DICTIONARY OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR

This monumental work, conceived by the foremost French and foreign specialists under the direction of Jean-Marie Moeglin, offers the most complete picture yet of a century-long conflict that shaped the history of two nations, France and England, between the 14th and 15th centuries.

The Hundred Years' War has long suffered from an old and narrow historiographical conception; it was described as a more or less erratic succession of battles; it was seen, anachronistically, as the clash of two forms of imperialism, a struggle for the preponderance of two proto-nation-states, France and England. A comprehensive reassessment was needed. That reassessment is provided here.

This Dictionary presents a new vision of the Hundred Years' War, born of a rivalry between two kings, one of whom claimed a crown that the other had appropriated without right. Around this quarrel clustered a multitude of other local confrontations. This logic made the Hundred Years' War an episode in which personal ties, matters of wounded honour and stubborn claims to lands and rights, and deep-seated hatreds passed down from generation to generation took centre stage.

The work shows how peripheral conflicts grafting themselves onto the central conflict between two powerful kings, and the need to give them political legitimacy, led the kingdoms of France and England to transform themselves into administratively organised, militarised states endowed with a coherent ideology in which obedience to the legitimate king became a cardinal virtue.

Scientifically rigorous, this Dictionary offers, beyond the myths it has generated, a total history of the Hundred Years' War, which has become an integral part of our national imagination.