Henry the Young King, by Matthew Strickland, is a refreshingly modern look at the only co-ruler in the Plantagenet dynasty. Updating and building on O. H. Moore, The Young King Henry Plantagenet (1925), Strickland provides a text that functions the same way a modern presidential diary can—accounting for the activities, motivations and pressures on the Young King's military, personal, and political life. Strickland's thorough and comprehensive documentary work presents a young man who is often considered “the forgotten king,” but whose life and career guided and shaped the twelfth century and beyond. Strickland proves conclusively that Henry II's inability to create a clearly defined role in the Plantagenet power structure for the Young King led to the troubles of his later reign. And though Henry II's intention in crowning the Young King was to create the basis for a stable transfer of power, he actually undermined his own authority.

Henry the Young King is organized into fourteen chapters. In the first chapter, “A Forgotten King?” Strickland studies the silence that settles over the Young King in modern scholarship and how that silence is a disservice to the historian and medieval scholar. In chapters 2 through 4 he describes the Young King's early training and the excruciating planning and politicking that went into the Young King's coronation. In chapter 5, “Novus Rex,” he explores the tension between the exiled Thomas Becket and other English prelates as the ecclesiastic power structure negotiated who would crown the Young King and how, in the short term, the coronation was an Angevin triumph, steadying the Plantagenet dynasty after the disastrous civil war of the early twelfth century and demonstrating to the king of France a united family front.

In chapter 6, “The Regent and the Martyr,” Strickland probes the psychological and practical effects that Becket's martyrdom had on the Young King, while in chapters 7 through 9 he gives the reader detailed political, military, and familial information about the rebellion of Henry II's sons. Even those familiar with the Great Revolt will be tremendously impressed with the detailed information regarding battle plans and sites, troop movements, and materiél distribution, as well as conflicting and changing loyalties as the battles move from England to the Angevin territories in France. Strickland provides revitalizing insights into motives and personalities in these chapters, providing the historical community a tremendous intellectual service. In chapter 10, “A Fragile Peace,” he teases out the impact of the rebellion throughout the Angevin empire and the Plantagenet family. This leads logically to chapter 11, “Apogee,” which he devotes to the Young King's true success not as a legislator or magnate, but as a champion in the lists and his vital relationship with William Marshall.

In chapter 12, “Keeping the Balance of Power,” and chapter 13, “The Brothers’ War,” Strickland reveals how Henry II's idea of crowning his son in his lifetime left his own family riven with factions and engaging in a zero-sum game for power. The final chapter, “Vir Sanctus,” is a fascinating exploration of the early posthumous cult of the Young King, how his surviving contemporaries lamented “what might have been,” and how the early cult floundered for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the Young King's wholly political life.

If there is a small lacuna in Strickland's work, it comes in a missing exploration of the Young King's relationship with his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Indeed, Henry the Young King has relatively little information about Eleanor of Aquitaine and her role in the Young King's life, religious development, marriage, and rebellion against Henry II. No one could fault Strickland's source work, so we may assume that the documentary evidence was not available for the responsible historian to unpack the nexus of places, practices and circumstances that defined and shaped the Young King's relationship with his mother. But I would be remiss if I did not mention that it is far too easy to resist attempts to recover women's historical presence that may fundamentally alter our understanding of patriarchal history.

Perhaps paradoxically, the absence of a clearly defined role for Eleanor of Aquitaine in the Young King's life allows Strickland to engage in a detailed reading of the homosocial bonds—their ambiguities, ruptures, integrations—between the Young King and a number of important men in twelfth-century history. Strickland gives us a detailed understanding of the relationships the Young King had with not just his father Henry II, but also Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket and William Marshall. In Henry the Young King, we can see a young man in search of alternate father figures, spending his adult life creating “queer” families with two patriarchs: Henry II and other strong men the Young King looked to for support to counterbalance the disappointments he found in his father. As Strickland details the two-father family the Young King tried to create, Henry the Young King is a fascinating and modern achievement of scholarship.

It is an understatement to say Strickland's Henry the Young King is an extraordinary scholarly success. Truly, there are modern American presidents who do not get the same detailed biographical attention. The reader finds twenty images in the book, ranging from the labeled portrait of the Young King in Matthew of Paris's Historia Anglorum to the detail from the Young King's tomb sculpture in Rouen—images brought together specifically for their relationship to the Young King and, as a collection, available nowhere else. Henry the Young King is for any scholar who wants to know about the Young King, Angevin and Plantagenet reigns, and the subtlest nuances of politics, tournaments, military engagements, and family dynamics in the latter half of the twelfth century.