100 books like Tormented Voices

This is a work of fiction, but one so well imagined that I felt like I was actually in the medieval English countryside.

It’s the story of Will, a peasant heading to France to join the English army as an archer in the Hundred Years War during the summer of 1348, when the Black Death swept across northern Europe. Along with him travel a gentlewoman avoiding an unwelcome marriage, some soldiers harboring a sordid secret, and a cleric with troubles of his own.

Following behind is Will’s gender-fluid childhood friend and would-be lover, Hab-Madlen, who is endangered as much by people’s prejudices as by the disease stalking the population. Will they escape England and their pasts before the plague catches up with them?

I really appreciate this book because it explains how medieval people thought about the grossly unequal society they inhabited and how they tried to reconcile its obvious injustices with Christian morality.

I particularly like how it shows peasants’ criticism of the medieval idea of society as being composed of Three Orders: those who fought (the knights and nobles), those who prayed (monks and priests), and those who worked (peasants).

The Three Orders idea supposedly justified the way that nobles and clerics profited from peasant labor, but peasants sometimes threw it back at them, arguing that if the nobles were defeated in war or the Church was full of hypocrites, then the peasants really didn’t owe them anything. It’s a fair argument.

One of the most disquieting things about medieval peasants for me is that many of them were not free.

Some were outright slaves, particularly at the very beginning and the very end of the Middle Ages, but by 1100, most ‘unfree’ peasants were serfs. Although not a commodity to be bought or sold like slaves, serfs did unpaid labor and suffered serious limitations on their liberty, like the inability to move or marry at will.

Many historians have written on the medieval transition from slavery to serfdom (and back again), but what I like about Rio’s book is her attention to the variety of forms that ‘unfreedom’ could take and to how and why people might lose or gain freedom in the centuries after the fall of Rome and its slave system. 

It’s a real frustration of mine that so much historical writing pays little or no attention to women, even though they made up half the population.

However ‘important’ whatever the men were doing was, they couldn’t have done it without women. There’s more written on elite medieval women—queens, noblewomen, abbesses, etc.—than there used to be, but peasant women remain mostly neglected.

I like Bennett’s book not only because she pays attention to village women but also because it doesn’t sugarcoat the story. Peasant women could do many things in medieval England, like owning property, going to court, and running businesses, but their options were sharply curtailed by male domination.

As Bennett puts it, "Insofar as these women had choices about their lives, the choices were always poor ones." 

This book centers the experience of global empire on the ordinary women left behind in northwest Spain. In many parts of the peninsula, the empire was felt most acutely and at the day-to-day level through absence: Galicia, in particular, had extremely high levels of male migration, creating communities dominated by women. Drawing upon court cases, marriage contracts, testaments, and Inquisition records, Allyson Poska shows how peasant women seized legal and social power in the sometimes-permanent absence of their spouses, eschewing norms on sexuality, property, and family.

If there’s only one that I could recommend, it’s this brilliant, beautiful, and vexing book by María Rosa Menocal, Sterling Professor at Yale University. In a compelling and artful manner, Menocal tells the story of medieval Spain from the arrival of the first Umayyad rulers to Cervantes. Beyond being a useful introduction to the fascinating history, Menocal makes the argument that a culture of tolerance existed in medieval Spain, one that transcended religious and ethnic differences. The principal engine of this culture, she suggests, was the Arabic language. Menocal’s book has received as much praise as criticism, a testament to its enduring power and the contentious quality of medieval Spain.

This is a book that made me think again about the ‘Moorishness’ of Spain.

How to square the repression and ultimate expulsion of people of Muslim origin in the early sixteen hundreds with the obvious delight taken in aspects of their material culture such as architecture, fashion, and horsemanship, not to mention the sympathetic portrayal of Moorish characters in sixteenth-century Spanish literature?

It’s a well-argued book full of fascinating examples which examine and enlighten this paradox. 

The Visigothic kingdom of Spain was long dismissed in older books as a barbaric backwater, the darkest point of the so-called Dark Ages. Yet it was, in truth, a vibrant cultural centre for more than two centuries, until falling to the forces of Islam in 711. Hillgarth’s fascinating book gives an excellent short survey of Visigothic history, and then explores how the legends surrounding the Goths were developed and exploited by later Spanish generations, from the Christian Reconquista and the sixteenth-century Golden Age to modern times. This creation of an idealized Gothic past provided inspiration and a sense of identity in Spain, in sharp contrast to Italy where the Goths were depicted during the Renaissance as the savage destroyers of classical civilization.

I have used this collection of translated primary sources for over a decade to teach students. It covers the whole period of medieval Spain, from the arrival of Muslim conquerors in 711 to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and allows one to confront for themselves the paradoxes of coexistence, collaboration, and violence that characterized this place and period. A thoughtful introduction precedes each document.

These three women give us Al-Andalus in depth. They are scholars of prodigious learning. This book shows their gift for clear explanation and offers a rich selection of color illustrations that are not collected so cogently together in any other books about the period. It is a major achievement and a joy to read; indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the history of Spain.