Love In a Dark Wood Wandering? Readers share 100 books like In a Dark Wood Wandering...

Who knew that an account of a disappeared medieval world could be so gripping?

I’ve always regarded history as a literary and intellectual exercise, and Pulitzer-winning Barbara Tuchman has been my model ever since I picked up this absorbing history of a Europe riven by war, climate catastrophes, plague, and religious schisms.

Academic historians might denigrate Tuchman’s approach, but through pen-portraits and narrative momentum, Tuchman immersed me in a world that had subtle echoes of today.

This is the book to which I turn for all the details of Christine’s life. Willard shows that Christine, who lived from 1364-1430, was an immensely courageous woman who, against all odds in an age that disparaged the female sex, succeeded in making her living as a writer and gained so much respect among the nobility that she was able to comment with impunity on the major political events of her time.

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. 

Jager’s book is an indispensable source for facts about a famous murder that is the inspiration for one of my future Christine de Pizan novels. In 1407 Duke Jean of Burgundy, known as Jean the Fearless, ordered his henchmen to murder Duke Louis of Orléans, who was his cousin as well as the king’s brother. The provost of France was able to identify Jean as the instigator of the crime, and in my novel Jean takes his revenge by having one of his minions kidnap the provost’s daughter.

In the US, when we think about Christianity, we tend not to think much about saints and when we do, they are at best a sort of role model for piety, an antiquated cast of characters in the history of religion. But to early Christians, saints were powerful patrons. The earliest saints were the martyrs put to death by the pagan Roman state: thrown to the lions, massacred by gladiators, executed at the orders of Roman officials. These saints’ bodies and tombs became objects of veneration, purported to produce miracles. In the middle ages, as Christianity became the dominant force in Europe, everyone wanted to benefit from the proximity to these holy men and women. But if you lived in Northern Europe, you didn’t have access to the hundreds of saintly bodies buried in Spain, Italy, or Provence. What to do? Buy them or steal them! In this fascinating book,… show more.

Because my character Janna seeks refuge in an abbey while on her quest to find her father, I found it interesting and instructive to read about Abbess Helewise and life at Hawkenlye Abbey in more detail. I also enjoyed trying to second-guess whodunit as the Abbess and her helpmate, lord of the manor, Josse d’Acquin, solve the many crimes that come their way. And I was intrigued by the supernatural elements introduced by Alys Clare, with the abbey being situated so close to the ancient forest in the Great Weald, and how the two worlds often intertwine. 

I love this because Ken Follett is a master storyteller. It spans the Elizabethan era and captures the intrigue, international conspiracies, horrors of religious persecution, and the opening up of the world through trade and exploration.

Yet again, Follett takes you to the town of Kingsbridge and into the world and lives of the characters who live there. You are engaged and invested in them and even feel you know them. I loved the reality, the emotion, the highs of joy, and the lows of sadness. 

I found this study of gentry culture, with essays on political influence, education, social networks, religious activities, and the display of ‘gentility,’ a useful guide to a social class that was evolving in the period of my research. It also helped me understand why Dame Alice was so successful in running her own household and did not remarry – she was secure in the knowledge that she could exercise power and influence as an independent woman. Many of the other books I read about medieval households focused on the aristocracy, their sumptuous lifestyles, lavish entertainment, ostentatious festivities, opulent recreations, and itinerant households, but were not relevant to the subject of my book about a sedentary fifty-year-old widowed gentlewoman running her estates and giving hospitality to her neighbours and agricultural workers.

If I hear someone who has never studied medieval history once in their life refer to the “Dark Ages” as a time when “Science” was banned by the Church one more time, I will actually die, and this book does an amazing job of explaining how ignorant those old myths are.

Falk laces this book with delicious tidbits of the weird and wonderful of medieval scientific (or, to be nerdy, what we would call natural philosophical) ideas. Goat fat enemas? Sure. But there is also the transcription of Persian manuscripts, the invention of mechanical clocks and eyeglasses, and the creation of the University.

The book brings to life a vibrant, interconnected intellectual world and is a testament to how clever medieval people were in circumstances that were much more difficult than our own.

In this book, Chris Wickham surveys the passage from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in a lucid and engaging manner that challenges past scholarship on the matter. Unlike Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) and his followers, who argue that the fall of Rome initiated a new age–the Middle Ages–marked by the triumph of barbarism and religion, Wickhams stresses the transformations that swept Europe and the Mediterranean World from the fifth century onwards and consequently re-shaped it.

I particularly like Wickham’s account because it gives Gibbon’s thesis on the decline and fall of the Roman empire the proper burial it deserves. Wickham is extremely revealing how profoundly effective and dynamic were the shifts that marked the transformation of the Roman world–shifts that laid the foundations for modern society and civilization.