In 1887, Kate Norgate coined the term ‘Angevin empire’ to describe the assemblage of lands ruled over by the twelfth and early-thirteenth century kings of England who had their dynastic origins in the French county of Anjou. Now often called the Plantagenet empire after the royal dynasty's progenitor, Count Geoffrey ‘le Bel’ Plantagenet, at its furthest extent this system included much of Britain and Ireland as well as two-thirds of France. From the 1960s, John le Patourel proposed that a Norman empire had preceded this Angevin/Plantagenet empire, and used both to challenge historical frameworks that took the modern nation-state as their organising principle and produced narratives illustrating the making of England or the making of France. A decade later, proponents of a new British history made a similar point, with Rees Davies eventually positing a medieval English empire to highlight the deep roots of English domination in these isles. Such transnationality is still more often evoked than practised today, but there is nevertheless general agreement that modern national boundaries should not be imposed upon our study of the period before 1300.

The Plantagenet empire, 1259–1453 sets out to extend this transnational perspective to the later middle ages, which still tends to be seen as the cradle of modern states. So, while fifteenth-century historiography often favours the themes of centralisation and cultural uniformity within crystallising polities, this volume stresses chance, liminality and diversity within an overarching imperial system. The editors – Peter Crooks, David Green and Mark Ormrod – are bold in calling this a Plantagenet empire, since the majority of that empire's continental components were permanently alienated in 1259 – the year this volume takes as its starting point. It might have been simpler to argue that Davies's ‘English empire’ ought to be extended past the mid-fourteenth century ‘ebb tide’ he envisioned, and thus link it to later English imperial ventures in Ireland and the Atlantic. Yet, The Plantagenet empire convincingly argues that vibrant networks continued to connect lands either side of the channel well into the fifteenth century. It charts their evolution as successive kings of England sought to resurrect the Angevin/Plantagenet empire during the Hundred Years War (formally adopting ‘Plantagenet’ as their surname in the process).

The book is arranged thematically in four parts. Part I, ‘Empire, Dynasty and Identity’ contains chapters by Jean-Philippe Genet, Len Scales, Julian Luxford, Kim Woods, Andrea Ruddick and Jaclyn Rajsic. These all look at the empire itself: how imperium was conceived in political theory, articulated in ink and stone, and broadcast to the world. Here as elsewhere, the interdisciplinarity for which the Harlaxton symposium is known creates a well-rounded image of what a Plantagenet empire might have meant to those who witnessed it. One great advantage that this volume has over those looking at earlier periods is the explosion of writing and recordkeeping that the late-medieval Plantagenet empire either generated itself or facilitated through its existence.

This is put to good use in Part II, ‘Regional Responses to Empire’. Over six chapters, Seán Duffy, Helen Fulton, Gwilym Dodd, Rachel Moss, Brendan Smith and Jackson W. Armstrong turn the optic from centre to periphery, looking at how those dwelling in the provinces of the Plantagenet empire reacted – sometimes positively, sometimes negatively – to rule from the metropole. These reactions were not only expressed politically, for instance through armed action or petitions to parliament, but also creatively through poetry, insignia and attire. As the growth in recordkeeping suggests, this was a bureaucratic empire reliant for its successful operation upon the transportation of large quantities of parchment and the ability (or willingness) of local administrators to carry out orders. This is the focus of Part III, ‘Networks and Communications’, in which Serge Lusignan, Joel Rosenthal, David Ditchburn, Michael Bennett, Anne Curry and Peter Fleming look at the agents of empire, whether clerks, diplomats or businessmen, by whose efforts the Plantagenet dominions were further entwined.

The usual complaints about multi-authored conference proceedings apply to this collection, yet The Plantagenet empire rises above many in the genre through the dialogue it achieves among the contributors. This is most evident in the editors’ introduction and a reflective final section. The introduction deals directly with the analytical category of ‘empire’, which gives the volume its theoretical underpinning and situates it with the wider field of imperial history. Part IV constitutes a response from Michael Brown and John Watts. Michael Brown emphasises the ongoing development of English claims to dominance over the empire's insular components, which stretched through this period and linked the thirteenth century to the sixteenth. John Watts is less enamoured of the term ‘empire’. He characterises the Plantagenet system as a ‘framework of possibilities’ (406), and its history as a series of phases during which different avenues were explored or abandoned. Watt argues that from the twelfth century ‘there was a long-term trajectory towards the definition and demarcation of political space’ (419). This ‘state-formation’ played a part in the making of the Plantagenet empire, but it ultimately forced the imperial framework to shift away from the continent and towards the Atlantic.

No short review can do justice to the range of scholarship in this volume, or adequately convey its historiographical importance. Like its Norman, Angevin and English forbears, the Plantagenet empire pushes against an insularity in English (and even British) historiography. In this it is both welcome and timely.