100 Books Like Romanesque

The late great Alan Watts was the master of reminding us not to take reality – or ourselves – at face value. His prose manages to be simple and profound at the same time and he always has his feet on the earth. I could recommend any of his books but this is the one with which I began. No one else can ever tell me who or what I am. My experience of the world is always subjective, whatever science says; and the best way to see accurately is to get to know myself.

One of the inspirations for Mystical France was this classic published in the 1970s, a guide to the earth mysteries and traditions of the British Isles by two photographers fascinated by standing stones, UFOs, and ley lines. It’s a matter-of-fact assembly of all the strange things they could find. The images are in black and white but this only adds to the aura of the places described. The text mainly consists of extended captions making it easy to pick up and flick through without having to commit to reading hefty chapters. As in the best-illustrated books, the words explain the pictures and the pictures explain the words with nothing superfluous.

Every mystery hunter needs a guide to symbols and this profusely illustrated book is the best I have found so far. Symbols, by definition, point directly to the non-obvious aspects of a greater reality. In religious buildings they are a way to escape the material and approach the numinous, which is beyond the scope of words. Sometimes the meaning of a symbol is clear but in other cases the explanation has been forgotten and you need suggestions as how to interpret it. This is where this book comes in.  

John Michell needs to be mentioned somewhere on my list for his pioneering work into seeing the earth as a living creature with which human beings interact. This is part of a legendary series of illustrated books, Art and the Imagination, which gives serious treatment to subjects that are too often treated in a less rigorous way. Each has an expert introduction and extended picture captions. Other titles cover astrology, alchemy, the Holy Grail, Tao, Zen, the mythical spiral, and sacred geoometry.

Reading about medieval illumination is one thing. But suppose you want to actually paint an illuminated letter for yourself? This book provides a do-it-yourself experience, showing you step-by-step how to reproduce alphabet letters from actual medieval manuscripts. Each project includes tips on painting techniques, a list of the tools and paints you will need, then walks you through the process with detailed photographic examples for each step. Choose from Celtic, Romanesque, Gothic styles, and more. This book is a feast for the eyes, even if you have no artistic ambitions for yourself. Simply leaf through it and imagine the world of the medieval artist as they created these gorgeous initial letters in their manuscripts.

I loved the Nevernight books because the main character is not necessarily always a hero. Mia is an assassin and cares only about killing. This means it can be uncomfortable to support her decisions and actions when they involve so much death and bloodshed.

She kills for reasons that she thinks are justified, but that isn’t always right, and it is great to see her grow and become something more than just a killing machine. She has a great personality and endures many hardships through the series but I loved reading along and seeing how she overcame everything she faced.

I like historical novels with strong female characters, even unsympathetic ones (maybe especially unsympathetic ones), but if I am not going to throw the book against the wall, their lives and values need to be true to those of their time.

The Maria of the title is one of the best examples I know of a slightly difficult and strong-minded woman who is fully a product of her world, in this case, the world of Norman adventurers of the eleventh century who carved out domains for themselves in southern Italy against opposition from Muslims and the pope in Rome.

Her life is constrained by the expectations of her class and gender and a marriage she does not want, but she is a survivor, and she finds her own way to exert power.

This is a much-needed antidote to the navel-gazing tendencies of American criminal justice thought.

Reading contemporary treatments, you might almost be fooled into thinking that certain types of police controversies have a specifically American – or at least modern – origin. They don't. In fact, the peculiar challenges of policing and its inevitable discontents might even be universal.

Certainly, they were present at an early stage in medieval Italy, long before the first English "bobbies" ever dawned a uniform. Use-of-force controversies, weapons prohibitions, reluctant witnesses, hostile crowds, simmering beefs among local gangsters: it's all here. Roberts' medieval world so eerily resembles our own when it comes to law enforcement that one ends up surprised to encounter any differences at all.

Here's one, though: medieval town dwellers did not have cell phones with which to film the cops misdeeds. Instead, they hollered for notaries to scribble records on the spot.

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.

If you’ve ever fantasized about restoring a crumbling medieval Italian villa, then you’ll get to live that experience vicariously through this memoir.

The author has a wonderful sense of the absurd as she recounts her family’s multi-year efforts to turn a roofless villa into their dream home, complete with a complicated teenage daughter who is trying to find her way in the rural Italian countryside where the family has been transplanted.

Brimming with idiosyncratic and endearing characters.