7 Books Like The Wordhord

What an amazing book! I'd had it on my TBR list for a long time, but I kept myself from reading novels and especially anything medieval while I was getting The Last Highland King completed. This was a treat and a treasure after a lot of studying and writing. I knew Marie de France somewhat, as the writer of lais and courtly romances, but this evocation of the scholarly writer places her at the help of an English abbey that she remakes into a female utopia, protected from the outside world by a massive labyrinth. Wildly inventive, but also emotionally charged as Marie comes to terms with her own intellectual, sexual, and political nature.

I've loved Robert Macfarlane's work, but this book has stayed with me. It's both lyrical and deeply unsettling, modern myth-making about a spit of land called Orford Ness. The first section, Ness, braids together voices from the land, from the Cold War era nuclear scientists who conducted tests there, with the overarching image of the Green Man. The second section, Holloway, looks at the ancient tracks by man and beast that have worn deep, deep "hollow ways" into the landscape of the British Isles. These are unquiet places, haunted places, a record of man's impact on the land even as the fungi and lichens and mosses work to reclaim their world. Spiky pen-and-ink drawings are evocative.

This book is filled with fascinating facts about medieval medicine, surgery, humoural theory, disease, and diagnosis. But what is surprising is how many other aspects of the Middle Ages are covered through the theme of bodies.

We learn about strange creatures like blemmyae (who have no heads and faces in their chests) and cynocephali (dog-headed people), saints and relics, race relations and politics, manuscript manufacture, religion, literature, travel, eating habits, love, sexuality, and gender identity.

I love how the chapters are organized by body part, from head to feet, a clever approach I have never seen in a history book before. Hartnell demonstrates how the medieval past is "an uncanny place at once startlingly different from and strangely familiar to our own."

Reading this book is like listening to your incredibly knowledgeable historian friend talk about medieval society over drinks. Janega’s turns of phrase and sharp observations make me laugh, and at the same time, I feel my mind soak up knowledge like a sponge.

This book is about what medieval people thought and why, going back to the philosophies and influences of ancient Greece and Rome. It tackles medieval beauty standards, sexual practices, family life, and work life. It addresses fart jokes and eyeliner, as well as ideas about biology and class disparities. We see women farming, ruling, weaving, brewing, and writing.

Janega argues that it is through seeing the past truly that we can "imagine new futures," making the necessary changes for "a more equitable world."

This book is a game-changer – looking at medieval history (so often told as the narrative of kings and knights and clerics) as a story of women. It is not only a vital act of history: it represents a new way of looking at the past that has inspired my own book, MYTHICA (coming out in 2025), that looks at the real women behind the 'male tales' of Greek myth. This book has to be on my list of top reads, not just of 2024, but of all time.

This book is about medieval manuscripts, but those parchment pages are only the "portals that connect us to lives in the past." This book’s stories are, in fact, about the hands that wrote, illustrated, commissioned, collected, and composed those manuscripts.

Wellesley’s enthusiasm for the forensic study of the physical as well as textual past is infectious. She gently corrects popular assumptions about the Middle Ages (yes, women were involved in all aspects of book-making, from commissioning to composing to writing to illustrating), all the while dropping in delectable details that make you stop and think (the word "artist" doesn’t appear in English until after the medieval period).

This is a medieval history unlike any other you’ll read, literally bringing the past into the present. How do medieval thoughts and practices relate to modern life, from the usefulness of minimalism to church "vision boards" to the healing properties of green spaces?

Cybulskie is lightheartedly critical of certain practices of the past but is always respectful, never treating people as strange or backward.

Illustrated with images from medieval manuscripts, this book covers everything from Easter ball games to party saint Brigid to Benedict’s vision of a room for communal undies. We see medieval religious folks interested in science and innovation, as well as history and ritual, and connected to the world around them in ways we might not have imagined.