Medieval – Renaissance novels set in the eastern Mediterranean: travel to new places. What are some of your favorites—anywhere—from Medieval or Renaissance times?

It’s no surprise that many of my favorite historical novels from the Medieval through Renaissance periods are set in lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea. If they’re also mysteries, even better. Why? I’m writing a Late Renaissance mystery trilogy. Book 1, set in Venice, is almost through the editing process for 2024 querying. Book 2, set in Istanbul, is well underway. Book 3, Croatia, a sketchy outline. My two mismatched sleuths solve crimes in the late 1500s. They encounter pirates, mythical beings, thieves, and empires in conflict around the eastern Mediterranean: so many places and reasons for trouble.

Below is a selection of novels: ten of my favorites set in the Medieval – Renaissance periods.

My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk

Who can remember every book they’ve read? To help remember, I found a ranked readers’ list of Medieval-Renaissance novels in GoodReads. Strangely enough, it did not include My Name Is Red, my favorite book from that time. In 2006, Pamuk won the Noble Prize in Literature, focused on but not exclusive to this historical novel. Set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, Pamuk’s home town, My Name Is Red is “…a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art.”  So wonderful, it’s time to read it again.

 

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose—rich in language, mood, and mystery—ranks number one in the GoodReads list. In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville investigates heresy and murder at a Benedictine abbey in Italy. “His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas…sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey.” I’ve read this novel twice and watched the movie, starring Sean Connery and a young Christian Slater.

 

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

I’ll read anything by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks. My copy of People of the Book is dog-eared. Brooks brings a fresh look, a probing journalist’s eyes, and insight to every historical period or event she writes about. “This ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain.”

 

The Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, by Ellis Peters

Scholar Edith Pargeter, writing as Ellis Peters, wrote twenty in the Brother Cadfael series, tales of a twelfth-century English monk and herbalist who solves mysteries from a cloister set in the environs of Shrewsbury. Worldly-wise, Brother Cadfael entered the cloister after years of traveling the eastern Mediterranean as a crusader and sea captain. “Abbots call upon him as a medical examiner, detective, doctor and diplomat.” The first volume is A Morbid Taste for Bones. I’ve consumed most of these delicious mysteries and watched the Mystery!: Cadfael series, starring the superlative Derek Jacobi.

 

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

It’s 1596. Where’s Shakespeare? Oh, he’s off writing plays. This deeply emotional story focuses on Shakespeare’s wife Agnes (Anne), her fierce devotion to their children, and her futile efforts to save their young son Hamnet from the ravages of bubonic plague. Like Brother Cadfael, Agnes was an  accomplished herbalist and O’Farrell’s scenes in the fields surrounding Stratford are potent and lyrical, says this gardener/naturalist. Four years after Hamnet’s death, Shakespeare was inspired to write Hamlet.

 

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White

When I was in my late teens and twenties, I immersed myself in arthurian legends. Myth: I was crazy about myth and still am. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King got me through a miserable week in the hospital in my mid-twenties. White sets his interpretation of arthurian legend in fourteenth-century Britain and follows Arthur from an inquisitive child to trouble-beset king, from a playful, fanciful tale to brooding meditation.

 

The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish

The Weight of Ink tells the tale of two cerebral women: One a scribe for a blind rabbi in 1660s London, the other a present-day, ailing historian in a race to identify the hidden identity of the scribe before another academic team does and before she dies. As a research librarian, I was fascinated by the ups and downs of determining the source of the scribe known only as “Aleph.” But it is the world of seventeenth-century London and Ester Velasquez’s engagement with it that most captured me. I can close my eyes and see Ester, the scribe and an emigrant from Amsterdam, on her first outing in bustling London. The book is long, 576 pages; but once I entered those two worlds, length was irrelevant.

 

The Physician, by Noah Gordon

Recommended to me by many who know my taste in books, The Physician tells an eleventh-century tale of an orphaned boy apprenticed to a barber-surgeon in England. When his mentor dies, the now young man realizes that his snake-oil business might have roots in something reputable. He makes his way to Persia, where “Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools. Christians are barred…but claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna.” And he falls in love. I saw the movie based on The Physician, but my memory of the book is more potent.

 

Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier

The story is based on Girl with a Pearl Earring, a same-named painting by seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer is famous for his play of light and shadow and for paintings that reveal domestic scenes. Chevalier’s novel conveys the domestic scene of Vermeer’s own home. Griet, who reveals the story, comes to the Vermeer home as a teenage servant. Through her eyes, we see the stir of a large family and the process of making art. Becoming closer and closer to the artist, Griet eventually becomes part of Vermeer’s art.

 

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

I so love All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, that I bought Cloud Cuckoo Land the minute it came out. More than 600 pages long, it’s still on my TBR list. The settings include a library in fifteenth-century Istanbul, still one of the world’s most evocative cities; a library in present-day Idaho; and a starship in the near future. Istanbul, libraries…I’ve put Cloud Cuckoo Land on this list, aspirationally. My daughter, a reader of good books, recommends it, so it’s next up, after I finish reading a recent birthday present, the latest Patricia Cornwell.

 

What are your favorite historical novels?

…from anywhere, set between between approximately 1200 and 1700? Please post them in Comments below. We love suggestions for good reads.