This is a great year for historical fiction! A plethora of medieval and Renaissance novels entered the market in competition with the ever-popular Philippa Gregory. Gregory’s latest novel, The Red Queen, is fabulous by the way — an imaginative portrait of Margaret Beaufort, the indomitable, ambitious and frighteningly powerful mother of Henry VII. Alison Weir’s The Captive Queen is a strong contender for Gregory’s spot in the limelight this year. A historian whose specialty is European royals, Weir is a veteran of historical biographies. The Captive Queen is her third and, in this librarian’s opinion, best historical novel. It features the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine, a woman who in the 12th century owned half of what is now France, the queen whose passionate marriage to Henry II was only one small part of long, bitter power struggles that ravaged the medieval world.
Portraying a similarly ruthless royal mother, C.W. Gortner’s new book, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, enters the mind of one of history’s most notorious queen-mothers to find the spark of courage that allowed Catherine to exist in an environment of intrigue and hostility. Gortner plays on rumor by imbuing Catherine with the gift of prophecy, which she shares with Nostradamus, in an increasingly repressive Protestant world.
Highlighting medieval women’s underhanded machinations, The Queen’s Lover by Vanora Bennett is not to be missed. Who would have thought Catherine de Valois, the timid French wife of Henry V, would fall hard for Owain Tudor, soldier/poet of Wales? In The King’s Mistress by Emma Campion, by a surprising twist of fate, Alice Salisbury is plucked from her complacent life and brought to the court of Edward III where she comes out ahead as the king’s mistress and a successful businesswoman.
Finally, among the several choices of novels about heresy and the Spanish Inquisition, try Brenda Vantrease’s The Heretic’s Wife for its homely portrayal of a loving marriage forged between strong-minded people whose beliefs put them at risk. Combine Henry VIII , Thomas More, and a beleaguered Catholic Church with William Tyndale and his Bible translation army and stir. This is the story of average people caught up in the idealism of powerful men. Watermark by Vanitha Sankaran is a similar tale featuring a disfigured albino woman whose fate is persecution but whose calling as a poet carries her through the Inquisition and brushes with witch hunters.
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