Marion Turner's Reading List

"So, the Canterbury Tales . We have a group of people who meet at an inn, or a pub. They’re all going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and they decide they’re going to travel together and tell stories on the way to pass the time. This is going to be a competition, so at the end, the person who’s told the best story will get a free meal paid for by the rest. The scene is set precisely for variety: for lots of people to be able to tell different kinds of stories. The idea of the tale collection—a group of stories—is a brilliant genre, because it allows you to do many different things. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It starts in a seemingly conservative way, where there’s a pretend drawing of lots, but in fact, the person of the highest social status gets to tell the first tale, the Knight. But then, after that, Harry Bailly (the innkeeper) wants to keep on a hierarchical order of tale-telling. He says, in effect, ‘Okay, the person of highest secular status, the knight, told the first tale; now the monk, the person of highest religious status, will tell the next tale.’ And the drunken miller just says, ‘Absolutely not, I’m going to tell the next tale. I can tell a great tale, I won’t be stopped!’ So, he’s allowed to tell the next tale. And he tells a brilliant tale. After that, we never return to the principle of hierarchy. The tales take on an organic form where one follows another. Sometimes someone suggests something; sometimes there’s an argument in between tales and someone jumps in. All kinds of different things happen. Absolutely. Some of the tales are deliberately extremely comic; some are very ribald in all kinds of ways. Others are very serious. In different centuries, people have liked different ones the best. In the 15th century—so, in the hundred years after Chaucer’s death—people liked best tales that in the 20th century people thought were quite boring: the tales with a serious moral message. So, the saint’s life, ‘The Second Nun’s Tale’, for instance, and ‘The Tale of Melibee’, an allegory about prudence, which is one of only two prose tales. In the 20th century, the ones that people liked best were the ones that were outrageously funny and often very rude. For many, if they know anything about specific Canterbury tales, they’ll know about ‘The Miller’s Tale’, which involves someone farting out of a window. It involves adultery, and this very complicated story where one suitor thinks that he is kissing the face of his loved one, but he’s in fact kissing the bottom of her lover. There’re all these farcical things going on. “For many, if they know anything about specific Canterbury tales, they’ll know about ‘The Miller’s Tale’, which involves someone farting out of a window” Or they know about ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, which involves two people having adulterous sex in a tree. These kinds of outrageous stories were the ones people liked best in the 20th century. There’s a Chaucer for everybody because he did so many different things. And each individual tale can be interpreted in so many ways—he really opens up possibilities of multiple interpretations. Even when he seems to give you a clear moral, that moral is never effective or convincing. He’s always saying: ‘Find your own moral; find your own meaning.’ And he’s always telling you to look further and to think for yourself—not to let anyone else tell you what things really mean. One of my own favourites is ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, a tale that ends by telling the reader to find the moral for themselves—it has spliced together many genres and stories-within-stories, and seeming digressions, and avoids giving a clear moral message."

"Exactly. I chose the House of Fame because I think it’s a really important precursor to the Canterbury Tales . The House of Fame is in fact my favourite Chaucerian text. It’s a crazy text. It’s unfinished—or seemingly unfinished. It’s a dream vision. It’s also the poem of Chaucer’s that seems to be the most autobiographical—though ‘seems’ is an important word there. The main character is called Geoffrey: he’s a writer, works as an accountant (as Chaucer did in the Customs Office), and then goes home at night to read books and try to write. The story is that he has writer’s block. He doesn’t know what to write about. He falls asleep and he has this very complicated and interesting dream where he passes through various different locations. He has a guide, an eagle figure, who kind of shouts at him in all kinds of ways. He takes him up to the Milky Way. He looks down on the world. He goes through a Temple of Glas and then, later on, he reaches the House of Fame, and then the House of Rumour. These different locations are really important. When he’s in the temple early on, the story of Aeneas and Dido is painted on the walls. This is one of the foundational stories of Western culture: the story of the Aeneid by Virgil. It then morphs into another version of that story: the Heroides by Ovid. Chaucer is showing us that even when you’re reading the most authoritative texts, they’re not reliable, because these two great authorities tell us different things about these characters. Can they both be right? Can we trust even the greatest of authorities? “Can we trust even the greatest of authorities?” Then we get to the House of Fame. We talk a lot these days about the ‘canon,’ but Chaucer was really interested in that idea, too. In the House of Fame, he shows us that the names of the famous are etched in ice. On one side, the names are in the sun, so they melt. On the other, they happen to be in the shade, so they survive. It’s completely random: some good things survive; some don’t. We don’t know all the stuff that didn’t survive, or that’s hidden and hasn’t come out into the open. He shows us these great authors standing on pillars, all fighting with each other. One says that Homer is a liar, for instance. That’s a really radical thing for Chaucer to say—that maybe these great authorities didn’t really know what they were talking about. The Chaucer figure goes through this vision of the canon, and someone asks him who he is, and if he’s there for fame. He says, ‘No, I’m not, I’m just looking for new tidings, but I haven’t found anything here; I’m not getting inspired.’ He wants ‘Somme new tydynges for to lere / Somme newe thinges, y not what.’ Then he goes to the House of Rumour. The House of Rumour is a refracted depiction of what seems to be the contemporary city—contemporary London. It’s a crazy place: it’s very dynamic; everything is moving; it’s very loud; things are flying everywhere; it’s open; there are no porters at the doors guarding it, no gatekeepers of the profession. Things go in, Things go out. Truth and lies are fixed together: “fals and soth compouned”, just as they are earlier. It’s not an idealised place, but it’s a dynamic place: it’s a place of life, where there are lots and lots of stories. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter You mentioned the very end of the poem, where all these seemingly ordinary people arrive with these bags full of stories. The stories are from all over the place. Some of them are lies, some of them are true—we just don’t know. But they’re interesting. The poem breaks off on the word ‘authority’, which is a perfect ending. The figures in the poem see someone who “semed for to be / A man of gret auctorite”, but of course that person can’t arrive, because the whole poem has been about the notion that authority doesn’t exist—that we should tear down authority. Now, Chaucer thought that people such as Virgil and Ovid were fantastic poets. He isn’t saying that we should throw them away or ignore them. He read them; he was inspired by them. Many of the tales, which are allegedly told by ordinary people, are in fact tales from literary sources. But I think he’s really interested in getting material from everywhere . So, read the classics, but also listen to what ordinary people are saying. There’s a part in the House of Fame where the eagle guide says to him, ‘Your problem is you just sit on your own in your room reading books. You need to go to the doorway, and talk to your neighbors as well – “thy verray neyghbores’ that live ‘at thy dores.’ He tells the ‘Geffrey’ narrator figure to go and listen to them. So, the message of the House of Fame is about opening out a sense of where you can find material, listening to everyone’s stories. And that segues perfectly into the idea of the Canterbury Tales , where the fundamental point is that everyone has a story to tell. We should listen to all kinds of different stories, different versions of events, and decide for ourselves where we think any truths might lie. But you have to understand that every version of the story is one perspective. No one has an objective perspective; we’re always hearing versions and biased perspectives."

"Chaucer isn’t the first or the only person in the 14th century to be writing a tale collection, but what he does with the form is radically different. It’s really important to know about Boccaccio when you’re thinking about Chaucer. Boccaccio was an Italian poet, also from a mercantile background like Chaucer, so they’re both very much products of the later Middle Ages where these kinds of people can become poets. He wrote in Tuscan, wrote many poems which were very influential on Chaucer such as the Teseida (which is the basis of ‘The Knight’s Tale’), the Filostrato (which is the basis of Troilus and Criseyde ), and the Decameron (which is a collection of tales). Boccaccio was also writing in his vernacular, Tuscan, a dialect of Italian. So, in some ways, when Chaucer chose to write in English, he was following an international trend: writing in the vernacular. Doing this, you could write texts that were accessible to a greater range of classes, and more accessible to women as well as men, and so on. Rather than writing in Latin or French—which were the more natural languages of education, and which he certainly could have written in—Chaucer chooses to write in English. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He went at least twice to Italy. He probably knew Italian because of his mercantile upbringing, but then when he got court appointments, he was in a position to be chosen to go on these Italian missions, which were to negotiate trade and marriages, things like that. So, he’s not going there for any literary reason. But while he was there, that’s almost certainly where he picked up lots of Italian manuscripts. He was reading Dante (which is hugely influential on the House of Fame in particular), Petrarch (he’s the first person to translate a Petrarchan sonnet into English, in Book One of Troilus and Criseyde ), and he’s probably the only person in England who’s reading Boccaccio at this time. He reads Boccaccio both in the Italian and in French translation. Chaucer’s reading of Boccaccio completely transforms English poetry. It transforms choice of subject matter in all kinds of ways, but also, formally, you can see that the kind of poetic forms that he developed are in some ways influenced by reading Boccaccio. The development of the ten-syllable line was influenced by the Italian poetic line called the endecasillabo , an 11-syllable line which also has stresses in it. It’s a different kind of line, but it was influential, and we can see Chaucer developing his ten-syllable line from Boccaccio. So, reading Boccaccio