Richard II has long suffered from an effeminate reputation, but the real king was very different. This book argues that the king sought to assert his authority by acting in accordance with prevailing ideas of manhood, first through a military campaign, and then, fatally, through revenge against those who attempted to restrain him. A bold attempt to shift gender-oriented approaches to the past to the central ground of political history, to demonstrate how sensitivity to issues of manliness allows new readings of texts...Fletcher presents us with well-wrought and challenging new interpretations of evidence