Irish Brain surgeons, Vikings who recycle and spotting mistakes in churches: Medieval News Roundup

An interview with Deborah Harkness, author of The Book of Life

Deborah Harkness, professor of history at the University of Southern California, has just published the final novel in her All Souls Trilogy. It follows the story of Diana Bishop, a historian and modern-day witch, Matthew Clairmont, a 1500-year-old vampire, and an enchanted manuscript at Oxford University's Bodleian Library.

Click here to read DuJour’s executive editor, Nancy Bilyeau, interview Deborah about The Book of Life

See also Deborah reading an excerpt from her novel:

Bruce Holsinger and Nancy Bilyeau talk about historical fiction

Bruce Holsinger and Nancy Bilyeau, two of the leading medieval novelists, had the chance to meet up in New York City and have a conversation about writing historical fiction, how they went about researching their novels, and what stories and styles influenced their writing.

For example, Bruce says to Nancy "you flesh out those aspects of daily life with remarkable skill, without a lot of hand waving or showing off of historical details. I actually struggled a bit with this at first. I knew the medieval period in terms of its literary history, but in terms of the details of everyday life, that was a brand new learning experience. I had to go back and relearn a lot of what I thought I knew. There are so many passages in the literature that will tell you about, say, the food at a feast, but I never really paid attention to those until I had to figure out what people ate in a scene I was writing."

Nancy replies, "Exactly! I was never happier than when a curator at the Tower of London scanned in a diet sheet of an aristocratic prisoner in the 1540s and sent me a PDF. I had every detail down to how many pigeons eaten a week."

You can read their conversation from The Daily Beast.

Nancy Bilyeau's latest book is called The Chalice - we will have a review about it on Medievalists.net very soon! Bruce Holsinger's novel is called A Burnable Book.

Truth, lies and historical fiction; How far can an author go?

Authors Philippa Gregory and Wayne Johnston can tell you that historical novelists have to deal with some odd complaints, most of which stem from the fact that everyone from the living descendents of their fictional characters to the fans of medieval monarchs will cheerfully ignore the words “a novel” blazoned on the cover.

 Gregory has written numerous novels about Tudor and Plantagenet women, including her latest, The Lady of the Rivers, about Jacquetta of Luxembourg, a figure from the War of the Roses. She has also co-authored a history book, The Women of the Cousins’ War, that includes a biography of Jacquetta. 

Johnston’s bestselling 1998 novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams controversially gave Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood an unrequited love. Now, Johnston has published A World Elsewhere, which introduces fictional Newfoundlanders into a psychopathic household inspired by Biltmore, George Vanderbilt’s palace in North Carolina.

 Globe and Mail arts writer Kate Taylor, herself the author of a novel based on the Dreyfus Affair, titled A Man in Uniform, asks Gregory and Johnston just how much a historical novelist is allowed to make up.

Click here to read this article from The Globe and Mail

An Interview With Jeri Westerson, Author of Blood Lance and the Crispin Guest Book Series

Author Jeri Westerson has done it again: She's managed to craft another fascinating, entertaining, engaging book in a style that's been dubbed "medieval noir."


Her latest book, Blood Lance, is the fifth in her series of books about Crispin Guest, a detective of sorts during the medieval era, a man who was previously a knight.

One of the many aspects of this book and series I enjoy is how Westerson combines history with fiction, even historical figures with fictional ones, with grace and eloquence.

In our latest interview--I previously interviewed her about her book Troubled Bones--she also talks about her concerns about the state of the publishing industry and how it will affect authors including herself.

Click here to read this interview from the Seattle Post Intelligencer

You can follow Jeri Westerson (and Crispin Guest) on Facebook

How Medieval Arms Race Led to Swords Capable of Killing ‘Tin Can’ Knights

I grew up on an early edition of Dungeons & Dragons and John Boorman’s Excalibur. The image of the tin-can knight — clanking and rattling as he walked, hoisted onto his horse by a crane — was the first part of my childhood that had to go when I started working on The Mongoliad, an epic collaborative tale about the Mongol invasion of Europe in the early 13th century.


