and hated by his contemporaries and posterity. Not surprisingly, there are many biographical and other studies on him, some of which are listed in the select bibliography of Heather Blurton’s new study, but many are not. Numerous studies, both in English and a smattering of foreign languages, have combed through his life, his military operations, his infamous imprisonment on his way back home from the Holy Land at the hand of the Austrian Duke Leopold V, his subsequent struggles, his successes and failures. Little wonder that this mythical figure also gained much traction in medieval and Romantic literature, which Rüdiger Krohn has already outlined at considerable length (“Richard Löwenherz,” Herrscher, Helden, Heilige, ed. Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, 1996, 133–53).