There is kind of a dearth of novels written by authors of color set in this time period. I used these dates for all the novels listed here, though I did have to stretch it some when searching for medieval novels written by authors of color. But for this post, I’m using these parameters. I know there are many, many different ways to define the era depending on what you look at, where, and so forth.

Just for the purposes of this list, and because I’m an Anglophile, I chose to define the Middle Ages in England from 510 CE (the end of the Roman Empire in Britain) to Aug(the Battle of Bosworth Field during the Wars of the Roses, the start of the Tudor dynasty I’ll round it up to an even 1500 CE). I fucking love his books, y’all, but you won’t find him listed here because I want to give other, less well known authors a chance to play in the sandbox. Also, there are a shit ton of authors of medieval fiction who aren’t, like, Bernard Cornwell. There was a whole globe that existed at the same time, experiencing its own stories and pain and joy, not all of which had a thing to do with knights and damsels and the rest. It is also mainly Western ethnocentrism that makes us automatically assume the knights and castles in the first place. But the Middle Ages are so much richer and more complex than that. The Middle Ages are awesome.īut first, a question: When you think about the Middle Ages, what do you picture? Knights in shining armor? Castles and kings and queens and serfs? I’d be lying if I said that isn’t the very first thing I think of, myself. But the next best thing to me is to read lots and lots of medieval historical fiction. So we’ll try to avoid medieval Star Trek historical fiction. Historical fiction that is somehow also Star Trek would be the best, but that would involve time travel and might fuck with the space/time continuum and then you’d get the Department of Temporal Investigation involved, and those guys are cranky.

So, my favorite thing to read is probably medieval historical fiction.

Duchess of Aquitaine by Margaret Ball