Part of our purview on the project, an interactive story that’s being turned into a book trilogy, was to portray Western martial arts correctly. Thus began my crash course in the evolution of arms and armor over several centuries of medieval life.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this education was charting the changes that occurred as a result of this medieval arms race. Let’s start with the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, as recorded by the Bayeaux Tapestry, which is more than 200 linear feet of embroidered pictures of men in armor.

They’re wearing hauberks, long shirts that hang nearly to their knees made from interlinked iron rings. They called it “maille,” plain and simple, and if the troubadours were getting all poetic about these battles, they might refer to this maille as a “net.” Never “chain.” Why? Well, because it was a net.

Click here to read this article from Wired Magazine

Click here to read more articles on Medieval Warfare

The Sweet Girl: Annabel Lyon’s last volume on Ancient Greece

Mercifully, Annabel Lyon has left her iPhone in her hotel room, which renders her unable to display a treasured photograph of the Iron Age vaginal dilator she snapped in a museum while visiting Athens to research her latest novel, a sequel to 2009’s award-winning, bestselling The Golden Mean.

“It’s horrifying!” she exults, spreading her arms to show the size of the fearful artifact, technically known as a speculum. “And it’s got this big screw on it, and it’s just ohh….” The novelist shudders.


“And I loved it, of course.”

Lyon loved it so much that she made the instrument a crucial prop in her new novel, The Sweet Girl, which returns to the ancient Greek world of philosophers and kings that she brought to life so successfully in The Golden Mean. But as the lovable speculum suggests, this is “a very different book” from her speculative biography of Aristotle, Lyon says. Chronicling the adventures of the philosopher’s precocious daughter after his death, The Sweet Girl is yin to the former book’s yang.

Whereas The Golden Mean focused on men and public life – “politics, warfare, science and reason and all of that,” according to the author – The Sweet Girl is “much more female, much more interior.”

Click here to read this article from The Globe and Mail

See also The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon: A brilliant philosopher’s daughter from the Toronto Star

Interview with Philippa Gregory on ‘The Kingmaker’s Daughter’

What made you choose to write about Anne Neville? 

 She absolutely embodies what happened to so many people in these turbulent 14 years of the War of the Roses. She’s on three different sides: York, then Lancaster, then York again. And she’s married to, or working with, the most powerful men of the period. And yet we hardly know anything about her. That makes her tremendously interesting to me, because once I put together her story, I can fictionalize it, I can bring it to life. In a way, I’m restoring a woman whom nobody knows and at least offering a version of her.

Click here to read the full interview from the Washington Post

Click here to see the Amazon.com page about The Kingmaker's Daughter

Writer wants Johnny Depp to play “his” Robin Hood

Best selling historical novelist Angus Donald from Tunbridge Wells is now on the fourth volume of his series concerning the exploits of Robin Hood.

 Warlord is set in 1194 and sees Richard the Lionheart in Normandy engaged in a bloody war to drive the French out of his continental territory. Using the brutal tactics of medieval warfare – siege, savagery and scorched earth – the king is gradually pushing back the forces of King Philip of France.

 By his side are Robert, Earl of Locksley, better known as the erstwhile outlaw Robin Hood, and Sir Alan Dale, his loyal friend, and a musician and warrior of great skill. Donald’s Outlaw series has become a fixture in the best seller lists and gained great reviews.

His Robin is charismatic and a great leader, but a much more complex man than is usually portrayed with a far darker side – not really a “merry man” in any shape or form.

Click here to read this article from Kent News

Click here to visit Angus Donald's website

The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc

Mark Twain’s obsession with Joan of Arc has to rank among the most baffling and least talked about enigmas in American literature. Even for those entrenched within the competitive world of Twain scholarship, stories like the one above are usually treated as interesting, but ultimately trifling, anecdotes, illustrative of the eccentricities of a predictably unconventional man.

 The same might also be said of his book about the French heroine. Published in 1896, when its author was 61, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc has long been viewed as something of an aberration, a curio—the type of genre-bending work that a bored, established writer often undertakes in order to buck audience expectations. Narrated by a fictionalized version of Joan’s servant and scribe, Sieur Louis de Conte, the book spans the majority of Joan’s life, beginning with her childhood in eastern France and ending with her questionable trial and execution. While other Twain novels such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and the Pauper are also set in medieval Europe, far from the author’s more familiar milieu of mid-19th century Missouri, Recollections is unique in its somber tone.

