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Some five hundred and fifty years after the accession of King Edward IV and six hundred years after the birth of his father , Richard, duke of York, interest in the age of the Yorkist kings of England remains as vibrant as ever. An extended 'Yorkist Age' from the birth of Duke Richard to the execution of Margaret, countess of Salisbury, in the reign of Henry VIII thus provided a lively topic for a dedicated interdisciplinary Harlaxton Symposium, from which the twenty-one essays collected in this volume arise. They explore a wide panoply of subjects drawn from the fields of political and religious history, literary criticism, archaeology, art history and musicology of the period. The contributors discuss not only the members of the House of York, their depictions, clothing and beliefs, the politics and warfare of the age, both domestic and foreign, but also the intellectual and cultural world of the second half of the fifteenth century, as manifested in writing, artistic creation and divine worship. Crucially, this is no uncritical exercise in hagiography. The approach of more than one paper is revisionist; several authors query the very existence of a distinctive 'Yorkist Age', and established experts in the period are joined among the contributors by younger scholars.
