Here, the criticism takes place when a book is read. Those that are selected for this site are recommended by definition (by virtue of being selected). What we do is to tell you something about the book; enough, we hope, to enable you to decide whether the world it conjures up is your kind of world, the people who live in it your kind of people.
ABOUT US
KB is Kate Burns, a yoga teacher and tarot enthusiast who has for some time now been "on her travels". She is at present in Bihar, India, but keeps in touch by email. She says she always has a couple of paperbacks in her bag, preferably historical romance/fantasy. She also writes the occasional poem and short story, and I have discovered that she is something of an expert both on the so-called Dark Ages (not only in Europe but in Africa and the Middle and Far East) and on (believe it!) reincarnation.
MBG is M.B.Gilbride, a writer of erotic SF, HF, and fantasy. As this is a pen-name, little more can be said about him, but he is known to like the weirder medieval novels (medieval fantasy) and will be reviewing most of them, especially stories that involve some form of shape-shifting. He is, in his own words, obsessed with the whole notion of shape-shifting. He is also fascinated by the Templars and what happened to them after the official dissolution of the Order, and by the history (and various alternative histories) of Byzantium (especially the Empress Theodora!).
JM is James Munro, who likes to think of himself as a poet (Sweeney Jim, Better Than Sleep, Fin de Millennium, The Jesus Bhakti Poems, etc) but spends most of his time these days reading and writing HF (medieval) and SF (time-travel). His special fields in HF are medieval theology and heresy, the Cathars and the Templars, alchemy and witchcraft, but his interests include Dark Age Scotland and Ireland (including the oft-overlooked Picts), the Vikings who settled in Sutherland and Caithness and the Northern Isles, and the Nordic gods; also divination (especially palm-reading and tarot), wyrd and shamanism, and all the magic and mystery of Middle Earth. He now lives in Greece, where he relaxes in the heat of summer beneath a trellised vine with a carafe and a glass and a good book. In the winter, he teaches and writes.
e-mail us
REVIEWS of outstanding Historical Fiction
(and occasional essential Non-Fiction)
set in the Medieval Period, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance -
i.e. (but we're not going to be too rigid about this) from the abdication of the last
Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476, (which marked the advent of the
medieval papacy and the coming of the Dark Ages) to the death of Richard III,
the last Plantagenet (and last medieval) king, in 1485, and
the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492.
Though we love all things medieval, when we first envisaged this website we really hadn't got much further than the genre which has become known as the "medieval mystery" (Ellis Peters' Cadfael stories for example): hence the domain name MedievalMysteries.com.
We found, though, that there was a great difference between the true medieval novel or mystery (mystery as in Mystery Plays?) and the whodunit which is arbitrarily set in medieval times though the mystery is not medieval in nature at all.
In Ellis Peters' first Cadfael story, by contrast, the mystery involves the remains of an obscure Welsh saint: that's medieval.
And so we branched out. Now our remit is the best HF set in the middle ages, and we prefer HF that contains something of
(a) Medieval Magic and Mystery, and
(b) one or more realistic Medieval Outsiders among the cast of characters
