Fans pick 100 books like Serious Entertainments

Chibnall was a fantastic writer, and she was the authority on Orderic Vitalis, one of the most important historians of the early twelfth century.

I love this book because Chibnall uses Orderic’s history to explore the world he wrote in, a world in which monks mingled with knights and kings, and she examines the rapid social changes taking place in the early twelfth century. This book is at once an examination of Orderic’s work, a biography of a famous chronicler, and an exploration of Anglo-Norman society in the early twelfth century.

It’s a fantastic place to start if you’ve never read anything on Anglo-Norman England, and it’s a great way to deepen your knowledge if you’re already familiar with this corner of the past.

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.

Heath Dillard uses a very special source, the Castilian municipal codes known as the fueros, to tell us about the lives of ordinary women in Castile in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These municipal codes were given to settler communities during the Christian conquest of southern Iberia, and so reveal the value and roles of all community members: married women and girls, Muslim and Jewish women, widows, and outsiders like prostitutes, concubines, and sorceresses. This book was published just before I began my graduate study and became my constant companion once I settled on Iberian women’s history.

Sophie Page is an expert on magic in medieval Europe and in this book she was given free rein to choose fascinating images from the British Library’s collection of medieval manuscripts. 

As somebody who studies medieval manuscripts myself, and loves them as works of art as well as for the historical records they contain, this book is irresistible. 

It’s a little like being given a guided tour through an exhibition on the subject, by someone who really knows how alchemy and astrology – or even necromancy and sorcery – were performed. 

If you want to know how to summon a demon or uncover hidden treasure, you’ll find places to start in this book! 

The prose of this classic novel can be a little sticky to our 21st-century sensibilities, but in all other ways, Scott is a modern writer, addressing the issues of anti-Semitism and the corruption of the Church at a time when those things weren’t cool. Plus, we have another awesome warrior-hero in Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe and jousting to boot. Who doesn’t love a good tourney? My daughter and I hit the Renaissance Faires every year just to see men pretend to stab each other from horseback with long sticks. The plotting of this book is simply perfection—they just don’t write them like this anymore. It’s a hero’s tale with a big dollop of romance—my favorite.

I am including Turkey as located in Asia Minor. As a frequent visitor to Istanbul in the past, I watched with fascination the whirling Dervishes. I know it is corrupted by tourism. The dance reflects the legacy of Rumi the 13 century Persian poet. The beauty of Rumi’s philosophy and the world of Sufism comes through as does the grace of the body.

In 1307 the pope charged three commissioners to decide whether the survival of a Welshman hanged for murder some years previously had or had not been a miracle. Bartlett’s masterly and compulsively readable microhistory draws from their report a brilliantly illuminated miniature (less than 200 pages) of an entire world, from the family life of the highest nobility to the grisly details of hanging and what they symbolised, and of the struggle for power in many forms, from the marches of Wales to central Italy.

This deep dive into the people that medieval Europe sidelined is absolutely indispensable for understanding society as a whole.

I get frustrated because when people think about the medieval period, they assume that it was a time when everyone just quietly played along with whatever the Church said, and everyone was a straight white Christian keeping quiet. This book goes and finds the people that the medieval period wanted hidden and brings them to light.

I also like that it helps us to consider that we still partake in the same othering behaviours now. It’s full of fascinating primary sources, and I find it totally absorbing.