My non-fiction recommendation would be The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend-Warner. Not recent obviously but a great novel. I also have Victoria Mackenzie For Thy Great Pain […] on my bookshelf.
If you can bare to read about Queens, Tim Clarkson’s Aethflaed is good, and I recently enjoyed Annie Garthwaite’s Cecily.
Ooh thank you for those suggestions! I do love reading about queens (and don’t mind kings - it just frustrates me when that’s *all* that’s on offer). And I love Æthelflæd so I will check that one out.
On the fiction side, you might enjoy Patricia Bracewell’s trilogy which begins with Shadow on the Crown. I’m afraid they’re very much about kings and queens, but they’re told from the viewpoint of Emma of Normandy, who was at the centre of so much late Anglo-Saxon history. I’m a bit biased, as I drew the maps for the novels, but I think they offer a very different insight into the early 11th century https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadow-Crown-Patricia-Bracewell/dp/0143124358
I’ll check it out! I actually don’t mind queens so much as I think Anglo-Saxon / contemporary queens were often sidelined and/or had their reputations maligned.
As an aside - I just finished Dark Earth in about five days, and apart from the ending which I really didn’t like, I thought it was fab! It’s got me thinking of all sorts of similar stories I could write and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So, thank you for the recommendation!
Anything by Lisa Picard who presents her history of ordinary folk during the reigns of various monarchs in The City of London is eminently readable There are many research based histories of ordinary non titled folk in many fictional novels. I just love it when these writers of fiction list their research sources.
Yes! My novel out on query is about ordinary women in and after the Black Death. Useful sources include Judith Bennett’s books, Femina by Janina Ramirez, Peter Larson’s work on life and power in 14th century villages. Finding comps for my novel has been a real challenge!
Ooh your novel sounds great! I hope it gets picked up as I'd love to read it. I also could not agree more about Janina Ramirez! I initially read her book because she taught one of my courses at uni - and now I'm positively evangelistic about it because I think it is just great.
Thanks! Fingers crossed. Another good book for ideas, though details are sometimes sketchy, is Phillipa Gregory's Normal Women. In terms of novels, have you seen Cuddy by Benjamin Myers? Outstanding. Strong women throughout and such writing!
I haven’t come across Cuddy before but I’ve got it winging its way now thanks to your recommendation! Can’t wait to read it: sounds right up my street.
It's a very different novel. Different from other novels, but also each major section is written in a different style. I'm curious to know what you'll think of it.
Yes, a quick flick through shows that it wasn’t what I was expecting! But I think that’s great: there’s so many different types of writing out there, experimental even, and they rarely make it into the historical fiction sphere (much more contemporary fiction I think). I’m looking forward to reading it!
So true. Most of the WERE involved. Very much like after the Norman’s came, we forget about the Anglo Saxons. But they also were still very much there and many of the women actually married Norman men.
I think this comes down to what we think history is for. It is used for many things of course. It is used to justify ideologies or national ambitions. It is used by people seeking secular saints (or regular saints) to inspire them. It is used as a source of gossip and human interest stories, as a sort of highbrow National Inquirer. It is used as a stage on which to set dramas that are harder to stage in the present age. It is even, very occasionally, used as a way to understand the development of human societies.
Historical fiction today, when it is not in the service an an ideology, is very much concerned with the search for secular saints. And the god that those secular saints serve is personal power. In the intensely individualistic age we live in, the acquisition and exercise of personal power is widely seen as the path to security and happiness. And who are the people from the past with the most power? Kings and queens. (Look at how often the regular people are described as "powerless" as if this was their most defining feature.)
If we are to expect historical fiction that is not about kings and queens, and about warriors and warrior maidens, it will have to be in the service of a search for a different kind of saint or for a different use of history.
I write mostly about those in the middle, neither royalty nor slaves, but, principally, the daughters of a minor Anglo-Saxon thegn, because I am more interested in writing about sinners than saints. And by sinners, I don't mean villains. I mean people who fail in their duties and must then live with the consequences of having done so, for themselves and for others. For which purpose, the Anglo-Saxon period, with its mix of Christian moral responsibility and the personal bonds of fidelity of a warrior culture, provide a fertile ground.
