5 Books to Explore the Middle Ages

A really great book that talks about how much we really can and do know about women in medieval society, and an explanation why we so often get it so wrong when we talk about them.

In some ways this is a political history of France but it’s really so much more. As I said in my review of the book, it “manages to convey how history ebbs, flows, and thunders, but even more importantly allows the reader to almost feel how events moved across four centuries of medieval Europe.”

A book that really shows you how permeable Europe was in the medieval period, how people moved and encountered others. The story of overwhelming violence that plagues the Middle Ages is one that should be reassessed, as they thought of themselves as part of something much larger than themselves.

Written by an eminent archeologist, this book is thorough and thoughtful. Dense at times but very rewarding, the reader gets a really good sense of who the Vikings were, why they did what they did, and why they occupy such a big place in the modern world’s imagination.

We wrote this book because there didn’t seem to be any good general histories of the period on the market. We aimed to make these vignettes engaging - thrilling - and give an impressionistic sense of the period that conveyed something true.