Desmond seward biography

Desmond Seward was educated at Ampleforth and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Among the most highly regarded popular historians of his generation, he was the author of some thirty books, including biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry V, Richard III, Marie Antoinette and Metternich. He died in 2022.

Praise for Desmond Seward

‘It is hard to imagine a historian more in command of his subject’
The Independent on A Brief History of the War of the Roses

‘His scholarship is great, his theme both interesting and largely unexplored and his judgment sound’
The Economist on The Monks of War

Puglia is the heel stretching down from the spur of the Italian boot, boasting beautiful landscapes, old cities with Romanesque architecture. Far from inaccessible, until recently it was seldom visited by tourists. Today, however, Puglia is becoming fashionable as an ‘an alternative Tuscany’; travel supplements laud its beaches and cuisine; supermarkets stock Apulian wine, oil and pasta. Yet almost nothing about the region has been published in English since the days of Norman Douglas and the Sitwells. ‘Holiday histories’ of Tuscany abound, but there is no popular introduction to Puglian history, not even in Italian. This book has been written to fill the gap by providing a simple, readable guide of the region.

DESMOND SEWARD was born in Paris and educated in Ampleforth and St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of many books including The Monks at War: The Religious Orders, The Hundred Years War, The Wars of the Roses, Eleanor of Acquitaine and Henry V as Warlord.

SUSAN MOUNTGARRET was the co-author of Byzantium: A Journey and a Guide which brought her to Puglia to study its ‘rupestrian’ churches.

Desmond Eric Christopher Seward (22 May 1935 – 3 April 2022) was an Anglo-Irishpopular historian and the author of many books, including biographies of Henry IV of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie Antoinette, Empress Eugénie and Napoleon's family. He specialised in Britain and France in the late Middle Ages.

Biography

Seward's father was William Eric Louis Seward, MC (1891–1975), a Franco-Irishman and industrialist in France whose experiences as a World War I aviator in Palestine were documented by his son in Wings over the Desert (2009). Born in Paris into a family long established at Bordeaux, Desmond Seward was educated at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire and at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He wrote extensively on medieval France and about the military religious orders on which he was considered an authority. Seward was fluent in French and read Italian, Latin, medieval English and Norman French. He was noted for conducting research on primary sources at relevant foreign locations, and wrote historically-oriented travel books. His work was translated into ten languages, including Hebrew and Japanese.

He lived in the English countryside on the Berkshire-Wiltshire border. He died on 3 April 2022 at the age of 86. A requiem mass was arranged at Douai Abbey in Reading.

Critical reception

Seward's work was generally well received by critics as offering a balance of readability and modern scholarship. The First Bourbon (1971), a biography of Henry IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, was described by Dame Veronica Wedgwood in The Daily Telegraph as a "sympathetic and well balanced portrait, drawn with a vigorous enthusiasm suitable to the subject [...] a most enjoyable and useful biography of a great man." History Today called it "An admirable book. Here a great success story [...] is not only told with much verve and pellucid readability, but above all is told from within the age itself."