I've also noticed the trend of medieval books focusing exclusively on the lives of the high aristocracy. It undermines dissemination of knowledge as well, as everyone thinks peasants are absolute buffoons, covered in animal feces, born to work and die, and doing nothing except farming, sleeping, and burying children
This is why my serial is focused on the lives of commoners—to let everyone know that humans will always do human things and in the most absurd and dramatic ways possible
You’re so right - that’s such an undignifying way to treat our forebears, right?! I’m grateful for the work writers like you are doing to show that this wasn’t the case. I try hard to show this too - that they were people just like us!
Ideally you are writing a serial about a woman in historical medieval fiction and it's difficult to research because there's no record or very little. But then you have to be the detective 🕵️♀️. What do you know? What do you not know and then what could have happened? Often possibilities emerge and you think would anyone really care about that but maybe you care about it a lot. You have to point the way to your readers. It would be great if you had a woman character who never existed but possibly could have. A woman who had virtually nothing who emerged to challenge a male lord and set him straight on how things should be done around the kingdom. It might have been done but what could have happened knowing what you know? And then books like that could be gotten into the bookstores with all the king guy stuff. You have to show the way, follow your intuition and also whatever feedback you get. You may already do this anyway in your serials.
They are exactly the kinds of women I’d like to showcase! You’re so right. We have feisty women like that nowadays, so I can’t see why they didn’t exist back then?
My serials thus far have focused on showing the stories of women who played a nationally-significant role at a time when their gender shouldn’t have allowed it, and subsequent history books have tried to write them out of it. But I’m toying with a manuscript idea for a much more ordinary setting much as you describe… so watch this space!
Also - congrats on your first post! I’m looking forward to reading it ✨
I would like to recommend an older book that may be difficult to find but Amazon may be able to get it for you through a third party bookseller or you may be able to order it through a local British bookstore. English medieval history is not the same but coexists alongside British medieval history. So it's not the same but there are similarities and you might have to find correlative persons or histories of women who could sort of be like the woman you want to create or recreate in a new way. The book is called "The Last Queen of Kashmir," written by Rakesh K. Kaul. I know Rakesh and there so many great feminist echoes in this book that it is almost for sure for getting you thinking a lot about your character. She doesn't have be a Queen. She could be commoner who evolves into a Queen just from the actions she takes or how she rises above her situation. Last Queen is a little formal, written in classical Indian narrative style, but it pulls no punches in describing the harshness of life in 14th century Kashmir next to the Himalayas near the border with China. Rakesh was doing research and says he stumbled on this Queen and wondered, "Who was this Kota Rani? Who was this inspiring symbol of feminine resistance that was central to the social history that Kashmiri Pandit women carried with them over the intervening centuries? Again, it is not British history so it's just a suggestion for you if it might help. You could end up creating a character who never existed but is so compelling that everyone would devoutly wish had existed. It might be too formal but you can always translate the general into the specific or transfer it to a different culture in the same time frame. My Substack url is INDIA491SUBSTACK.COM Good Luck and All the Best!
I have the same difficulties in chain bookshops. I rarely find anything of interest in the popular history section anymore, though I did fin The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady at my local Barnes and Noble. Mostly, I rely on the library and their inter-library loan capability. Through that, I've read Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination by Paul Freedman, and one of my current reads- Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages by Nancy Mandeville Caciola.
Fictionally speaking, I rely on my library for that, too, as I've been very disappointed by the bookstore's offerings, which tend to run toward a flock of Philippa Gregory novels, and I've been unimpressed by everything of hers I've tried.