Click here to read this article from The Awl

Medieval professor continues novel series

“Peaceweaver,” the recently published second book in Rebecca Barnhouse’s historical-fantasy series aimed at young adult readers, picks up where her first book ended.

But although it’s a companion to “The Coming of the Dragon,” the new novel stands alone. A reader needs no prior knowledge to understand or enjoy it.

Barnhouse is an English professor at Youngstown State University and an expert in medieval literature.

Like all of her books, “Peaceweaver” is rooted in ancient literature — “Beowulf” in this case. Barnhouse creates characters and stories that fit into the framework created by the ancient poem.

Click here to read this article from Vindy.com

Click here to visit Rebecca Barnhouse's website

Best-selling writer Umberto Eco celebrates 80 years

Italian author Umberto Eco, turning 80 today, can boast decades of literary success, but he got a late start in life as a novelist.

Many will remember him as having penned the book The Name of the Rose; perhaps even more people were gripped by the film, starring Sean Connery. Both narratives unlock medieval history through fast-paced, intricately-plotted storytelling and literary somersaulting referencing other world-class scribes, such as Jorge Luis Borges, and detective protagonists like Sherlock Holmes. The book, released in 1980, became a best seller, turning over millions of copies around the world and catapulting Umberto Eco to literary fame.

"Since I'm a book person, I write about books," Eco told German weekly Die Zeit.

That book, "The Name of the Rose," was the writer's first novel and came relatively late in life - at nearly age 50. Yet it likely couldn't have been written - or at least not in that way - had Eco not made an impressive academic career for himself beforehand.

Click here to read this article from Deutsche Welle

University Park author’s latest book dips into the Dark Ages

Anna Elliott is well versed in the lore and legends of the Dark Ages.

“Sunrise of Avalon,” the final book in the historical fiction and fantasy novelist’s Twilight of Avalon trilogy, was released in September. Elliott of University Park studied English and medieval history in college and has long been a devoted fan of the Victorian novel.

“I wrote a Victorian American novel for my senior thesis in college,” she says. “It was a natural pick for me to write a historical novel. It was a setting I knew well. [The novel] was nothing that I would want to publish, but I fell in love with the process. From there, I kept writing every day.”

Elliott says writing her first novel was a long, tedious process. “I had been shopping my novel around, and I got an agent, which was huge, but then she decided to quit being an agent,” Elliott says. “I was five months pregnant and we were living on my husband’s grad student stipend. I couldn’t really see [writing] as a career and felt I had gone back to square one.”

Click here too read this article from the Maryland Community News

Click here to visit Anna Elliot's website

A Passion For The Past: 2011's Best Historical Fiction

By Sharon Penman

Historical fiction invites us to experience the exotic and the unknown while confirming our common humanity. I do not believe that human nature has changed much over the centuries and it is possible to identify with the emotions, passions, and fears of men and women long dead. But the past is also uncharted territory; it is like visiting a country where we do not speak the language. What did these people believe? What superstitions did they share? What demons did they see lurking in the dark? We want to be transported back to that foreign country, and we want the historical novelist to act as our translator. This is what good historical fiction does, what these five novels do. The authors allow us to empathize with their characters, to care deeply about their fates. But we never forget for a moment that they are not our neighbors, not ourselves, for their expectations and ethics and boundaries are not ours. Their lives are firmly rooted in alien soil.

Click here to see Sharon Penman's Top 5 Historical Fiction novels of this year from NPR

Mary Malloy taps medieval world for murder most foul

Like Chaucer's Wife of Bath, Mary Malloy is an adventurous woman. She has hiked across England in the footsteps of the "Canterbury Tales" character and voyaged north to Spitsbergen, Norway, and in the South Seas.

A professor of maritime history at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole who also teaches museum studies at Harvard University, she balances her academic career with a lighter pursuit: writing mysteries.

