Books like The World of Orderic Vitalis — picked by fans

I love this book because Partner examines the works of three of my favorite medieval historians: Henry of Huntingdon, William of Newburgh, and Richard of Devizes.

In the first half of the book, she delves into each authors’s unique voice: Henry’s contempt for the world, William’s skepticism and critical eye, and Richard’s sometimes devastating tongue-in-cheek humor.

In the second half of the book, she explores many of the quirks of medieval histories that tend to confuse or disappoint modern readers: the medieval deference to authorities, the fact that medieval authors approached history writing as a literary exercise, and the fact that Biblical material is constantly popping up in historical narratives.

She argues that history served not only as a source of entertainment for the upper classes, but as a means of educating the ruling class and inculcating certain values. 

This book isn’t just about historians or history writing, but I love it because it addresses some really important questions related to history writing: why was the preservation of memory gendered labor, with different types of memorialization expected of men and women, and how was the past preserved in forms other than chronicles?

It also grapples with the fact that some events and people were purposely forgotten or intentionally left uncommemorated. This practice of collective amnesia or whitewashing the past is something I find particularly compelling. It’s a fascinating look at the gendered practices of memory, and a great reminder that chronicles were not the only means by which the past was preserved for posterity.

This is one of those books that completely changes the way you understand a subject.

Clanchy looks at how the growth of bureaucracy in England fostered the growth of literacy and changed the world in the process. That’s an important subject in its own right, but I love this book for all of the little details it includes.

It’s full of information about how the definition of literacy has changed over time, how knights and kings were educated, how courts functioned, how oral testimony was heard, how records were kept, how books were produced, how much it cost to produce them, and how forgery developed.

This is very much an academic book, but it explores a whole range of practices and attitudes that have shaped the world we live in.

Any book by Robert Bartlett is worth reading (check out The Hanged Man and Trial by Fire and Water as well), but I love this one because it examines one of the most interesting and entertaining historians of the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales.

Gerald was famously opinionated, prejudiced (mainly against the Irish – check out his History of Ireland), and gossipy. Bartlett explores Gerald’s attitudes, experiences, and works to paint a compelling picture of the wider world around him. Much like Chibnall’s book on Orderic, this is a fascinating portrait of an important historian and the complicated world he lived in.

I love this book because out of all the time travel tales I’ve watched and read, this one seemed the most plausible. I mean the method of time travel that was used, if time travel to the past is ever possible, the method they use in the book would probably be the means to do it.

So it made me think about that, but it also enlightened me about other aspects of time travel back to the medieval period in England that I’d never considered before: like for instance, the English they spoke would be mostly indecipherable, and you’d need a translating device (which, sadly the movie version didn’t address). So, it had me thinking a lot about language and how it’s evolved over time.

This is an eye-witness account of the French Revolution of 1848 by a major participant. It offers a fascinating, acerbic picture of the major actors, the revolutionary “days,” and Tocqueville’s unhappy experience as Foreign Minister. It vividly conveys a sense of both the fears of the propertied classes and the limitations of radicals who could only play at revolution, mimicking the roles and gestures of 1789-’94.

But what I find most compelling is Tocqueville’s preoccupation with questions that are central to our understanding of the failures of democratic politics, then and now. How is it that in the space of two generations, democratic revolutions twice culminated in Napoleonic dictatorship? Why do so many democratic governments, including ours, appear to be moving in the same direction now? 

Another story that's impossible to forget – actually this is a novella in a collection of stories with this name. Again, about a lost house in a forest in France, an artist, a young man in love, and the two young women who bewitch him in turns. John Fowles is an English writer from the 1960s, whose work I loved when young and still do. He was much influenced by Alain-Fournier.

I love this classic study in which Huizinga vividly portrays the colorful era in which my heroin, Christine de Pizan, lived. Huizinga shows that late medieval society was full of striking contradictions, among them chivalry vs cruelty, courtly love vs vengeance, blissful visions of heaven vs horrific visions of Hell. 

Eleanor of Aquitaine is certainly one of the most formidable women of the Middle Ages; not just because she was queen to two kings, but because she had the courage to openly defy them both.

Consequently, I raced to order Coirle Mooney’s first novel in her The Medieval Ladies series, followed quickly by the second, The Cloistered Lady. I absolutely love the author’s ability to craft vivid descriptions of time and place, especially the uncommon setting of the nunnery at Fontrevault. Joanna, Queen Eleanor’s lady-in-waiting, is a delightfully complex character.

Like Christina Kohl in my series, she is wonderfully human; but her fears and shortcomings are balanced out by her sometimes-surprising strength and compassion. I enjoyed all three novels in the series, but this one most of all.

This is the best general survey of French wine in English, from someone who not only teaches the history of modern France at his local university, but who also reviews and writes about wine for his city’s newspaper. As both an academic historian and a journalist, Phillips has written a riveting account of how wine was first introduced to France under the Romans, how many of the vineyards later came under the control of the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, how the French state attempted to control and regulate the production of wine in the nineteenth-century, and how smaller wineries are now trying to cope with the global commercialization of the wine industry. Just a great primer on French wine.