I've liked the following historical novels:
- The Half-Drowned King trilogy by Linnea Hartsuyker -generational story about Scandinavians before and during the reign of Harald Finehair
- Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed -Scheherazade tale set during the Third Crusade
- Rose Nicolson by Andrew Grieg -Story about religious strife and love in James I's Scotland
- Learwife by JR Thorpe -Retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear from the point of view of his wife, set in a nunnery in an unspecified medieval time
- To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek- a motley collection of people trying to get to Calais as the Black Death begins to spread through England. Told partially in Middle English-adjacent language
- Gorse by Sam K. Horton-- I haven't read this one yet, but a friend highly recommended it. It's a gothic tale set in Cornwall in 1786 and features a clash between older folk beliefs and Christianity
That is such a great list! Do you mind if I share it in an upcoming post? I will tag you of course!
Also, don’t mind me as I head off to buy the Black Tudors book… @15thCenturyFeminist got me interested in this theme when she did a Note recently showing portraits of black Tudors.
Feel free to share! I hope you find something you like on the list!
There are a few other titles I thought of in the same vein as Black Tudors: African Europeans by Olivette Otele and The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper, which is about race in Shakespeare’s work, then and now. StoryGraph suggested Onyenka Nubia's book England's Other Countrymen: Blackness in Tudor England when I was double checking the author's name of Black Tudors. I haven't read that one, so I don't know how it is.
Oh! And I have Black Knights: Arabic Epics and the Making of Medieval Race by Rachel Schine on my tbr, but I don't know if it's out yet or not.
I was a bit disappointed in "Out of the East"; the first part of the book seemed much better/stronger than the last. Still quite worth reading, I think I bought the ebook for $2.99. A fair amount of ebooks come on sale like that, at least in the US -- I'm on mailing lists for them. So I've accumulated bits and bobs of history, much of it Scottish, and a tonne of Roman. Plus historical fiction, of course, and not forgetting all the old public domain works which are out of date, but still worth reading as long as you're up to wading through Victorian prose with untranslated wodges of other languages.
I'm 100% with you on wanting more stories from we the little people. One of my driving questions is: How the heck do they/we survive all the turmoil when they/we have little say-so. (Thus, my own projects...)
But also wanted to say, some of those covers are yummy!
Some of the covers were SO yummy! That’s what caught my eye - and I would have bought many of them based off the covers alone (if I had the funds!).
I’m hoping to do more ‘little people’ writing on here as my PhD progresses over the next few months. I’m moving into archaeology which, for my time period, brings access to the lives of more ordinary people and their day to day lives. So, while my next serial does have a royal abbess as its protagonist, it will be telling the stories of ordinary men and women around her. And then, as a real pie in the sky dream, I’m hoping to put together a manuscript for a historical fiction novel based off the archaeological evidence for ordinary lives… But we’ll see!
I'm currently writing a book based in Italy in the 1600s and it's not about the Medici family. :D I have to get another book finished before Christmas and then I can give it 100% of my time. I'm so looking forward to getting my teeth into it!
It will be published one way or another! (i.e. Either trad or self-published.) However, there is a long way to go before it will be ready for anyone else's eyes and I am enjoying the research so much I am not ready for it to end.
I'd recommend Annie Whiteheads's Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England, and Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom. Still high-status women but that's who the records are mostly about. Sharon Bennet Connolly's books mostly focus on (high-status) women in history, too, and there's another that has caught my eye but I haven't read: Judith Bennett's Women in the Medieval Countryside.
I have seen Annie Whitehead’s book a lot so thank you for the reminder to put it on my TBR list! I have never quite got around to it.
I think with high status Anglo-Saxon women, their stories still need telling because so often it’s the men who take centre stage in the histories that are written. We can start with these women to get people interested in a broader history, and then work from there to diversify even further, right?
And I will have to check out that other title too - it sounds great. Thanks for sharing!
I'm doing a BA in medieval and modern Europe to round out previous ones in ancient history and finding books outside of textbooks on the medieval period here in Aus is not easy at all. I found some on medieval queens and a few on the crusades but the rest seem to all be on the kings. my 2 current published fiction books are set kind of medieval for time but they're pure fantasy so not historical at all, weird since I'm an ancient historian but oh well.
