Kristin Lavransdatter

In 1320 a lord breaks a serf’s wedding at Navarcles, and Bernat Estanyol flees to Barcelona with his infant son Arnau, who grows up carrying stone for Santa Maria del Mar, lives through famine and plague, and rises from bastaix to merchant while the church is still unfinished. Ildefonso Falcones’s 2006 novel (English translation) is medieval saga historical fiction of fourteenth-century Barcelona, from a boy on the quarry road to the consecration of the church in 1384.

Orphaned in eleventh-century London, Rob Cole learns the barber-surgeon’s trade on the road, then walks east—through Europe and the Islamic world—to study medicine at Isfahan, where Christians are barred and he must travel as a Jew to sit under Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Noah Gordon’s novel is medieval historical adventure of a healer’s apprenticeship: plague, faith, and a journey from Dark Ages England to the best medical school on earth.

In the 980s red-haired Orm is taken off his father’s Scanian farm onto a Viking ship, then rowed through al-Andalus, the court of Harald Bluetooth, and Ethelred’s England, with his friend Toke beside him as Scandinavia is pressed to convert. Frans G. Bengtsson’s novel (Swedish parts 1941 and 1945; one English volume, 1954) is medieval adventure historical fiction of the late Viking Age, from a boy at the oar to a chieftain who has served Al-Mansur and outlived the year 1000.

A Franciscan friar investigates murders in a labyrinthine abbey where books are power.

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.

In 1482 Paris, the cathedral of Notre-Dame watches over Quasimodo the bell-ringer, Esmeralda the street dancer, and Archdeacon Claude Frollo, whose desire pulls all three toward the towers, the Court of Miracles, and the gallows. Hugo’s novel is medieval historical adventure: a city, a cathedral, and a love story that made Notre-Dame itself a character.