In 1491, as Machiavelli advised popes and princes and Leonardo da Vinci astonished the art world, a young man boarded a ship in Portugal bound for Ireland. He would be greeted upon arrival as the rightful heir to the throne of England. The trouble was, England already had a king. The most intriguing and ambitious pretender in history, this elegant young man was celebrated throughout Europe as the prince he claimed to be: Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the “Princes in the Tower” who were presumed to have been murdered almost a decade earlier. Handsome, well-mannered, and charismatic, he behaved like the perfect prince, and many believed he was one. The greatest European rulers of the age—among them the emperor Maximilian, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and Charles VIII of France—used him as a diplomatic pawn to their own advantage. As such, he tormented Henry VII for eight years, attempting to invade England three times. Eventually, defeated and captured, he admitted to being Perkin Warbeck, the son of a common boatman from Flanders. But was this really the truth? Ann Wroe, a historian and storyteller of the first rank, delves into the secret corners of the late medieval world to explore both the elusive nature of identity and the human propensity for deception. In uncovering the mystery of Perkin Warbeck, Wroe illuminates not only a life but an entire world trembling on the verge of discovery.

Princess Isabella is sick and tired of princes that are too tall, too small, too stupid or just too boring and rejects all her suitors as quite unsuitable. But princesses marry handsome princes and live happily ever after. How can Isabella's story find a happy ending, and what have frogs and flies and moats to do with it?

Princess Madeline and her maid, Rose, set out on a journey to find her perfect Prince. After almost giving up hope, they find a beautiful castle in the midst of a foggy lake. The Prince of Earnsworth Castle is shrouded in mystery. Madeline learns to love with her heart and not just physical looks. Madeline has found her perfect Prince and she and Prince Charles Earnsworth marry and live happily ever after.

Chivalry and the Perfect Prince is a survey of the ceremonial armor crafted for the Spanish Habsburg monarchs of the sixteenth century. It examines notable tournaments and pageantry held at the courts of Charles V and Philip II, and the artworks associated with them. Braden Frieder guides the reader through these tournaments, jousting, and other knightly exercises as part of a larger aristocratic culture that included arms and armor, paintings, tapestries, medals, and sculptures with chivalric themes. Frieder presents Habsburg tournaments in their proper historical context as an extension of imperial politics, drawing comparisons with popular chivalric literature of the period. Frieder’s study utilizes extensive primary source material and contemporary documents, many appearing for the first time in English. Included in this book are eighty-one illustrations of fine art and armor from the sixteenth century, the crescendo of the armorer's art in Europe. For the first time in print, these artworks are treated collectively, as integral parts of aristocratic life and culture during the Renaissance.

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliAIs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonAIs impeachment, Mansfield's work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldAIs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of MansfieldAIs writings.

The outcome of a scientific conference organized in November 2021, this volume aims to provide a picture of how the aristocratic political class of France and Moldavia sought to challenge monarchical power and how the latter tried to reassert itself in face of this turbulent nobility, in the context of the endemic civil wars that plagued both countries during the chosen period. For this purpose, this volume tries to analyze both the ideological issues involved in these endemic struggles, as they appear in the propaganda of the period, and the practical aspects and consequences (political intrigues or military developments) of the conflictual relationship between the rulers of these countries and their discontented nobles. Divided into two sections, one dedicated to the case of France during the Wars of Religion, the other to Moldavia from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, this volume is also the result of a collaborative work between French and Romanian academics, who thus tried to bridge what seemed like a (large) geographical gap in order to benefit from different perspectives and thus gain a better insight into different (but maybe not so different) models of early modern European political cultures. In the end, despite the distance between them, in early modern France and Moldavia, to effectively challenge the authority of the king or prince, one had to take up arms: and the nobility, who imagined itself first and foremost as a military order, did exactly that. But there is more to this clash between ruler and rebels than a mere contest of military strength. Despite the apparent political and cultural differences between early modern France and Moldavia, there is one common feature that influenced the behaviour of the rebels in both countries: the need for a justification of the revolt. Since the rebels operated in a political environment where the king (or the prince) was the source of all legitimacy (in particular, the nobility was beholden to the traditional aristocratic ethos of loyalty towards the ruler) and this common mentality of politics shaped the actions of the ruling class, they had to persuade the public opinion (domestic or international) of the righteousness of their cause.