To Be A Queen

In 1464, widowed Lancastrian Elizabeth Woodville marries Yorkist King Edward IV in secret and steps into the Wars of the Roses as queen, mother, and survivor. Gregory’s opening Cousins’ War novel is late-medieval biographical historical fiction of a commoner queen, the Woodville rise, and the mystery of the princes in the Tower.

Marie de France is sent to a failing English abbey—and remakes it into a kingdom of women.

Richard, youngest son of York, grows from a loyal brother into the last Plantagenet king: Towton, Barnet, Tewkesbury, the princes in the Tower, and the charge at Bosworth that ends the Wars of the Roses. Sharon Kay Penman’s 1982 novel is medieval historical saga that restores Richard III as soldier, husband, and contested king—England’s most argued-over reign, told at full length.

In the ninth century, a canon’s daughter hides her sex, takes her dead brother’s name, and rises from a Fulda monastery to Rome as scholar, healer, and—according to the legend—pope. Donna Woolfolk Cross’s international bestseller is medieval biographical historical fiction of learning, disguise, and a woman the church spent a thousand years denying.

Wart the kitchen boy is trained by Merlyn—who lives backwards through time—then draws the sword, marries Guenever, and watches the Round Table crack under Lancelot, Orkney, and a war he cannot end. T. H. White’s 1958 Arthurian cycle is medieval historical adventure: the education of a king, and the legend behind Camelot and The Sword in the Stone.

In eleventh-century Persia a judge who might punish Omar Khayyam for his verses gives him a blank book instead, and the Rubaiyat crosses the Seljuk court, the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, and Hassan-i Sabbah’s fortress at Alamut. Amin Maalouf’s 1988 novel (English translation) is medieval biographical historical fiction of that manuscript, taken up again in the 1890s by an American who carries it toward the Titanic.