is formally transformative as well as being very influential on the subject matter. “Chaucer’s reading of Boccaccio completely transforms English poetry” Boccaccio is Chaucer’s main source. He uses Boccaccio more than anyone else in his works, although he never names him or mentions him. There’s a lot of debate about in how much detail Chaucer uses the Decameron . He certainly knew something about it, but I don’t think he sat and read it in the kind of detail that he sat and read Il Filostrato or the Teseida . The Decameron specifically is a story about ten people who meet in Santa Maria Novella, a real church in Florence, in the time of the plague. They decide to escape the plague by going to a lovely country house with their servants, and when they go there, they then tell stories. There’s ten of them for ten days; they tell ten stories a day, so there are 100 stories. The stories tend to be very, very funny. A lot of them are very rude. The key thing which I want to get across is that the tellers are all of the same social class and background. When they meet in Santa Maria Novella, we’re told they’re all beautiful, young. Many of them are related to each other. They’re all of gentle status, so essentially they’re all noble, aristocratic people. There are seven women and three men, which is very interesting—it’s female-dominated. The form is also very carefully structured: ten stories a day. The Canterbury Tales , then, is really interesting in its differences from that model. Because in the Canterbury Tales , we have pilgrims of radically different social class. Instead of having people who are all knightly, we have one knight. We have a merchant, a man of law, a shipman, a sailor, a plowman (though he doesn’t actually get to tell his tale). There are lots and lots of different kinds of clerics, for instance a pardoner, a parson—not all high-status clerics. We have people like the miller; we have ribald people, drunk people. It’s extraordinary that Chaucer puts these very ordinary people into this text and says they’re all going to tell stories. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In Boccaccio’s text, they all meet in a church, a central symbol of Florence. Chaucer’s group meet in an inn just south of the river in Southwark. They don’t meet in St. Paul’s Cathedral. They don’t meet in the centre of London. They meet on the margins, on the threshold. They also meet in a place of commerce, a place of buying and selling—often a place of sexual escapades, of drinking. I mean, it’s a reputable hostel, but it’s not St. Paul’s Cathedral. Looking at the differences between those two texts helps us to see how radical Chaucer is in his focus on hearing everyone’s voice. One example would be ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, which Boccaccio tells and then Petrarch translates, and then Chaucer writes a version of it too We have Boccaccio’s Italian version, Petrarch’s Latin version, and Chaucer’s English version of the Griselda story. He’s actually not getting that directly from the Decameron , so it’s quite an interesting example of the multi-lingual nature of culture at this time. At this time, people were very happy to recycle stories and put a different spin on them. Today, we think a lot about originality. Of course, there are a lot of problems with the very idea of originality. Can we really think up new stories? But people didn’t think about originality in that way in the Middle Ages. No one thought you had to invent your own plot—it was really what you did with it that counted. “In the Middle Ages, no one thought you had to invent your own plot” Let’s take the story of Griselda. The rich ruler of the country, Walter, marries her, and tells her she must obey him in every possible way and never go against him in anything. She promises that she’ll do that, and he proceeds to torture her. Essentially, what he does is that each time she has a child, he tells her he’s going to kill that child. He doesn’t actually kill the child, but she thinks that he has. He removes the children; she thinks they’re both dead over the years, and has to go on pretending everything’s fine. Eventually, he says that he’s going to marry someone else and casts her off. But when his new wife arrives, it’s not his new wife—it’s the children come back. Everything’s supposed to be resolved . . . Griselda collapses, and he tells her he’s been testing her all these years. Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer each tell the story, and essentially, Boccaccio and Chaucer both show a lot of sympathy for the oppressed woman. Petrarch’s take is that this isn’t really about domestic abuse and the abuse of women: this is about God and the soul. The soul should be obedient to God whatever. The problem with that allegory is that it makes God a sadist, tempting you for fun. It’s really problematic and bleak. In Boccaccio, the teller Dioneo says that he wishes she (Griselda) had gone off and had an affair with someone else. He’s speaking against Walter. And Chaucer’s clerk gives us Petrarch’s moral but says it’s not really adequate. He refers to the Wife of Bath, a very strong woman. He gives us a lot of different ways of thinking about this tale, and throughout the tale, the clerk keeps saying that he shouldn’t be testing her. He explicitly says that there is ‘no nede’ to put her in ‘angwyssh and in drede’. Chaucer also makes an innovation in that tale in that he sets it in Lombardy, an area known at the time for its tyranny. Petrarch was sponsored by the Lombard tyrants. So, Chaucer is making a very specific point that this is a tale about tyranny; this is a tale about not only political tyranny but also domestic tyranny. And Chaucer certainly thought that tyranny was a bad thing."

