Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri

This is an intriguing little book, part history and part historiography. In the first part of The Man Who Believed He Was King of France, Falconieri recounts the tale of Giannino di Guccio, a fourteenth century Sienese merchant who was persuaded to believe he was the lost heir of Louis X of France, switched at birth with the illegitimate son of a travelling Italian. Persuaded of his birthright, di Guccio embarked on an ultimately ruinous journey in an attempt to persuade his royal "relations" of his true identity and reclaim his birthright. While this might all sound like something out of a rather improbable novel, it seems that di Guccio was a real person who did make some attempt at claiming the French throne for himself. In the latter half of the book, Falconieri teases apart the surviving fifteenth century sources, interrogates how historians can assess the veracity of documentation, and examines questions of appearance and representation in written sources. There's an awful lot to unpack in such a brief work, and I'm going to have to keep it in mind for future use in an (upper level?) class.… (altro)