Louis XII; and The Reign of Francis I

• Louis XII
  by Frederic J. Baumgartner (Alan Sutton Publishing xiii + 319 pp.)
• Renaissance Warrior and Patron - The Reign of Francis I
  by Robert J. Knecht (Cambridge University Press xxv + 512 pp.)

Royal biographies constitute a historical genre of their own, for various reasons. Because monarchs were so central to political life they lived in public, minutely observed by their contemporaries, leaving a multiplicity of written reports for the historian to exploit. Their personal histories can never be isolated from those of the countries they ruled, so biographies perforce become virtually national histories for the period concerned.