before we get to the historical fiction you have chosen: you are an expert on late medieval literature, and chaucer in particular. What was the first thing that interested you in this period?
I think a lot of people misunderstand the middle ages. once you start reading the literature, getting to know the culture and thinking about what’s going on, you find that it’s an incredibly rich and interesting period. in the 14th century there is this great global pandemic, much more dramatic than anything we have ever experienced, and, after that pandemic, there is massive social change: more social mobility, changes in what people eat, how they dress, a lot of literature and art is produced, many trips. you also have the peasants’ revolt and usurpation of the throne. a lot of things are happening.
You are reading: Best medieval historical fiction books
so all of that is very interesting to me, as a specialist in medieval literature. that too, of course, provides great background for historical fiction, set in such an interesting era.
If I like medieval historical fiction, will I also enjoy literature?
if you like to read medieval historical fiction, you might enjoy literature. there is so much and it is so diverse. You may especially like the Canterbury Tales, the most famous work of medieval literature. It’s so varied that there really is something for everyone in the Canterbury Tales: there’s a fairly formal and idealized romance, there are very raunchy and funny stories where all sorts of sexual shenanigans take place. there is also a female meditation on what it is to be excluded from writing, what it is to be raped; such serious matters. there are also parables, myths about death. You can read it in Middle English or in a modern translation, like one by David Wright, for example.
another medieval text that is very accessible and interesting to read in translation is sir gawain and the green knight. There is a particularly good translation by the poet Simon Armitage and a movie of the poem, The Green Knight, has just come out. it’s an amazing story about a quest and there are all kinds of puzzles, monsters, temptations and a lot of things going on. then I would really recommend it as well.
It’s so nice to hear there’s still so much interest in these stories that movies are being made about them. What makes the literature of medieval times still so interesting to us today?
There are two different angles to this I think. On the one hand, there are things that medieval literature deals with that are very relevant to today’s world. For example, Zadie Smith’s play Willesden’s Wife, which is based on the prologue and Chaucer’s short story “The Wife of Bath,” will premiere later this year. there are a lot of things in that story that speak to our present moment: it’s about men trying to shut up women; it’s about women trying to be heard; there is a #metoo element. talks about domestic abuse, about the importance of listening to many different voices. there are many things in medieval literature that are relevant to our particular moment or that are timeless. for example, jk rowling’s deathly hallows is based on a canterbury tale, “the tale of the forgiver”.
“I think a lot of people misunderstand the middle ages”
But I think people tend to read literature from the past not only because it’s relevant, but because it’s different. one of the most important things about reading fiction is immersing yourself in a world different from our own, challenging ourselves, taking leaps of imagination, trying to think what it was like to live in a different world with different horizons waiting. and I think you see that in medieval literature. you also see it in some of the medieval historical fiction that we are going to talk about today.
just one more question before we get to that: the plantagenets were in power for much of the period we’re about to discuss: to what extent did medieval monarchs influence literature?
The monarchs of the time have some influence, perhaps not least because of the fact that England, during the latter part of the medieval period, is ruled mainly by French-speaking monarchs. which affects the multilingual nature of English culture at this time. the law courts are working in French, for example, and the church is working in Latin. literate people tend to be literate in many languages.
but then, as the period progresses, much of the literature does not come directly from the court. in the 13th and 14th centuries, there is a great increase in bureaucracy and an educated and clerical class emerges in the cities. much of the literature written in English comes from that kind of background, rather than from a courtly background.
Let’s talk about your first book, which is a fantasy novel called The Buried Giant. It’s by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. Why did you choose this book?
