SOURCE: Caldwell, Ellen C. “The Hundred Years' War and National Identity.” In Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures, edited by Denise N. Baker, pp. 237-65. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Caldwell analyzes Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry V in the context of French and English historians' and artists' representations of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453).

The sequence of invasions and expulsions known since the nineteenth century as the Hundred Years' War may be read in such divergent historical narratives today as to question whether those narratives refer to the same events. Their differences depend largely on the historian's nationality or national alliance, beliefs about the legitimacy or necessity of that war or of war in general, and historical circumstances. Popular representations of that war in art and literature are no less divergent, and at this remove from the...