Alumni and guests are invited to join the Cambridge Society of Dorset, for with much anticipation, talk by Professor Anne Curry on her extensively researched account of the Battle of Agincourt.  

Anne Curry is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton, where she was also Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 2010to 2018.  She is a past president of The Historical Association and past chair of The Battlefields Trust and has also served as Trustee to the Royal Armouries. She has published many books and articles on the Hundred Years War, as well as a major database of late medieval soldiers.  Professor Curry has a particular interest in the battle of Agincourt.  

In 2015 she chaired the Agincourt 600 charity trustees responsible for distributing the £Im made by HM Government for commemorating the 600th anniversary of the battle and has been much involved in the refurbishment of the museum at Azincourt. She is Master elect of the Worshipful Company of Fletchers. Agincourt. Myth or Reality. Know ye not Agincourt? Surely everyone does. But how much of this is the real battle of 1415 and how much the reinvention of Shakespeare and other writers of later centuries?

For many years Anne Curry has worked on the contemporary sources for the battle. We are fortunate to have so much surviving material in the National Archives which informs us about the English army. There is much material in France too. Through these sources, and detailed knowledge of the chronicles as well as the Azincourt area in Picardy, Anne has been able to reconstruct the reality of that fateful day on 25th October 1415. In her Great Battles. Agincourt,  published by Oxford University Press in 2015, she has also considered why and how this battle, more than any other, has occupied such a key place in English identity in the six centuries which have followed – a cultural legacy which stretches from the bowman to the Beatles via Waterloo, Dickens and both the First and Second World Wars.