I love this book. is extraordinary is quite different from the other books I have chosen today. as you say, it has an element of fantasy; all the other books I have chosen are obviously more realistic. this is a book that is more mythical, more symbolic, and it is also set in a different time. the medieval period is ridiculously long, about 1,000 years. the other books I have chosen are set in the latter part of that period, after the Norman Conquest. This is set after the Romans have left the British Isles, at a time when there are British on the island and Saxon tribes have started arriving from Germanic lands.
is a book that I find powerful in many ways. it is essentially about memory and forgetting. it is about terrible atrocities that have happened between different groups of people and how they can manage to live together and how they can break the cycles of revenge and trauma. it’s very obviously relevant to all kinds of conflicts, to things that have happened in northern ireland, or israel and palestine, for example. It is a book that talks about experiences that cross time and space.
It also reminds us that the history of this country has always been a story of immigration, of many different kinds of people coming here. immigration is not a recent phenomenon of the twentieth century. We have always been a place that has a mixture of different people and that has been a great strength.
The book also makes us think about historical fiction itself, about why we want to remember our own past. why do we care it sort of thematizes the reading experience, if that makes sense, because it goes deep into this theme of memory.
ishiguro deliberately chooses to set this book in the middle ages, as he calls it, because “nobody knows what the hell was going on…it’s a blank period in British history.” is that a fair thing to say about the middle ages? Also, do you think we should be cautious about treating historical fiction as a history lesson, especially when we’re talking about such a distant period?
“The dark ages” is a bit of a controversial term because it implies not only that we know nothing about it, but also that the things that were happening were inherently dark. in fact, we know a few things about this period and what was going on: we have chronicles and poems, particularly as the period progresses. there has always been a reasonable bureaucracy in this country that has left records, so we have written artifacts. we also have archaeological evidence.
And yet, at the same time, I think ishiguro is right that we really don’t know much about what happened to the people who were here before the Angles and Saxons came. there is debate about the extent to which they were eliminated, or intermarried, or expelled. there’s certainly room there to be very imaginative about what happened. I really love the way he does it, the way he imagines how the British lived, the way he thinks about the relationship between the people who were here before and the people who came after.
It’s a mistake to read historical fiction as a history lesson and I think ishiguro doesn’t want us to do that. his book presents gawain as a character, for example, a mythical character. he also features a dragon, which symbolizes important themes in the book. the country is covered with a fog that makes people forget. he’s not trying to write a book that teaches us what the period was like. he says it very explicitly in the quote that he gave because he says, “this is a place where I felt like I could be imaginative.” he uses symbols, etc., to try to imagine us in time.
That’s very effective in helping us try to get into the mindset of people who are struggling with change, what has changed in their country, what they need to remember to move forward and how they deal with that memory could cause real problems. it makes you think about issues that have to do with truth and reconciliation, how different countries or systems have dealt with the trauma of the past. the kinds of things this book is doing are consciously not just about that particular moment in history.
Let’s move on to your second medieval historical fiction recommendation, which is Matthew Kneale’s Pilgrims. this book is described in the Guardian as “both the stranglehold of religious law over everyday life and thought and the endlessly inventive individual efforts to exploit and interpret it.” Can you tell us about the book, and can you also shed some light, for those of us living in this much more secular time, on what religion meant to the average man or woman on the street, or in the country? , in the middle Ages? times?
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This book is set in the 13th century. it’s called pilgrims, so we immediately think of Christianity and a Christian pilgrimage, which is in fact crucial to the structure of the book. but the religion that matters at least as much, and possibly more, in this book is Judaism. focuses on the persecution and expulsion of the Jewish community from England in the 13th century. I found that particularly powerful and important.
we were talking about something similar with ishiguro. Matthew Kneale also moves us away from the idea of a monolithic sense of medieval English or British culture. instead, it shows us all kinds of themes related to what we would consider colonialism, invasion, different types of immigrants, and takeovers. another part of the book is largely based on what is going on in wales. It’s about the English raid on Wales and the different atrocities and adaptations that are going on between England and Wales right now.
But the Jewish experience is really at the heart of this book, because at the end of the 13th century very important Jewish communities were expelled from England, not to return for hundreds of years. that is one of the most crucial aspects of this book.
