Today@Dal

Posted Friday by the Globe and Mail:

This week, as researchers confirmed the scoliotic skeleton in Leicester belonged to Richard III through DNA analysis of a 17th-generation descendent of his sister, the world gawked at the power of contemporary science to play historical detective. The long debate over the character of the man who once owned those bones, however, has always been the stuff of successful fiction rather than hard fact.

...

“You are taking up the cause of the underdog, that is always appealing and you are rejecting the official, authorized story,” said Rohan Maitzen, an English professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax who has written about the popularity of Ricardian fiction. What really interests her is the reaction to these books, which are often dismissed by academic historians.

“It’s primarily historical romance, it’s a very gendered genre, written by women for women ... And the reaction to it is gendered. It’s dismissed, but it is really just a continuous experiment in ‘What if?’”

Read the rest of this story at the Globe and Mail's website.