So great to hear from you after connecting over your serial! (I’ve subscribed by the way - it looks fab).
And so great to hear you’re doing a BA in medieval/modern Europe. If you ever want specific recommendations for academic texts beyond those your tutors have recommended, I’m more than happy to help! (Mostly on pre-conquest England) 🥰
Hope you’re having fun? I appreciate the frustration with getting hold of texts down in Aus (I’m a kiwi despite the accent, so get it!). What topic are you currently working on?
I'll be doing the Crusades this trimester, should be interesting, just wish it wasn't offered over Christmas so I could take the trimester off but they expect you to do all 3 as much as possible. Ordered the textbook, hoping it arrives before class starts on the 21st but it was out of stock almost everywhere I looked. So frustrating. I miss Book Depository. I'm actually double majoring, religion is my second major, though I definitely prefer looking at the more ancient religions than more modern stuff.
I did ancient Rome and Greece for the first BA, more Rome than Greece since the Greek department got a little gutted in my 2nd year and didn't rehire for a few. Then in my MA at a different uni I continued with those two and threw in some mythology. By the time I finished high school I was so sick of Ancient Egypt that I chose the path that didn't include it which is sad now. Current uni doesn't offer any units on it so I can't even pick it up for an elective unit. Was considering picking up Latin but not sure about doing a language via distance learning, it's hard enough in the classroom.
Well it's not quite Middle Ages and is still about Royals....but I'll be uploading a couple out of copyright books about Woburn Abbey and the letters of Lady Russell soon. I have I think 5 editions of her letters and the second corrected seems to be the best. She has been referred to as "one of the best women". Her husband was accused of treason and executed.
My non-fiction recommendation would be The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend-Warner. Not recent obviously but a great novel. I also have Victoria Mackenzie For Thy Great Pain […] on my bookshelf.
If you can bare to read about Queens, Tim Clarkson’s Aethflaed is good, and I recently enjoyed Annie Garthwaite’s Cecily.
The STW should say fiction!
Ooh thank you for those suggestions! I do love reading about queens (and don’t mind kings - it just frustrates me when that’s *all* that’s on offer). And I love Æthelflæd so I will check that one out.
On the fiction side, you might enjoy Patricia Bracewell’s trilogy which begins with Shadow on the Crown. I’m afraid they’re very much about kings and queens, but they’re told from the viewpoint of Emma of Normandy, who was at the centre of so much late Anglo-Saxon history. I’m a bit biased, as I drew the maps for the novels, but I think they offer a very different insight into the early 11th century https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadow-Crown-Patricia-Bracewell/dp/0143124358
I’ll check it out! I actually don’t mind queens so much as I think Anglo-Saxon / contemporary queens were often sidelined and/or had their reputations maligned.
As an aside - I just finished Dark Earth in about five days, and apart from the ending which I really didn’t like, I thought it was fab! It’s got me thinking of all sorts of similar stories I could write and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So, thank you for the recommendation!
Anything by Lisa Picard who presents her history of ordinary folk during the reigns of various monarchs in The City of London is eminently readable There are many research based histories of ordinary non titled folk in many fictional novels. I just love it when these writers of fiction list their research sources.
I'll have to check out Lisa Picard - thanks for the recommendation! And yes, I totally agree: I love it when an author includes a bibliography!
Yes! My novel out on query is about ordinary women in and after the Black Death. Useful sources include Judith Bennett’s books, Femina by Janina Ramirez, Peter Larson’s work on life and power in 14th century villages. Finding comps for my novel has been a real challenge!
Ooh your novel sounds great! I hope it gets picked up as I'd love to read it. I also could not agree more about Janina Ramirez! I initially read her book because she taught one of my courses at uni - and now I'm positively evangelistic about it because I think it is just great.
Thanks! Fingers crossed. Another good book for ideas, though details are sometimes sketchy, is Phillipa Gregory's Normal Women. In terms of novels, have you seen Cuddy by Benjamin Myers? Outstanding. Strong women throughout and such writing!