“the medieval period is ridiculously long, about 1000 years”
In terms of religion in general, there are many different aspects. you have the doctrine, which most ordinary people would not have thought much of, or not in detail. you have popular piety, which could be more about holidays and pilgrimages. Pilgrimage was a very important part of medieval Christianity, small local journeys, not going all the way to Rome, which is what this book is about.
Today we know a lot of people who are atheists and agnostics: that wasn’t really an option in the medieval period. for European Christians at the time, being religious was not an option. religion was a constant part of life and the church was crucial. from almost the day you were born, you could either be baptized the day you were born or the day after, you were part of a parish, part of a community. people listened to the sound of church bells to structure their day. there were many monks and friars. there were periodic heresies, people challenging the church. there are also many moments where you see people have more individual relationships with god, trying to think of god for themselves. and, of course, at the end of the medieval period, we have the reformation. but before that, there were other movements that tried to reform the church in various ways. so the church is different at different times throughout this long period.
I was curious to read that the wife of one of the pilgrims wants pilgrim badges to sew on her hat to show off in church, and I have read (in other historical fiction) that sometimes leading members of a town or city I would go to church just because people would notice if they weren’t there. how widespread do you think it was that religious piety was a performance for others rather than a truly held belief? Were the people of the Middle Ages less religious than we tend to believe?
I think I’d say there was no choice between doing it as a performance or believing it. it is quite indisputable that everyone basically believed in their religion at this point. there was a general level of belief.
That’s not to say that people wanted to go to church all the time. many people pilgrimage to have fun. some of them went because they believed, because they wanted to get a cure for a disease. but other people went for a little change, a little vacation. there was a lot of criticism of the pilgrimage because people did it as a way to travel and do something different. so yes, people bought badges showing where they had been to show other people their home.
one of the other things i really liked about matthew kneale’s book pilgrims is that it has quite a few really interesting female characters. his characters are very varied and one thing he is very good at is the different voices. he did it in his earlier book, English Passengers, Too, he told it through many different voices. Here again we have different characters, different stories that feed off of it, which are somewhat based on the Canterbury Tales, although it’s a very different type of text. he is not only interested in the experiences of English Christian men, but also the experiences of different kinds of women and, as I have already mentioned, of Jewish and Welsh characters as well. he really gives us this texture of medieval English life as something that is diverse in many ways.
You are the author of Chaucer: A European Life (and the first female biographer of Chaucer, I might add). Ella in Ella’s book reveals Chaucer as a great European traveler and thinker. how common was it for people at that time to travel to europe like chaucer and the pilgrims do in kneale’s novel?
certainly the common Labrador at this time was not likely to travel much beyond his immediate vicinity, but people of slightly higher classes might well have the opportunity to travel. when you get into the educated classes, a lot of those people traveled. there was a lot of traffic between france or the so-called netherlands (what we would think of as the netherlands and belgium) and england at the time. Furthermore, people like Chaucer, who was not a very important person (although he was a diplomat and attended royal trade missions), would actually go further afield, to places like Italy and Spain. Kneale’s book is about a pilgrimage to Rome. There are records of lots and lots of English in Rome. there was an English workhouse there, where Englishmen came and stayed, and many interesting examples of Englishmen going there. Some English went as far as Jerusalem. they got ships to the holy land, either on pilgrimages or, at other times, to fight in crusades.
so there was a lot more travel going on right now than people usually imagine. People think that everyone stayed at home in medieval times and are often surprised when they hear that someone like chaucer traveled to italy and spain and crossed the channel very often, and that goods came to england from as far away as Indonesia.
let’s move on to your third book, the name of the rose by umberto eco. this is surely the best known of his book choices, having sold over 50 million copies worldwide. what do you think gives this book its enduring appeal and makes it one of the best-selling books ever written?
