100 books like The Dark Queens

Guy Halsall has a comprehensive knowledge of the history and archaeology of the early Middle Ages as well as a firm control of all of the centuries of debates and controversies about this period.

He cuts through a lot of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations of this crucial period of history. Often opinionated but never dull, he provides the best general narrative guide to date in English on the transformation of Western Europe.

Rather than following a chronological order or a political narrative, Wickham, the leading British historian of the Early Middle Ages, takes a thematic and regional approach to the transformation of the Roman world across the Mediterranean.

His dense comparisons of the economic and social structures of specific regions, both some like Denmark and Ireland that were never part of the Roman Empire, as well as core regions around the entire Mediterranean, highlight the diversity already existing within the Roman Empire and the differing fates of these regions as they emerged from its disappearance.

For two centuries, Europeans have tried to find in the peoples of the early Middle Ages the ethnic origins of their own nations.

The Franks were the most successful of these peoples, appearing first as a minor group along the lower Rhine but ultimately, under Charlemagne, creating a vast empire that encompassed much of what had been the Roman Empire in the West.

However, in this extraordinary book Reimitz shows how protean Frankish ethnic identity was across this period.

Relying on close readings of historical texts and their manuscript transmission, constantly amended, re-edited, and transformed, he shows how Frankish identity was constantly disputed and renegotiated, ultimately moving far from classical notions of ethnicity to an imperial identity and then to a notion of the Franks as one of a number of Christian peoples chosen by God to rule the West.

Everyone has heard of the Franks, but few have any knowledge of the Avars, mounted warriors originating in Steppes of eastern Asia who created a vast empire between the Frankish and Byzantine worlds that endured longer than either the better-known Hunnic or Mongol empires.

Pohl’s book takes us out of the usual world of Germanic barbarian kingdoms and into a radically different kind of post-Roman world.

Drawing on Latin and Greek sources as well as vast amounts of archaeological research conducted over the past century, he introduces us to this multi-ethnic empire that stretched from the Vienna woods to Belgrade and which formed the crucible out of which emerged the South Slavic peoples and nations whose names persist until today.

The Merovingians – the Frankish royal family – were the closest, and most powerful, neighbour to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages. They influenced trade, culture, and religion of early England, at times as partners, at times as hegemons of the island. At the same time, they built the foundation on which the Carolingians built their empire, the New Rome that would control the great swathes of Europe for centuries to come. Ian Wood’s excellent book is possibly the most detailed account of their rule ever written. 

From her arrival as a fourteen-year-old bride to her death as queen mother fifty-five years later, Catherine de Medici was praised as a devoted wife and mother and able ruler but also condemned as a foreigner, a poisoner, and murderer of Protestants. This rare collection of primary sources translated into English allows readers to become familiar with the sources of such positive and negative assessments of this controversial queen. The letters included here, selected from her many volumes of correspondence, reveal her concerns as a mother and as a political figure.

Excerpts from Venetian ambassadors' gossipy reports bring to light principal figures of the French court--their character, their motives, and political interests. Other sources in the collection extravagantly praise the character and actions of the queen. The several polemical sources included in the collection offer a sharp contrast. The vehement charges leveled against Catherine allow readers to recognize and understand… show more.

Catherine de Medici has been reviled as an evil and power-hungry queen mother of three French kings, and as the architect of the St. Bartholomew’s Day’s Massacre—the most infamous episode in the decades-long French Wars of Religion. She was even slanderously accused of murdering another queen by sending her poisoned gloves, in keeping with her “Machiavellian” Italian extraction. Leonie Frieda’s biography corrects the “Black Legend” of Catherine and provides a vivid portrait of the complex woman who wielded unprecedented power as queen regent in France, where Salic Law prohibited women from exercising sovereignty in their own right, as did her contemporary Elizabeth I. She shows that from her husband Henri II’s unexpected death in a gruesome accident through the reigns of her sons, who unfortunately did not inherit their mother’s ability, Catherine displayed “intelligence, courage, and an indefatigable spirit” in exercising political power and acting as an exceptional patron of… show more.

This is a must read for visitors to Versailles Palace.

I enjoyed this book because Ms. Fraser has a wonderful writing style and she weaves the story of Marie Antoinette from start to finish and even though we know the outcome, it is hard to put down this book. The author’s research is quite detailed and written with little-known facts including Count Axel von Fersen’s role with the queen and her family, attempts to save the royal family, and the king’s failure to consummate the marriage.

You start out feeling sorry for the fourteen-year-old girl who is a pawn in a European power chess game. Soon you are appalled at the way the young queen conducts herself. By the time she reaches middle age, you begin to see her attributes as a wife and mother.

Early modern Europe is a ‘hot spot’ for queenship studies and there are countless individual biographies, works on groups of royal women and collections on key themes which I could have recommended. I’ve chosen this work as, like Earenfight, it is a great place to begin exploring what it meant to be a queen in this period. Unlike Earenfight, this book is divided up by key themes instead of working chronologically, exploring various facets such as royal weddings and ceremonial, motherhood and political agency. Kosior also brings together plenty of European examples to illustrate these themes and a distinctive feature is that she includes Polish royal women who are often missing in studies of queenship, which gives this book a unique and interesting angle.

Juliet Gray brought Marie Antoinette to life in this book. We got to understand her from such a young girl who had so much pressure put on her. We see her as kind and childlike but we also see how Marie does mature into a woman who strives to have a loving marriage with her husband while they rule France.