The Name of the Rose

In fourteenth-century Norway, headstrong Kristin Lavransdatter defies her father for the charming, reckless Erlend Nikulaussøn, then lives out a marriage, seven sons, and a faith tested by politics, guilt, and the coming of the Black Death. Sigrid Undset’s Nobel-winning trilogy is medieval historical fiction of one woman’s whole life against church, kin, and a frozen northern kingdom.

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.

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

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.

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.