It’s very interesting that it went so well, isn’t it? It is set in Italy in a monastery. echo makes interesting demands on its reader. there is a lot of philosophy, theories of knowledge. I find it very, very encouraging that so many people have taken the time to read this complicated book. And I think the reason it’s been so popular is that it did something really cool in bringing together a very complex field, semiotics or sign theory, with detective fiction, because those two things are essentially the same thing. what do the clues tell you? when you have a sign, which could be a footprint, what does that footprint tell you? what can you deduce from it? what assumptions are you making that don’t quite work? It’s a real page turner. there are red herrings, different suspects, red herrings. you are very excited and interested to know what is going on. that stands in contrast to many discussions about how we can read signs, how we can think about knowledge, about different kinds of heresy, different modes of belief. he puts quite a complicated philosophical, religious and theological thought in his book, almost with a sleight of hand. he’s so smart.
The other thing that makes the book so engaging is the way it describes the setting. you become so rooted in the world of the monastery, the world of the library where this secret book is. it is immersive. you really feel that you are in those shadowy corridors, you want to enter these secret spaces and he stops you. you really are with the characters because their descriptions are so powerful.
right at the beginning of the book, there is a foreword about adso de melk and a book that resurfaced in the victorian era that umberto eco comes across. he was a bit confused about that: was it real or part of fiction?
is fiction, which makes us question the status of this text. It’s actually a very medieval thing to do, to give false authority, to pretend that you have this source from somewhere when it’s really from somewhere else. he is not trying to trick us. he is trying to establish an ambiguity around the text, to say, ‘does something really have an origin? Can we believe in signs? what do they really refer to? Is everything a copy, a version of something? can we really get to the thing itself?’ he is repeating the same point about sign theory over and over again.
Many of your book choices focus on religion. Do you think that medieval historical fiction can reflect the Middle Ages without involving religion in one way or another?
I think it would be very difficult not to involve it in some way, just because it’s part of the fabric of people’s lives. the name of the rose is set in a monastery. pilgrims is set on a pilgrimage. you can have books about the middle ages that aren’t so deeply framed in a religious context, but you can’t really ignore it. let’s say, the invention of fire, which we haven’t talked about yet: although religion is there in the background, it’s not really about religion. I guess there are still references to religious characters, so religion is involved, but not central.
His next book is The West Wind by Samantha Harvey. The Financial Times review of this book says: “Harvey creates such a rich and detailed inner life that at times the experience his book generates is less like reading a novel and more like time travel, something that I’ve just explained earlier in the work. off hilary’s mantelpiece. do you think the yearning to travel through time, to be able to go back and dive into a certain time and see how people lived, is what draws most people to historical fiction?
I think that’s probably what draws a lot of people to historical fiction. it’s not the only thing. From my book choices today, I think the buried giant is perhaps doing something a little different due to its less realistic nature. but I think most of the other books aim to produce a realistic, immersive experience where you can feel like you’re there. the west wind immerses us in depth in this small rural town. it is the only one of the books I chose that is set in a town. it’s an exceptionally powerful description of a place.
I’ve noticed that of the five novelists you’ve chosen, samantha harvey is the only author. Is the study of medieval history fairly male dominated?
It was something that worried me a bit when I was putting together my list. I think it would be quite interesting to know, in editorial terms, if there are fewer women writing historical fiction about this time. or if they’re writing it, but the editors don’t pick it up.
I was thinking what other medieval historical fiction I’ve read, written by women. there is a very famous book called katherine by anya seton, which is about katherine swynford, the mistress of john of gaunt. that book takes a lot of people into the world of historical fiction. It’s not one of my top five personal favorites, so I didn’t pick it for this interview, but it certainly is an influential book. but in general I think there is less medieval historical fiction written by women, which is a shame.
