New Medieval Fiction

Lady of the English / by Elizabeth Chadwick

There are many in the English royal court who’d like to prevent Matilda, daughter of Henry I, to succeed her father on the throne. Some within her own family even, like her widowed mother’s second husband, fight to preserve not only a preferred line of succession but to keep a woman from being the monarch. But Matilda’s adversaries don’t know the strength she possesses to remain steadfast in her duty and lead her country. (FIC CHADWICK)

The Burning Land: A Novel / by Bernard Cornwell

In ninth-century Britain, the once youthful King Alfred the Great has grown old and feeble and is ill-equipped to defend his kingdom against the marauding Viking raiders. Having to hire outside help, he secures the aid of vicious mercenary Uhtred the Saxon, a mercenary who defends the honor of the king amid perilous circumstances and treacherous schemes. (FIC CORNWELL)

Holy Warrior: A Novel of Robin Hood / by Angus Donald

In 1190 A.D., Richard the Lionheart has assumed his rightful position as King of England. His first order of business is to take up arms in a crusade to reclaim the Holy Land with his most trusted nobility in-tow. Among them is a fearless knight named Robin of Locksley, as good a fighter and as battle tested a warrior as Richard possesses. (FIC DONALD)

The King’s Witch / by Cecelia Holland

Under the grueling circumstances that encompass the Third Crusade, death by disease and pestilence is as common as being killed in battle. Fortunately for King Richard, he has a secret ally in a mysterious woman claiming to have been sent by his mother. The woman, Edythe, remains under suspicion until her extraordinary healing gifts come into play at just the right time. (FIC HOLLAND)

Lionheart / by Sharon Kay Penman

One of only two surviving sons of Henry of Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard is no sooner on the throne following his father’s death than he’s engulfed in a crusade to reclaim the Holy Land. Marching toward a pivotal war against the formidable Saladin and the Muslim hoard, Richard must defer his duties as King to his younger brother John. (FIC PENMAN)

Nightshade: A Hugh Corbett Mystery / by P.C. Doherty

Hugh Corbett, in service of his majesty King Edward I, is sent to investigate the case of an renegade local lord who’s refused to relinquish a priceless relic he found during the Crusades. Furthermore, the nobleman in question has accused several Knights Templar of heresy and is suspected of murdering a few. (MYS DOHERTY)

Chalice of Blood: A Mystery of Ancient Ireland / by Peter Tremayne

In 670 A.D., the murder of an esteemed monk and scholar has occurred at the Abbey of Lios Mor in Ireland. The killer has absconded with an important manuscript containing some cryptic writings. With haste Abbot Iarnla sends for savvy sleuth Sister Fidelma and her companion Brother Eadulf to investigate the matter. (MYS TREMAYNE)

The Enterprise of Death / by Jesse Bullington

Awa is a Moorish slave accompanying her mistress on a sea voyage when their ship is marooned on an island off the coast of Spain. When her party’s captured by a necromancer, an ancient sorcerer with the power to raise the dead, Awa comes under his tutelage, ultimately learning his black arts only to have him place a curse on her when she attempts to escape. (SF BULLINGT)

Time Travel Romance

Charming the Highlander / by Janet Chapman
When a plane crashes in the snowy Maine wilderness, scientist Grace Sutter is the only one to survive. Or so she thinks. Amidst the wreckage she soon locates a man named Greylen MacKeage who’s medieval Scottish getup proves to be no joke. Greylen is an actual highland warrior who’s traveled through time seeking the woman he’s destined to love. This is the first book in Chapman’s “Highlander” series. (FIC CHAPMAN)

Outlander / by Diana Gabaldon
In 1945, Claire Randall is on a second honeymoon with her husband in the Scottish highlands when she happens to step inside an ancient stone circle and is transported back to the year 1743. There she confronts a world at war with the Scots bravely fighting the English to preserve their native homeland and heritage. Immediately swept up in the drama, Claire is harbored by the Fraser clan and eventually forced into marrying a highland warrior. This is the first book in Gabaldon’s (soon to be eight-part) “Outlander” series. (FIC GABALDON)

Dark Seduction / by Brenda Joyce
Malcolm of Dunroch is a master of the dark arts in medieval Scotland, a place where peace is hard to come by and fair maidens whom he can seduce—to his and their ultimate doom—are never far away. Knowing the destructive force his powers can potentially have, Malcolm tries to deny himself all forms of pleasure until a beautiful young girl, Claire Camden, who’s had her own problems with escaping conflict, is sent back from the future. This is Joyce’s first book in her “The Masters of Time” series. (FIC JOYCE)



