100 Books Like A Tudor Turk

It is difficult to imagine a list of great novels about the Middle Ages that does not include this book.

I read it first when I was in graduate school, and it brought so much of what I was studying to life – the monastic world of its setting with all its contradictions and spectacular architecture; fights over religion and the true nature of spirituality; the non-linear nature of medieval literature. 

I love how it can be read on one level as a page-turny murder mystery and on another as a post-modern novel that explores the nature of signs and meaning. Its mystificatory preface reveals the distance between the medieval world and what we can say about it.

Segu may begin with a lone white explorer gazing across a river at the Bambara people, but this novel turns away from him to those whose world will be irrevocably changed as colonialism and Christianity, Muslim expansionism, and the horrific trade in human beings irrevocably changes the course of African lives. Condé turns an unblinking eye on the Traore family as they break under the weight of these civilizational pressures. Traditional ways of life turn brutal and desperate—women especially feel the brunt of an unstable world—and sons abandon the family for enemies or are kidnapped and enslaved. Each storyline in this famed epic cuts straight into the political and social complexities of that time and exposes its players to uncompromising account.

The magnificence of the first in the Amalgant series is the immersive reconstruction of Mongol social, political, and religious worlds, as well as the lives of its people. Hammond resistantly reads histories produced by hostile cultures, instead privileging the earliest and most comprehensive Mongol tellings of their own lives, The Secret History of the Mongols. This is no dry historical account of cultural norms, steppe relations, or material artifacts, but an intimate and humane telling of the personal tragedies and struggles that would change the world as the war-orphaned Temujin grows to be the man we know as Chenggiz Khan.

Set in Delhi on the eve of the first battle for Indian independence in 1857 that would be so brutally put down by the British, ending with Delhi in flames and India coming under direct British rule, our detective, the poet laureate Mirza Ghalib investigates a murder. The investigation reveals the myriad of personalities, pressures, and allegiances from every corner of Indian and British society that led to the uprising and all that has come after. This finely wrought novel begins and ends with death at a Mushaira—a poetry recitation, public, private, or intimate for just two, that typically drew from every level of society—sounding the loss of India as it was before colonization, and then partition, when religious and social boundaries were not as starkly defined and policed as they are now.

Laslett’s book taught me the value of comparative material in studying Ancient History. Another part of the Medieval and Modern History syllabus was seventeenth-century England. Teaching was dominated by the Civil War, emphasizing its socio-economic aspects.

This book had just appeared, and I drew on it enthusiastically for my essays. It dealt with the only period of English pre-industrial history for which original documentation allows some meaningful, detailed study of ordinary life. This is not possible for Roman history, even through archaeology, but the experience of later times can be considered in studying Roman society.

For example, Laslett explored precisely how upper-class and merchant families were not nuclear but made up of a large number of near and distant relatives, servants, employees and apprentices: not unlike the traditional Roman familia, except that the latter included slaves.

If you haven’t read Montaigne’s Essays start now. I suggest reading one a day – they’re quite short.

I love this book because Montaigne is a genius for all time. Montaigne exploration of what it means to be human remains relevant today. It connects our world with past and shows that, although technology has changed and we can become a lot richer, humans haven’t changed so much.

Montaigne’s Essays are not a relic, they are the mirror on our present condition.

A startling finding when I was researching Elizabethan ideas about the mind was how far their attitudes to the imagination differed from ours.

We see it as a creative force to be encouraged and liberated, but for them it was dangerous, deceptive, and unruly, leading towards sinfulness and madness. Roychoudhury explains how early scientific thinking was starting to unsettle this traditional view of the imagination as reprehensible, and traces the effects of this in works including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Sonnets, and Macbeth.

I would add that the new commercial playhouses for which Shakespeare wrote became experimental crucibles: these were spaces where the combined imaginations of playwright, actors, and audiences created virtual realities, unleashing an exhilarating and magical sense of the powers of imagination.

Notorious for its violence, the 17th century is also a time of sweeping change. Change ignites resistance. When I first started researching Irish history, I was well aware of Cromwell’s march, and soon discovered much more and perhaps worse. How could people survive under constant threat and fear? How could humans justify such cruelty? This book examines several horrific events, the people and the policies that allowed them to happen—in the interest of learning from history that which we should never repeat.

Nietzsche said; “Only those with very large lungs have the right to write long sentences.” Montaigne was of the same opinion. He pre-dated Nietzsche in couching his philosophy simply and clearly in short, sharp aphorisms. Like Nietzsche’s aphorisms, they are often very funny.

In The Sterkarm Handshake, the device for time travel is simply a tube; not magical, but scientific, down which modern ruthless developers travel back to 16th century Scotland. Here they meet with equally ruthless highlanders. The scientists are planning to plunder Scotland’s resources (the 16th-century locals have been plundering roundabout for years), and of course, the modern developers run into problems. As in all books of this genre, the characters who travel through time may want to fit in or may choose to reject what the past has to offer. 

The heroine, like similar time-travellers, falls in love with a long-dead character and here, there’s also the possibility of the 16th century Scots coming up the tube to 20th century England – a good twist. There are also some very satisfying links between past and present, moments where you smile and think, Ah, how clever!