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the west wind is a really great book. I really wanted to put it on my list. what harvey does is very clever: he tells the story backwards. It starts with a certain day and then goes back in time through different days. was listed as a whodunnit, though I really don’t think that’s the best way to describe this book. it’s much more about atmosphere and a particular world and figuring out the details of different characters’ motivations and ideas rather than figuring out what happened. if you were reading it as a mystery, it might not be satisfying because it leaves some things quite open, in ways that I think are very brave for a writer to do. she writes absolutely beautiful. some of her sentences are so wonderfully crafted. she is a very skilled writer.
Several of the books you have chosen have been published relatively recently. Do you think there is something about the medieval world in particular that still captivates us in the 21st century?
I think people like to read historical fiction from many different eras. it would be interesting to know if there are particular times that are more popular than others. With Hilary Mantel, and also the Shardlake books, there has been a lot of good early modern historical fiction, a bit later than these books. I guess people are often fascinated by books that are set in a time quite far from our own time because it offers the experience of taking those imaginative leaps into a different world. I think that’s very attractive. as I said before, people also often read books set in different time periods to make connections to the present, which I think all of these books encourage us to do in many ways. there’s this interesting tension, where you’re in this different world, but you see a lot of things that are also familiar. that combination is very powerful.
let’s move on to the last book you recommend today, the invention of fire by bruce holsinger. depending on whether or not it includes a westerly wind, it’s second or third on your list. Is this a modern genre that contemporary authors are applying to a medieval setting or are there examples of mystery writing from the medieval period as well?
That’s a really interesting question. detective fiction as we know it really gets going in the 19th century and then develops a lot in the 20th century. I would be going to great lengths if I tried to fit earlier texts into that model, but there are medieval texts where there are mysteries. I think Gawain and the Green Knight, which I mentioned earlier, is a good example of a text where there is suspense and there are puzzles. I wouldn’t call it detective fiction, but it appeals to some of the same things detective fiction appeals to us.
The Invention of Fire is a very clever piece of crime fiction. Bruce Holsinger is an academic and he really knows this 14th century world. For someone like me, who also really knows this world, it is quite satisfying to read it because he understands it very well. the book really has its roots in the medieval period. there are many references to legal cases, that if you are a non-specialist reader, you would not know that they are based on real cases. for example, one part of the book talks about a transvestite prostitute in medieval london. her this was a real person, john rykener, known as eleanor rykener. A lot of people would think we don’t have records like that from the 14th century, but we do. Holsinger then adds some fictional elements. he does so many cool things like that in this book and it’s extremely effective.
Speaking of rooting fiction in real life, Geoffrey Chaucer appears in this novel, as he does in every other medieval historical fiction I’ve read. Chaucer’s shadow looming over the genre?
I don’t think it’s about the genre as a whole because the medieval period is so long. if you think about the books I’ve talked about today, they’re set in quite a few different time periods. furthermore, many writers are probably reluctant to put real people in their fiction because it can be a real risk. you get the holsinger books where chaucer is a real character, and he totally pulls it off; and in pilgrims there is a kind of riff on canterbury tales. but medieval historical fiction is a very varied genre; there’s a lot of different things going on, so I don’t think it’s particularly chaucerian in general.
The invention of fire, however, is set in Chaucer’s life. Chaucer is a character, and one of Chaucer’s contemporaries, John Gower, is the main detective figure. Many, many of the characters are real people whom Holsinger has fictionalized in various ways.
one of the things i really like is that holsinger upsets people’s expectations about what’s going on in this world. so the plot is partly based on the fact that guns are being invented right now. gower also has glasses, which are a novelty at the time (echo, in fact, also wears glasses in the rose’s name). I like it when medieval historical fiction authors remind us of scientific or technological advances. At first, we talked about the idea of the ‘dark ages’. a lot of people think it was like monty python and the holy grail: ‘how do you know it’s the king?’ ‘he ain’t got shit on him’. there’s this idea that people in the middle ages are going around cleaning pigs and ripping food off the ground and that’s it. in fact, this was a very sophisticated era where people traveled, thought, wrote, and there were all kinds of technological inventions.