I haven’t come across Cuddy before but I’ve got it winging its way now thanks to your recommendation! Can’t wait to read it: sounds right up my street.
It's a very different novel. Different from other novels, but also each major section is written in a different style. I'm curious to know what you'll think of it.
Yes, a quick flick through shows that it wasn’t what I was expecting! But I think that’s great: there’s so many different types of writing out there, experimental even, and they rarely make it into the historical fiction sphere (much more contemporary fiction I think). I’m looking forward to reading it!
So true. Most of the WERE involved. Very much like after the Norman’s came, we forget about the Anglo Saxons. But they also were still very much there and many of the women actually married Norman men.
YES! I don't think enough is written on that... Perhaps something I / we could dive into more on here!
I think this comes down to what we think history is for. It is used for many things of course. It is used to justify ideologies or national ambitions. It is used by people seeking secular saints (or regular saints) to inspire them. It is used as a source of gossip and human interest stories, as a sort of highbrow National Inquirer. It is used as a stage on which to set dramas that are harder to stage in the present age. It is even, very occasionally, used as a way to understand the development of human societies.
Historical fiction today, when it is not in the service an an ideology, is very much concerned with the search for secular saints. And the god that those secular saints serve is personal power. In the intensely individualistic age we live in, the acquisition and exercise of personal power is widely seen as the path to security and happiness. And who are the people from the past with the most power? Kings and queens. (Look at how often the regular people are described as "powerless" as if this was their most defining feature.)
If we are to expect historical fiction that is not about kings and queens, and about warriors and warrior maidens, it will have to be in the service of a search for a different kind of saint or for a different use of history.
I write mostly about those in the middle, neither royalty nor slaves, but, principally, the daughters of a minor Anglo-Saxon thegn, because I am more interested in writing about sinners than saints. And by sinners, I don't mean villains. I mean people who fail in their duties and must then live with the consequences of having done so, for themselves and for others. For which purpose, the Anglo-Saxon period, with its mix of Christian moral responsibility and the personal bonds of fidelity of a warrior culture, provide a fertile ground.
I've also noticed the trend of medieval books focusing exclusively on the lives of the high aristocracy. It undermines dissemination of knowledge as well, as everyone thinks peasants are absolute buffoons, covered in animal feces, born to work and die, and doing nothing except farming, sleeping, and burying children
This is why my serial is focused on the lives of commoners—to let everyone know that humans will always do human things and in the most absurd and dramatic ways possible
You’re so right - that’s such an undignifying way to treat our forebears, right?! I’m grateful for the work writers like you are doing to show that this wasn’t the case. I try hard to show this too - that they were people just like us!
Ideally you are writing a serial about a woman in historical medieval fiction and it's difficult to research because there's no record or very little. But then you have to be the detective 🕵️♀️. What do you know? What do you not know and then what could have happened? Often possibilities emerge and you think would anyone really care about that but maybe you care about it a lot. You have to point the way to your readers. It would be great if you had a woman character who never existed but possibly could have. A woman who had virtually nothing who emerged to challenge a male lord and set him straight on how things should be done around the kingdom. It might have been done but what could have happened knowing what you know? And then books like that could be gotten into the bookstores with all the king guy stuff. You have to show the way, follow your intuition and also whatever feedback you get. You may already do this anyway in your serials.
They are exactly the kinds of women I’d like to showcase! You’re so right. We have feisty women like that nowadays, so I can’t see why they didn’t exist back then?
My serials thus far have focused on showing the stories of women who played a nationally-significant role at a time when their gender shouldn’t have allowed it, and subsequent history books have tried to write them out of it. But I’m toying with a manuscript idea for a much more ordinary setting much as you describe… so watch this space!
