Pillboxes on the Western Front Book

Dry as an accounting textbook. Interesting as a description of how a late Middle Age state was run and governed.

Accounts are described and gone over extensively. "Following the money" is a good way to get a feel for how entities such as a government is run. It does not make for scintillating reader, however. The author also uses lists of people, a lot. This is also not scintillating reading.

As a work of scholarship, this seems well-researched. The detail is fantastic. I do wish someone had taken this as a summary for writing something that was more readable about Philip the Bold.

One last criticism is the author has a thesis and they attempt to "prove" it by repeating it at the end of every chapter, despite very little in the chapter actually supporting it. The thesis is "Philip the Bold created a modern, separate state in the Two Burgundies". However, the book presents very little evidence that this actually happened during Philip the Bold's lifetime nor that he was intending to do such a thing. Instead, we get a glimpse of a powerful French aristocrat (fourth son of John II of France) doing whatever was needed to govern the lands he was given to rule. There is little evidence in the book that Philip was trying to create a separate state nor that he did so "accidentally". Instead, he copied governance from France, used French resources where he could, he emulated French methodologies, and used French personnel interchangeably with "locals" to govern. At best, Philip laid the groundwork for a separate state that undeniably came into being later.