Amy Licence

Amy Licence is a historian whose books focus on women, kinship, and political power in medieval and Tudor England. Cecily Neville studies the aristocrat who became Duchess of York and mother of Edward IV and Richard III. Licence follows Cecily through the Wars of the Roses, examining her marriage to Richard, Duke of York, her management of family interests, and the upheavals that placed her children near the center of dynastic conflict. The book resists treating Cecily only as a royal mother, instead tracing the choices, households, loyalties, and religious commitments that shaped her long public life. Amberley issued the original hardback during 2014; a paperback appeared the next year. Cecily Neville draws on Licence’s academic training in medieval and Tudor studies and belongs to her broader work on historical women whose influence survives unevenly in political records. By concentrating on one family across decades of instability, the biography makes genealogy, property, marriage, and personal allegiance essential parts of national history.