725 EHR, CXXX. 544 (June 2015) BOOK REVIEWS though the number of romances on the subject indicates that the possibility was well recognised. Moss spends some time discussing how anti-feminist discourse insists that a woman’s beauty could make her complicit, responsible for inciting her father’s lust; but it has to be said that the romances do not take that line. Their heroines are virtuous, determined to escape their fathers’ desires by whatever means they can, and they do so successfully in ways that eventually lead to a happy ending. It is easier to see a link with the historical record when it comes to the question of tyrannical fathers, those who wished to deny their daughters any freedom; though there, too, many romances endorse young love entered into in the teeth of paternal opposition, whereas the letters witness both its rarity and the absence of approval. ‘Fiction’, Moss notes, ‘allows an avenue of expression for that which cannot—must not—be consciously expressed’. Romances always end by confirming the established order in some way, but that may not take the form of endorsing parental authority. Authority is the key theme of the book. The father is the figure who underlies the whole patriarchal system, in life and in literature, and for all their excursions into wish-fulfilment, or wishful thinking, the romances never challenge that system, whatever their views on individual fathers. The letters similarly may show sons resenting their fathers’ authority, but they never challenge the fact of its existence. The transition from subordination to independence is often uneasy, and both genres illustrate that in various ways. Fatherhood, in the century since Freud, has been closely intertwined with ideas of the subconscious; but the places where I found myself disagreeing most strongly with Moss were where she seems to carry such psychoanalysis too far, in ways that suggest that romance characters are real people, and quite possibly modern real people. It is a difficult line to draw, and readers will probably draw it in different places: I am not convinced that Guy’s life of penance was conceived as a desire ‘to recover something of the adolescent wandering life’, or that the fairy knight in Sir Degaré has ‘a kind of subconscious knowledge’ that the protagonist is his son, or that it is because of the dominance of their mothers that some romance husbands fail to father children. It is, on the other hand, certainly true that such mothers force some husbands to discard the children they have, and that sons with no known father are eager to find them, to discover who they really are. Not for nothing did Freud write on ‘the family romance’. HELEN COOPER doi:10.1093/ehr/cev088 Magdalene College, Cambridge Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England, by Katherine J. Lewis (London: Routledge, 2013; pp. 284. £24.99). Whereas English political life in the later middle ages was once mainly interpreted in terms of the pursuit of patronage and self-interest, a number of historians, including Christine Carpenter, Michael Hicks, Edward Powell and John F. Watts, have more recently emphasised the importance of values and principles in motivating political involvement and alignment. Yet, despite this revival of interest in the role of ideas in medieval political life, there has at University of Manchester on November 25, 2016 http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from