Jack Cade's Rebellion (1450) has been the subject of a number of important studies since the 1980s. Recent work has illuminated the grievances of the rebels and the course of the rising, as well as introduced a broader comparative context by considering late medieval popular revolts as a whole. The main outlines of this regional uprising are well known. Unrest across the politically aware southeast of England was prompted by the simultaneous collapse of royal finances and the fall of English Normandy, a catastrophic failure in government that hardened underlying discontent over gross corruption, economic distress, and pirate raids on coastal towns. The murder of the duke of Suffolk, the king's chief minister, whom parliament failed to impeach, sparked rumors of royal retribution that impelled Cade and his mainly Kentish band to march on the capital, avowedly to inform and petition the king. Cade's followers included the lesser gentry and yeomen who led the local militia, as well as husbandmen, craftsmen, laborers, and soldiers. Nevertheless, many mysteries remain, including the identity of the group's leader and why popular discontent translated into action in 1450 but not (generally) at other times of weak government.

Alexander Kaufman's book focuses on one of the most important groups of sources covering the revolt: the fifteenth-century London chronicles. Among these varied and rather miscellaneous texts, whose interrelationships have been delineated by Mary Rose McLaren, are some dozen or so accounts of the rising. Kaufman's aim is to provide a study of these narratives as both historical sources and literary texts. He is, in other words, concerned to assess not just their factual accuracy and political biases, but also their literary qualities and the way in which the stock themes of contemporary stories shaped the resulting “quasi-historical” prose. Given the very one-sided nature of the official records of the revolt, this kind of examination of the perceptions of contemporary and near-contemporary London writers could potentially be very fruitful. This is especially the case given the sophisticated program that the rebels presented, in word and song, expressed in the vernacular and couched in the new political language of the commonweal.

Kaufman's study is aimed at the theoretically informed medievalist who has taken the “linguistic turn” and is concerned with understanding the interface between text and reality. He is occasionally rather disparaging of others who he sees as less sophisticated (4–5), and at one point implies that medieval historians in general have “ignored the discursive nature, the literary modes, and the ideological implications of medieval histories, chronicles, annals, and correspondences” (6). This does a disservice to many recent scholars and, in this context, particularly to John Watts and David Grummitt, whose work on the way language shapes political discourse has shed new light on fifteenth-century politics, including Cade's revolt, though it is little cited here.

More fundamentally, although Kaufman asserts (somewhat tautologically) that “the need to apply contemporary literary techniques of structuralist, poststructuralist, and postmodern theories to historical writings of the Middle Ages is a necessity,” his own attempt to use these techniques has not been overly successful. The Historical Literature of the Jack Cade Rebellion is cluttered by a good deal of undigested theory that distracts from the analysis rather than deepens it. It is unclear, for example, what Jacques Derrida's abstract theorizing about Freudian “archive fever” might tell us about medieval attitudes, despite Kaufman's assertion that John Vale shared the same “insatiable (death?) drive to archive” ( 32). Similarly, in an otherwise potentially helpful discussion of the use of figurative language to describe traumatic events, he pursues a bizarre comparison between Cade's revolt and the Holocaust, apparently to correct a prevalent “Monty Python” view of the Middle Ages (67–68).

As these rather clumsy uses of theory might suggest, the text has a slightly naive and ahistorical quality. This is brought home most sharply by the highly inaccurate characterization of Cade's revolt as “an uprising of some 30,000 middle-class citizens” (dust jacket). But it is also evident in Kaufman's appeal for a more nuanced treatment of the thinking and motivations of late medieval writers, which loses much of its force when he characterizes the Wars of the Roses as “a period where opinions and sides changed at random” (60). At times, the internal logic of his argument is also faulty: if, as we are told, some political actors changed sides “willy-nilly” (22), why should contemporary writers like John Vale have had a “unifying belief towards the political events of the fifteenth century” (30)?

Regrettably, this book is unlikely to increase the confidence of mainstream historians in the value of literary critical approaches to the late Middle Ages. Literature specialists themselves will probably be underwhelmed by Kaufman's promotion of the London chroniclers’ literary skills, which goes little beyond an early assertion that they are so proficient that he too “became caught up in their rhetorical arguments and ideological beliefs” (3). There are some interesting passages, notably in chapter 3, which examines the carnivalesque aspects of the revolt and is partly based on an earlier article in Nottingham Medieval Studies. But most chapters lack conviction, including that on the influence of the Robin Hood stories on contemporary understandings of the revolt. Ironically for a study of the power of writing, the book as a whole fails to tell a coherent story.