Queen Emma and the Vikings

This is a quality book with beautiful printing and a very interesting subject. I had high hopes that this book would be a well-informed and analogous to Dan Jones's Wars of the Roses, but in a different time period. Emma is a very interesting subject whose life spans several cultures and a tumultuous era of European history. Unfortunately the facts are quite thin. That would be okay if the author didn't fill in the gaps with admittedly outlandish speculation that directly contradicts more well-informed books on the same subjects. It got to the point where every sentence was packed with weasel words (probably, maybe, we can guess, and so on), and then it became clear that the author was substituting modern caricatures of medieval life in place of facts. Women are depicted as powerless units of property (with enough “maybe” and “probably” to cover her), directly in contradiction to other books on the subject. Having just read a treatise by Christine Fell on women in Anglo-Saxon England, I wanted to get an idea of how things were different in the Norman world. Instead of just saying “we don't know” the author fills in a best guess that has no basis in fact. I had to stop reading.