100 Books Like Saint Patrick Retold

This book trace the development of national identities in the early Middle Ages and beyond. In his careful reading of classical historians, their early medieval counterparts, and their modern interpreters, Geary challenges the traditional understanding of early medieval identity formation and its relations to the origins of modern European nations.

Geary demonstrates that the early Middle Ages were marked by a fluid and dynamic sense of identity and that rulers and policymakers deployed a plethora of strategies to create a sense of shared identity among their people. I particularly like Geary’s inference that the modern idea of the nation-state is, in fact, a nineteenth-century invention and any attempt to trace it back to the early Middle Ages is plain historical nonsense.

In this book, Chris Wickham surveys the passage from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in a lucid and engaging manner that challenges past scholarship on the matter. Unlike Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) and his followers, who argue that the fall of Rome initiated a new age–the Middle Ages–marked by the triumph of barbarism and religion, Wickhams stresses the transformations that swept Europe and the Mediterranean World from the fifth century onwards and consequently re-shaped it.

I particularly like Wickham’s account because it gives Gibbon’s thesis on the decline and fall of the Roman empire the proper burial it deserves. Wickham is extremely revealing how profoundly effective and dynamic were the shifts that marked the transformation of the Roman world–shifts that laid the foundations for modern society and civilization. 

The period between the fifth and the eighth century, once unjustly and anachronistically known as the “Dark Ages,” was perceived in the past as a period of cultural decline and ignorance. Pierre Riché’s monumental book challenges that notion. By focusing on education and the written culture in the various Barbarian kingdoms of the post-Roman world–from Anglo-Saxon England in the north to Vandal North Africa in the south and from the Frankish Kingdoms of Gaul to the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, Riché demonstrates how prolific and innovative was the cultural scene of the early medieval West.

He further points out that much of the culture associated with the Romans of Late Antiquity was preserved by the Barbarian rulers of Europe, paving the way for the so-called Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries. 

This pioneering book challenges the notion that literacy in the early Middle Ages was confined to a small clerical elite and a very thin layer of lay aristocrats. By looking at a wide range of documents that survive from the eighth and the ninth centuries, Rosamond McKitterick demonstrates that literacy in the Carolingian period was widespread, not only among clerics and governmental agents but also among the lay population.

Indeed, as McKitterick points out, the written word played a central role in both the legal system and the royal administration, but it also had an important cultural and social role that affected all strata of society.

I devoured this book in a weekend.

Hild plunged me into the rough and tumble world of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England through the eyes of its title character, a young woman with unusual abilities who is dangerously close to the crown of one of its kings and who protects herself by becoming his seer.

I appreciated how Griffith evoked the texture of life in this period, its beauty and its roughness, bringing me into its mead halls and forests and onto its sea cliffs. She also draws out the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Anglo-Saxon world and the conflicts this created between Celts and Saxons, mixed with pressure from Franks across the Channel and the Latin Church in Rome.

One of the most exciting areas of research and publication in medieval history over the last few generations has been the cult of the saints. A landmark was Peter Brown’s slim but fundamental The Cult of the Saints (1981), an effervescent essay on the origins of the veneration of saints in the Late Antique period. In the same year a very different book appeared, the French original of Vauchez’s enormous and comprehensive study of Christian saints in Latin (western) Christendom, the heart of which was an analysis of the 71 people who were proposed for papal canonization in the period 1198-1431 (only half of them made it). By limiting himself in this way, Vauchez was able to ask statistical questions, demonstrating that as time went on, canonized saints became more female and more lay, as well as pointing out the geography and chronology of sanctity. A monumental achievement.

This book explores post-Reformation attitudes to the medieval past, which was continuously debated and rewritten according to the shifting religious landscape of the sixteenth century and beyond.

Helen Parish’s work helped me to see the merits and benefits of crossing the rather arbitrary divide between the medieval and early modern periods, since it so deftly places medieval and Reformation sources in dialogue.

Her book also makes fascinating reading for anyone wanting to better understand reformed Protestantism as a culture of adaptation and accommodation, as much as of destruction and the outright rejection of the Catholic past. 

I love laughing, particularly at our own human foibles. In this book of essays, in fact, in all of Brian Dole’s essays, he captures with both love and humor the peculiarities of what makes us human. His essays celebrate moments of everyday living that help me see profoundly and humorously what a joyful, profound, and mysterious thing this creation we call life can be.

Helena is Evelyn Waugh’s most overlooked novel but it is my favourite. I love it for how Waugh depicts Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constatine, but what raises it to a place in any best-of list is a passage of writing that ranks as Waugh’s best - and he sets a very high bar for himself. Towards the end of the book Helena prays for her salvation but, reading it, we realise that Waugh is praying for his own salvation too, for those “who have had a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation… of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.” 

Out of all my recommendations, this one is a true mafia romance in the Hotter Than Hell series. But make no mistake, this isn’t the typical mafia romance where the hot/rich/dangerous guy comes in and sweeps the virgin/young/beautiful girl off her feet into a glamourous life where she’s pampered, but never loses her “I’m just a down-to-earth kinda gal” personality. I’ve met Ms. Roberts personally, and know she’s worked as a sex crime detective in real life, which has enabled her to bring some of those experiences to her books. While she never shies away from the hard stuff, she also never glorifies violence, and instead focuses on the emotional aftermath of trauma and the message that love really can conquer all.