100 books like The Myth of Nations

If you want to understand why everything you think you know about the Middle Ages is (probably) wrong, go pick up a copy of The Devil’s Historians, which chronicles how everyone from the Brothers Grimm and George R. R. Martin to ISIS and Donald Trump have invented a medieval past that reflects their own ideological preoccupations rather than historical reality. With chapters on nationalism, gender, race, and religion, Amy Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant’s book sharply contrasts the one-dimensional Middle Ages found in pop culture and political propaganda with the more complicated, even contradictory, medieval world revealed by contemporary scholarship. 

When I first read this book as a graduate student, Kathleen Davis’s ability to draw unexpected connections—between political power and temporality, feudalism and imperialism, medieval and postcolonial studies—melted my brain (in a good way). It’s not easy to do justice to her complex argument in a few sentences, but basically she shows how early modern jurists deliberately relegated certain ideas (servility, absolutism, religiosity) both to Europe’s medieval past and the present of the nonwestern world in order to justify imperial expansion, colonial domination, and even chattel slavery. A dense critique of both medieval historiography and postcolonial theory, Periodization and Sovereignty isn’t a breezy read but it’s well worth the effort.     

This book is very much a product of the George W. Bush years, when American adventurism in the Middle East, domestic surveillance programs, and the rise of Islamophobia seemed like the biggest problems facing America. While this makes the book feel a little dated in places, it remains one of the most fascinating case studies of the distortion of the Middle Ages for political purposes. Holsinger meticulously details how neoconservative thinkers repeatedly described Al Qaeda and the Taliban as “medieval” and “feudal” (even though their extremist ideology was a distinctly modern phenomenon) as well as how the neomedieval school of political theory was used to intellectually justify torture, extradition, and the War on Terror more broadly.  

I often use selections from Whose Middle Ages? in my medieval history courses, but this collection of short, insightful essays is a great resource for anyone interested in understanding what leading scholars think about invocations of the medieval past in contemporary culture. Touching on a wide range of topics, from Viking imagery in heavy metal music and Celtic crosses on white supremacist websites to controversies over Sharia law and papal heresy in the popular press, this volume serves as an ideal introduction to the use and abuse of the Middle Ages.   

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.

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.

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.

Eileen Power was a pioneer in Women’s History and this was the first book I read when I went back to university. It’s an inspiring collection of essays on medieval ideas of women, working women in town and country, education, and nunneries. If you’re planning to write a book about women in the Middle Ages, start your research here.

Power refers to many diverse contemporary texts such as The Goodman of Paris and works by Chaucer and Christine de Pisan, which enabled me (or, which will enable you) to portray authentic detail in my own book. The essay on nunneries, which I drew on for my novel, is a summary of her seminal work on medieval English nunneries. There are also forty-two well-chosen illustrations that complement the text.

Dani​​èle Cybulskie, AKA “the 5 Minute Medievalist,” is a Medieval Influencer with books, a podcast, and blogs, all offering the world quickly digestible knowledge of this millennium in history. In her book, Life in Medieval Europe, Fact and Fiction, she takes us through a fun game of True or False. The grouping of the Middle Ages spans a confusingly long time, from around the late 400s to the late 1400s. Various traditions can be fit into those thousand years, one would think that by sheer probability most of our Medieval stereotypes would fit into one of those centuries. Interestingly enough, a good amount of what films set in Medieval Times is hilariously incorrect. Pick it up and start your guessing.

Contrary to our common assumptions, women in the Middle Ages were not simply muted or repressed. Much depended on the social, economic, religious, and cultural circumstances. Blamires brings to light a wealth of documents that confirm the much more complex conditions for women in the pre-modern age, many of whom received considerable respect if not admiration.