One Enchanted Evening / by Lynn Kurland
Costume designer Pippa Alexander has been asked to provide her expertise at a party being held at an old English castle. Ultimately, she and all of the other guests, including her sisters, arrive at the party donned in Faerie regalia only to suddenly be plunged back in time to the 13th century. There a man named Montgomery de Piaget, the official Lord of the original castle, thinks the girls really are fairies and it’s up to Pippa to tell him otherwise. This book is a part of Kurland’s “Di Piaget” time travel series. (FIC KURLAND)

Touch of Enchantment / by Teresa Medeiros
Tabitha Lennox has always considered herself more rational than most. But when she looks closer at a strange amulet which her mother bequeathed to her, one she's been told holds special powers, she’s suddenly hurled back in time to the fourteenth century and directly into the path of a chain-mailed knight on horseback. But Tabitha's not the only one taken by surprise. It’s also the last thing the medieval warrior, Sir Colin of Ravenshaw, expected as a knight returning home from the crusades. (FIC MEDEIROS)

The Time Traveler’s Wife / by Audrey Niffenegger
Clare is desperately in love with her husband Henry De Tamble and is sure that they are destined to be together forever. The only problem is that Clare never knows when Henry will be ‘present’ because Henry is a time traveler, stricken with a strange genetic disorder causing him to live his entire life skipping back and forth through time. (FIC NIFFENEGGER)

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict: A Novel / by Laurie Viera Rigler
Courtney Stone is still grieving over her broken wedding engagement when she suddenly wakes up in a different place in a different time—and in another woman’s body. Transplanted back to the nineteenth century in a regency England she finds familiar due to her love of Jane Austen, Courtney plays along with the setup, acting as the woman she’s supposed to be and sorting out the love life she’s intended to have. (FIC RIGLER)

Knight Errant / by Rodrigo Garcia y Robertson
American Robyn Stafford takes a trip from California to England to surprise her boyfriend on his birthday only to discover that he’s actually married with a family. To recoup from the discovery, she takes a few days to sightsee some of the medieval ruins in the area when she suddenly encounters a knight on horseback who identifies himself as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of March. He thinks it’s the year 1459 and at first believes Robyn to be a boy because she wears pants. But after this is sorted out, Plantagenet asks Robyn if she’d like to ride along, an offer she graciously agrees to. This is the first of Robertson’s “Knight Errant” series. (SF ROBERTSON)


Time After Time / by Constance O’Day-Flannery
Recently widowed Kelly Brennan is still going through the grief process when she reluctantly agrees to be a bridesmaid in a friend’s wedding. The Southern-styled ceremony, held outdoors near an old plantation home, gets even weirder for Kelly when she’s sucked into a mysterious oak tree and transported back to antebellum New Orleans. Shocked by her surroundings, she agrees to be aided by a young girl whose father, it turns out, is also widowed and bears a strange resemblance to Kelly’s late husband. (FIC ODAYFLAN)

1215: The Year of the Magna Carta / by Danny Danziger & John Gillingham

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In 1215 at Runnymede, a small section of forest west of London, the English nobles and King John (of Robin Hood fame) met peaceably to discuss the king's arbitrary rule of law opposing the canonical law of the land. Over-taxation and costly wars had made the King unpopular with the council of lords and barons who believed that the monarch already wielded too much power. Thus the nobles, rather than raise arms against the monarchy, an event which many felt would only lead to Civil War and increased French influence in the region, resorted to an ultimatum. King John would sign a treaty pledging to limit his sovereign priveleges and relegate authority to the barons or commit to an all out, self-destrucive war. Besides laying down restrictions to the king's authority, the 63 clauses of the charter introduced legislation regarding the right to a fair trial, right to own property and other stipulations involving personal freedoms and liberties. The document, then known as the 'Articles of the Barons' or simply the 'Runnymede Charter', became known as the Magna Carta.
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Though of minimal significance for its time--it was repealed and reconfirmed at intervals over the next few years--the Magna Carta would resonate through the ages as perhaps the most important individual document on civil liberties, including inalienable human rights and 'self-evident truths', that the world has ever seen. More importantly, it was the document which the American Founding Fathers perpetually referenced when drafting the Declaration of Independence and, later on, the U.S. Constitution. Danziger, already well-known for his concise histories which pinpoint a precise year, extrapolates here on the people and lifestyles during the early part of the 13th century in a more conventional historical chronicle rather than go into detail about the political ramifications of the charter itself. The actual Magna Carta isn't really got into until the final chapters with the signing of the document only found in the book's last pages. It's still a fun, informative and entertaining bit of history. (942.033 DANZIGER)