Also - congrats on your first post! I’m looking forward to reading it ✨
I would like to recommend an older book that may be difficult to find but Amazon may be able to get it for you through a third party bookseller or you may be able to order it through a local British bookstore. English medieval history is not the same but coexists alongside British medieval history. So it's not the same but there are similarities and you might have to find correlative persons or histories of women who could sort of be like the woman you want to create or recreate in a new way. The book is called "The Last Queen of Kashmir," written by Rakesh K. Kaul. I know Rakesh and there so many great feminist echoes in this book that it is almost for sure for getting you thinking a lot about your character. She doesn't have be a Queen. She could be commoner who evolves into a Queen just from the actions she takes or how she rises above her situation. Last Queen is a little formal, written in classical Indian narrative style, but it pulls no punches in describing the harshness of life in 14th century Kashmir next to the Himalayas near the border with China. Rakesh was doing research and says he stumbled on this Queen and wondered, "Who was this Kota Rani? Who was this inspiring symbol of feminine resistance that was central to the social history that Kashmiri Pandit women carried with them over the intervening centuries? Again, it is not British history so it's just a suggestion for you if it might help. You could end up creating a character who never existed but is so compelling that everyone would devoutly wish had existed. It might be too formal but you can always translate the general into the specific or transfer it to a different culture in the same time frame. My Substack url is INDIA491SUBSTACK.COM Good Luck and All the Best!
Thanks for your recommendation Larry - I’ll make sure to look it up!
I have the same difficulties in chain bookshops. I rarely find anything of interest in the popular history section anymore, though I did fin The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady at my local Barnes and Noble. Mostly, I rely on the library and their inter-library loan capability. Through that, I've read Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination by Paul Freedman, and one of my current reads- Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages by Nancy Mandeville Caciola.
Fictionally speaking, I rely on my library for that, too, as I've been very disappointed by the bookstore's offerings, which tend to run toward a flock of Philippa Gregory novels, and I've been unimpressed by everything of hers I've tried.
I've liked the following historical novels:
- The Half-Drowned King trilogy by Linnea Hartsuyker -generational story about Scandinavians before and during the reign of Harald Finehair
- Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed -Scheherazade tale set during the Third Crusade
- Rose Nicolson by Andrew Grieg -Story about religious strife and love in James I's Scotland
- Learwife by JR Thorpe -Retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear from the point of view of his wife, set in a nunnery in an unspecified medieval time
- To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek- a motley collection of people trying to get to Calais as the Black Death begins to spread through England. Told partially in Middle English-adjacent language
- Gorse by Sam K. Horton-- I haven't read this one yet, but a friend highly recommended it. It's a gothic tale set in Cornwall in 1786 and features a clash between older folk beliefs and Christianity
That is such a great list! Do you mind if I share it in an upcoming post? I will tag you of course!
Also, don’t mind me as I head off to buy the Black Tudors book… @15thCenturyFeminist got me interested in this theme when she did a Note recently showing portraits of black Tudors.
Feel free to share! I hope you find something you like on the list!
There are a few other titles I thought of in the same vein as Black Tudors: African Europeans by Olivette Otele and The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper, which is about race in Shakespeare’s work, then and now. StoryGraph suggested Onyenka Nubia's book England's Other Countrymen: Blackness in Tudor England when I was double checking the author's name of Black Tudors. I haven't read that one, so I don't know how it is.
Oh! And I have Black Knights: Arabic Epics and the Making of Medieval Race by Rachel Schine on my tbr, but I don't know if it's out yet or not.
Thank you thank you thank you! 🤩
I was a bit disappointed in "Out of the East"; the first part of the book seemed much better/stronger than the last. Still quite worth reading, I think I bought the ebook for $2.99. A fair amount of ebooks come on sale like that, at least in the US -- I'm on mailing lists for them. So I've accumulated bits and bobs of history, much of it Scottish, and a tonne of Roman. Plus historical fiction, of course, and not forgetting all the old public domain works which are out of date, but still worth reading as long as you're up to wading through Victorian prose with untranslated wodges of other languages.
I'm 100% with you on wanting more stories from we the little people. One of my driving questions is: How the heck do they/we survive all the turmoil when they/we have little say-so. (Thus, my own projects...)
But also wanted to say, some of those covers are yummy!
