Mistress of the Art of Death

In May 1137, Prior Robert of Shrewsbury Abbey sends a party into Wales for the bones of Saint Winifred, and Brother Cadfael goes along as their Welsh translator. Ellis Peters’s 1977 novel is medieval mystery historical fiction of that expedition to Gwytherin—the villager who stands against moving the grave is killed with an arrow, and Cadfael, a former Crusader turned herbalist, looks for a human hand on the bow.

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

In July 1209, as the Albigensian Crusade closes on Carcassonne, seventeen-year-old Alaïs Pelletier is given a book by her father and told it holds the secret of the true Grail. Kate Mosse’s 2005 novel is medieval time-slip historical fiction of that charge—and of archaeologist Alice Tanner, who in July 2005 finds two skeletons in a Pyrenees cave marked with a labyrinth and cannot leave the Cathars’ war buried.

Cathedral-building, civil war, and intertwined lives in twelfth-century England.

Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a Saxon earl’s son raised by Danes, is pulled between a pagan war-band and Alfred’s Wessex as ninth-century England is carved up. Cornwell’s opening Saxon novel is medieval military historical fiction: shield walls, divided loyalty, and the making of England.

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.