3/21/2023 0 Comments Historic medieval battlefields![]() “In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. ![]() When the Danish Vikings, led by Swein Forkbeard and his son, Cnut, cause a maelstrom of chaos, Emma, as Queen, must take control if the Kingdom-and her crown-are to be salvaged.” Not only is Æthelred a failure as King, but his young bride, Emma of Normandy, soon discovers he is even worse as a husband. In 1383, Guest is called to investigate an unfaithful merchant’s wife, leading to a murder, and now everything seems to turn on a religious relic reported to have wiped the brow of Christ-that is now missing. This is something we seriously need to talk about, folks.Ĭrispin Guest, a disgraced knight with no trade to support him and no family willing to acknowledge him, has turned to his wits to scrape a living together on the mean streets of London. There is kind of a dearth of novels written by authors of color set in this time period. I used these dates for all the novels listed here, though I did have to stretch it some when searching for medieval novels written by authors of color. But for this post, I’m using these parameters. I know there are many, many different ways to define the era depending on what you look at, where, and so forth. Just for the purposes of this list, and because I’m an Anglophile, I chose to define the Middle Ages in England from 510 CE (the end of the Roman Empire in Britain) to Aug(the Battle of Bosworth Field during the Wars of the Roses, the start of the Tudor dynasty I’ll round it up to an even 1500 CE). I fucking love his books, y’all, but you won’t find him listed here because I want to give other, less well known authors a chance to play in the sandbox. Also, there are a shit ton of authors of medieval fiction who aren’t, like, Bernard Cornwell. There was a whole globe that existed at the same time, experiencing its own stories and pain and joy, not all of which had a thing to do with knights and damsels and the rest. It is also mainly Western ethnocentrism that makes us automatically assume the knights and castles in the first place. But the Middle Ages are so much richer and more complex than that. The Middle Ages are awesome.īut first, a question: When you think about the Middle Ages, what do you picture? Knights in shining armor? Castles and kings and queens and serfs? I’d be lying if I said that isn’t the very first thing I think of, myself. But the next best thing to me is to read lots and lots of medieval historical fiction. ![]() So we’ll try to avoid medieval Star Trek historical fiction. Historical fiction that is somehow also Star Trek would be the best, but that would involve time travel and might fuck with the space/time continuum and then you’d get the Department of Temporal Investigation involved, and those guys are cranky. ![]() JONES gained his PhD from Cardiff University.So, my favorite thing to read is probably medieval historical fiction. It also considers the physiological and psychological effect of wearing armour, both on the wearer and those facing him in combat, arguing that the need for display in battle was deeper than any medieval cultural construct and was based in the fundamental biological drives of threat and warning. It maintains that heraldry and livery served not only to advertise a warrior's family and social ties, but also announced his presence on the battlefield and right to wage war. Drawing on a broad range of source material and using innovative historical approaches, this book completely re-evaluates the way that such men and their weapons were viewed, showing that martial display was a vital part of the way in which war was waged in the middle ages. Yet too often the significance of such display has been ignored or dismissed as the empty preening of a militaristic social elite. The fully-armed knight, bedecked in his vivid heraldic colours, mounted on his great charger, riding out beneath his brightly-painted banner, is a stock image of war and the warrior in the middle ages. A refreshingly different approach to the world of the medieval combatant and his place within that "host of many colours" that was a medieval army, it adds a new dimension to our understanding of medieval warfare.' Dr ANDREW AYTON, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Hull The medieval battlefield was a place of spectacle and splendour. ![]() Particularly notable is the author's subtle exploration of the function of armour: not only its practical role, but as a form of display. The reader is struck by its originality, and by its sophisticated and critical interpretative engagement with historical and literary sources. A penetrating investigation of medieval martial display. ![]()
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