Daniela Dvořáková, Elisabeth of Luxembourg (1409–1442): A Hungarian Queen of the 15th Century, trans. David McLean. East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450– 1450, 96. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2025, 241pp.

There are two problems attending the larger topic elaborated in this book. The first is the essential lacuna in the historiography concerning Elisabeth while the second is the paucity of source material to support a monograph-length study. Dvořáková makes the best of a limited situation. What emerges from the shadows of the blurry history of late medieval Hungary is a story of triumph and tragedy; a tale of strife and woe, of hard short lives and brutish, cruel, and premature deaths. Dvořáková has mastered the sources and coaxed a portrait of this virtually unknown queen from its pages. This has been achieved by taking account of the short reign of her husband and considerations of salient topics such as women in the world of the later Middle Ages, religious faith, travel, hygiene, medicine and existential exigencies lived on the precarious boundary between life and death.