Some of the covers were SO yummy! That’s what caught my eye - and I would have bought many of them based off the covers alone (if I had the funds!).
I’m hoping to do more ‘little people’ writing on here as my PhD progresses over the next few months. I’m moving into archaeology which, for my time period, brings access to the lives of more ordinary people and their day to day lives. So, while my next serial does have a royal abbess as its protagonist, it will be telling the stories of ordinary men and women around her. And then, as a real pie in the sky dream, I’m hoping to put together a manuscript for a historical fiction novel based off the archaeological evidence for ordinary lives… But we’ll see!
Woo-hoo! All sounds great!
I'm currently writing a book based in Italy in the 1600s and it's not about the Medici family. :D I have to get another book finished before Christmas and then I can give it 100% of my time. I'm so looking forward to getting my teeth into it!
That sounds amazing! There was so much more to that time than just one family, right??
Will your book be published? And will you share any of it on Substack?
It will be published one way or another! (i.e. Either trad or self-published.) However, there is a long way to go before it will be ready for anyone else's eyes and I am enjoying the research so much I am not ready for it to end.
Oh yes, I feel you with the not wanting it to end part.
I'd recommend Annie Whiteheads's Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England, and Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom. Still high-status women but that's who the records are mostly about. Sharon Bennet Connolly's books mostly focus on (high-status) women in history, too, and there's another that has caught my eye but I haven't read: Judith Bennett's Women in the Medieval Countryside.
I have seen Annie Whitehead’s book a lot so thank you for the reminder to put it on my TBR list! I have never quite got around to it.
I think with high status Anglo-Saxon women, their stories still need telling because so often it’s the men who take centre stage in the histories that are written. We can start with these women to get people interested in a broader history, and then work from there to diversify even further, right?
And I will have to check out that other title too - it sounds great. Thanks for sharing!
I'm doing a BA in medieval and modern Europe to round out previous ones in ancient history and finding books outside of textbooks on the medieval period here in Aus is not easy at all. I found some on medieval queens and a few on the crusades but the rest seem to all be on the kings. my 2 current published fiction books are set kind of medieval for time but they're pure fantasy so not historical at all, weird since I'm an ancient historian but oh well.
So great to hear from you after connecting over your serial! (I’ve subscribed by the way - it looks fab).
And so great to hear you’re doing a BA in medieval/modern Europe. If you ever want specific recommendations for academic texts beyond those your tutors have recommended, I’m more than happy to help! (Mostly on pre-conquest England) 🥰
Hope you’re having fun? I appreciate the frustration with getting hold of texts down in Aus (I’m a kiwi despite the accent, so get it!). What topic are you currently working on?
I'll be doing the Crusades this trimester, should be interesting, just wish it wasn't offered over Christmas so I could take the trimester off but they expect you to do all 3 as much as possible. Ordered the textbook, hoping it arrives before class starts on the 21st but it was out of stock almost everywhere I looked. So frustrating. I miss Book Depository. I'm actually double majoring, religion is my second major, though I definitely prefer looking at the more ancient religions than more modern stuff.
The Crusades were my first history love! I almost did a masters course on them.
Did you focus on ancient religions during your first degree, or was it more of a general course?
I did ancient Rome and Greece for the first BA, more Rome than Greece since the Greek department got a little gutted in my 2nd year and didn't rehire for a few. Then in my MA at a different uni I continued with those two and threw in some mythology. By the time I finished high school I was so sick of Ancient Egypt that I chose the path that didn't include it which is sad now. Current uni doesn't offer any units on it so I can't even pick it up for an elective unit. Was considering picking up Latin but not sure about doing a language via distance learning, it's hard enough in the classroom.
What an exciting journey you’re on. I hope you enjoy your foray into medieval with the crusades this term 🥰
Well it's not quite Middle Ages and is still about Royals....but I'll be uploading a couple out of copyright books about Woburn Abbey and the letters of Lady Russell soon. I have I think 5 editions of her letters and the second corrected seems to be the best. She has been referred to as "one of the best women". Her husband was accused of treason and executed.