Her newest, Paradise Walk (Leapfrog Press, 286 pages, $15.95), finds historian Lizzie Manning tracing the path of Chaucer's bawdy Wife of Bath. In the vein of Dan Brown's blockbuster, "The Da Vinci Code," "Paradise Walk" entwines fiction and history.

What begins for Lizzie as a research commission to find evidence of Alison the Weaver, who may have inspired Chaucer's character, becomes a quest riddled with intrigue and danger. Woven into this mystery with textile clues are the legends of King Arthur, the relics of St. Thomas Becket and King Henry VIII's brutal dissolution of the monasteries.

Click here to read this article from Cape Cod Online

Writer found a gateway to the medieval world close to home

Cassandra Clark tells Sarah Freeman how growing up in East Yorkshire inspired her acclaimed series of medieval mysteries.

Cassandra Clark is on something of a mission. While Britain of the medieval age is often painted as a pretty lawless, disease-ridden place to live, the author of the popular Hildegard series is hoping that along with selling a few copies of her books, she will also bust a few myths.

“Generally when you read anything about that period it is always about the depressing domestic squalor and disease,” says Cassandra, whose third book in the series, The Law of Angels is out later this month. “However, the truth is rather different, they were actually a pretty civilised bunch. They listened to music, often wore wonderful clothes and the towns were very orderly places. Dare I say it, but it wasn’t that much different to today..

Click here to read this article from the Yorkshire Post

Medieval Lincoln captures best-selling author and historian Alison Weir

Lincoln Castle will open its gates and transport visitors back in time at the weekend, transforming its grounds into a scene from Medieval England. The Medieval Merriment event at the castle will be brought to life with theatrical performances and re-enactments of traditional crafts.

Bestselling author and historian Alison Weir, who recently visited Lincoln to promote her latest book, The Captive Queen, explains why Lincoln is really such brilliant place for rediscovering the past. In the past she has spent a lot of time in Lincoln researching her books, in particular, while writing a biography of local historical figure, Katherine Swynford.

Click here to read this article from the Lincolnite

Game of Thrones: when the medieval fantasy explains Realpolitik

The Iron Throne A Song of Ice and Fire in the original has become an HBO series, this dark fantasy saga written by George R. R. Martin, whose first volume appeared in 1996 and who must rely on Sept. 1 when completed.

The story of the saga takes place mainly in imaginary land called Westeros in a fantasy universe. As in any good fantasy saga, rare and fantastic populate the continent as dragons or werewolves.
The story begins with the death of the king’s hand, Lord Jon Arryn, it was used and advised a Roy who had seized the throne by force. A usurper king chasing women and running and will leave gradually the power of the courtiers and advisers.

On this earth there are seven crowns, unified under one banner in which the swords of the kingdoms were used to build a huge iron throne.

Joffrey families, Renly, Stannis, Robb Stark and Greyjoy families are “royal” on this earth and are in constant struggle, ignoring a hazard in the North, where the king’s power stops. This border is guarded by men in the North prevail mysterious beings, giants, wild men and other, strange and mysterious supernatural beings, capable of transforming humans into zombies frozen.

Click here to read this article from EconomicsNewspaper.com

Teen author creates medieval world in trilogy

When 18-year-old Cayla Kluver set out to write her first novel in 2006, she merely wanted to create a fun story for readers to enjoy.

But as the novel became a trilogy and the Fall Creek High School graduate got deeper into the world she was creating, she found deeper ideas pouring onto the pages.

Kluver's series, which is led off by "Legacy," recently was picked up by the national publishing company Harlequin Teen and is available at Barnes and Noble bookstores everywhere.

Click here to read this article from the Leader-Telegram

A Dance with Dragons, the fifth novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, released

The long-awaited fifth novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, entitled A Dance with Dragons, was released this week. The work, written by George R.R. Martin, has earned huge sales and positive reviews.

A Dance with Dragons is set in the fictional world of Westeros, but takes many elements from medieval Europe mixed with fantasy. The series has gained new popularity with the launch of the Game of Thrones television series on HBO, which is based on the first book. Martin’s novels have sold 16 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 20 languages.

The fifth novel runs to 1014 pages and has already reached the #1 spot on Amazon.com’s bestseller list.

Click here to read this article on Medievalists.net