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millenium, An Englishman's World / by Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger

Common notions of early medieval life evoke images of people wearing robes and tights, daily toiling in the mud-caked fields, laboring behind horse-drawn carts, walking through villages and towns where buildings are constructed entirely of wood and thatched roofing. Or one might think of knights on horseback, kings and castles, ladies in waiting and customary ceremonies depicted in any number of mediums. In fact, though many of these allusions maintain some level of accuracy, daily life in England and most other parts of western Europe was far from the conventionally accepted model previously described. Though life was no picnic with sparsely-insulated housing, unpleasant hygiene, high mortality rates and the constant threat of invasion, "life was not all that bad" say authors Lacey and Danziger who base much of their information on one of the few documented transcripts of the period--the Julius Work Calendar circa the year 1000, as close a thing the first millenium Britons had to an almanac.
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England in the year 1000 was still largely Anglo-Saxon. The Norman Conquest would not take place until 1066 when the entire social and demographical landscape would change permanently as the nobility and landowning entities would be transplanted by French-speaking invaders from nearby Brittany (France). Without a unified nation and with only a barely established monarch, Aethelred the Unready, ruling the larger part of the southwest portion (Wessex) of the country, the land and people were vulnerable but composed. There was peace and even prosperity during this period, larger landowners (still separate from the feudal system which would arrive with the Normans) orchestrating the cultivation of the land through peasants and lower level farmers. During hard times, towns and villages banded together and forged their way through it, while in better times the societies even thrived with frequent agricultural surpluses appearing on record despite notable accounts of scarcity and famine.
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One thing both the authors and most people today would agree on is the correlation of illiteracy and superstition. The high concentration of pietist individuals, along with prevalent mystical interpretations of nature and reports of fantastical beings or supernatural occurrences could be directly attributed (in most cases) to a thoroughly uneducated populace. Only about 1 percent of the country could read, write or dictate early English, and few beyond that were able to read or write Latin. Consequently, records from the era are sparse, and that's being generous. Marginally few detailed transcripts, or personal accounts outside what the local Bishops and monasteries preserved have survived through the years. Though a decade removed from its initial publication, The Year 1000 is, more than anything, an entertaining read, more than worth it for curious history buffs or readers with inquiring minds.

Company of Liars / by Karen Maitland

By 1348, the strain of Bubonic plague known as The Black Death had ravaged much of western Europe, the pestilence wiping out entire towns and villages on its way to eliminating fully one-third of the continent's population. Still untouched, residents of the British Isles clung to the faint hope that the plague would die out before reaching them, that by some divine providence they would escape the clutches of the most deadly scourge ever to lay waste to Christendom. But it was not to be. Even the decreased the volume of ships passing across the channel--mercantile trade having been severely limited in the years 1346 & 1347--between England's coastal ports and western Europe could not keep the country quarantined. By midsummer, swarms of infected persons were reported in the south of the country, the outbreak striking first in coastal areas near Weymouth, Gloucester, Bristol and Dorset and steadily migrating north and east into the heart of the countryside and soon the major cities of London, Leicester, York and Newcastle.

Suspecting the imminent outbreak, Camelot, a one-eyed old peddler of religious trinkets promptly decides to journey north away from his present station near Weymouth, hoping to outrun the plague before it firmly establishes itself on the isle. He and a ragtag assortment of other travelers--two minstrels, a storyteller, Zophiel the magician, a newlywed couple expecting their first child and a strikingly astute young girl, Narigorm, who can see into the future--slowly but surely make their way along the rough-trodden (and frequently muddied) path, through dense forests and cragged rocks, from village to village, town to town, often sleeping for days out in the cold before finding a bed. Theirs is a peculiar lot, full of odd, seemingly misplaced characters all wielding some special talent (or curse) and yet all are hiding something particular from the rest. Each has a secret just as each is conscious that death is never far behind, a mysterious, perhaps sinister confidentiality of which, for purposes unknown, must remain hidden.

This is an exquisite book and a shining example of historical fiction at its best. A story conceived by a masterful storyteller and penned by a superior writer, it flows brilliantly off the page, immersing the reader into the mien of the oft-depicted, but seldom realized medieval period when life was truly delicate. Reminiscent of Canterbury Tales while reverberating the characteristics of Tolkien or Marion Zimmer Bradley, Maitland genuinely achieves a fascinating first novel, a "plague novel" in the truest sense. (FIC MAITLAND)