Is historical accuracy important in historical fiction?
depends on what the author is trying to do. if the author is trying to be historically accurate, then it’s important that they get it right. In most of these books, the authors are trying to be historically accurate, and they really succeed. with ishiguro’s book, that’s not what he’s trying to do. he is trying to be imaginative and mythical. and I think that’s great too. so no, I don’t think books have to do that, but if they’re written in a realistic genre, it’s annoying if there are anachronisms, for example.
the black plague was a big problem and danger after it reached europe in the middle of the 13th century. How is the plague reflected in the writing of the time and in medieval historical fiction?
From the 14th century onwards, there are some very dramatic writings about the plague. There’s the Italian writer Bocaccio’s Decameron, which is written right after the plague hits, and it’s about people fleeing Florence, going to a country house and staying there and telling stories to stay away from the plague. so there are some texts like that, responding directly to the plague.
then we see it dripping into other texts. Chaucer mentions the plague. he has a story about people who, when they find out that the plague is killing everyone, they want to go and kill death. there is this symbolic figure of death that also represents the plague in all kinds of forms. in medieval art, a focus on decomposing bodies develops around this time. there is also a broader sense in which the plague, because it brought about so many social changes, affected the fabric of medieval life.
In terms of medieval historical fiction, it varies a lot, because it’s a very rich genre and a lot of different things happen. so it depends on precisely when the book is set. only two of my five books are set after the black death. I recently read another book, by james meek a calais, in ordinary time, which takes place in the period when the plague is approaching. if you’re writing a book that’s set after 1348-9, and particularly in the half century after that, it’s probably pretty hard not to talk about the plague and have it there because it caused such social upheaval.
Do you think there’s going to be a resurgence of reading medieval historical fiction set after 1348 as a result of what we’ve been through in the last 18 months?
There are obvious parallels to be drawn, but one thing to say is that the Black Death was much worse than what we have experienced. we are talking about perhaps a third, perhaps half of the population dying from a disease that indiscriminately affects people of all ages. one thing we have been spared in this pandemic is the sight of many children dying. Although there has been terrible individual trauma in this pandemic, the mass trauma was on a different scale in the fourteenth century. so I think the way people responded was also different in all sorts of ways.
I have not yet, in my life, experienced this kind of global catastrophe, something that is so collective. I suppose it happens with the great world wars but, fortunately, many of us who are alive today have not lived through that. that sense of “how do we respond collectively?” is a very interesting parallel.
“it is a mistake to read historical fiction as a history lesson”
Also, one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is how to rebuild. will we be able to rebuild better? because after the plague, many things got better for the people who survived. they were horribly traumatized, but wages went up for the poor because there were fewer people to do the jobs. things got better for women in many ways, they moved to the city, they got jobs, they delayed their marriages, they had more options. that everything happened organically and not because of government policy. but in our current situation, things right now are worse for women and worse for the poor than they were before covid.
So the question is, how much do people see parallels or how much do people want to try to learn from an experience that, while not the same, has comparisons? not only is the experience different, but the way we can respond is different because, with our relatively interventionist government, there are so many more ways that our responses as a society can be controlled and help restructure society. it will be interesting to see what happens. also, if people really want to think about this or if medieval plagues are just too depressing to think about.
last question, in the style of desert island records: which book would you choose if you could only read one again?
I really think these are all fantastic books that are not only good within the medieval historical fiction genre, but good in all sorts of ways. I think even people who don’t necessarily love that genre might enjoy all of these books.
I think if I had to choose one, it would be Kazuo Ishiguro’s Buried Giant. the reason why I would choose him is, in a way, precisely because of the mythical qualities of him. there’s something about it that’s meant to be timeless in all sorts of ways, in the themes of memory and reconciliation that we talked about earlier. there’s a lot about that book that I haven’t really understood or haven’t understood yet because there’s a lot going on in the images it uses and the characters it reinvigorates. so I feel like I have more work to do with that book.
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