"I wanted one of my five choices to be a book of literary criticism. It was quite hard to choose which one, because there are so many great ones. This is one I first read when I was an undergraduate. Back then, when it was a very new book, it really radically changed how I thought not only about Chaucer but about what’s possible in modes of historical literary criticism. Paul Strohm talks about the idea of “a mixed commonwealth of style.” He argues that that Chaucer, instead of talking directly about class conflict, displaces it onto the level of genre. He shows us this, for instance, in the romance- fabliaux conflict between the knight and the miller. Strohm makes the point that the poly-vocality, the multiple voices of the Canterbury Tales is itself a political statement. By having this mixed commonwealth—by simply allowing this heterogeneity—that is itself political. You don’t have to be saying as an author what you think about that; simply having those voices is political. That’s really important. “Feudal time is church time: in it, time is endless, and your relationships in time are always the same” He has another chapter called ‘Time and the social implications of narrative form’ in which he juxtaposes the idea of feudal time and merchant’s time. Feudal time is church time: in it, time is endless, and your relationships in time are always the same. You have the same relationship with your lord as your father had with your lord’s father, and that your grandfather had with your lord’s grandfather. These things will never change. It’s the idea that that we are all put into a place, and that time moves on in this unchanging way—as opposed to merchant’s time, or mercantile time, where we make transactions. We make our own opportunities. Things change all the time; everything can be bought or sold. There are all kinds of problems with living in that way, but we don’t have to live in the same way as our ancestors lived. We can live in a world of happenstance and chance where we take advantage of opportunities, and we can rush through time. We can do different things. He shows how different genres are appealing to those different kinds of ideas of time, and how narrative is implicated within that. That’s not just relevant for thinking about Chaucer: it’s relevant for thinking about social change across the Long Middle Ages, and much later; those different kinds of models of existence have an ongoing relevance. For me, I think if people were thinking about reading books of literary criticism, I would say that’s a really excellent one to start with. If I could just mention a few more, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics by Carolyn Dinshaw was another one that really changed how I thought about Chaucer. It came out at the same kind of time as Social Chaucer— now about 30 years ago, but it is still very influential and field-changing. Dinshaw talks in particular about models of reading as gendered across time: the idea that men are expected to be readers and interpreters and women are used as metaphors for the text. They are things to be interpreted. And Dinshaw shows how even many 20th century critics were still using that kind of language and imagery. Chaucerian Polity by David Wallace, which very much focuses on the Italian political and literary context as well as on Chaucer’s texts, is also a very important book in thinking about the different kinds of literary and political social models that Chaucer would have experienced when he went to Italy and saw both a tyrannical state and oligarchic city-states. And he engaged with different kinds of Italian literature, which are implicated in those different social and political constructs as well. Wallace focuses on Italian contexts in the round—literary, political, artistic—and his work was also field-changing for Chaucer studies, and deeply influential on me personally. In terms of thinking about my own biography of Chaucer, when you write an enormous book like that, so many major critical works help and inform what you do. Those are just some of the critics—Strohm, Dinshaw, Wallace—that have really helped me over the decades to approach Chaucer. But of course I could name hundreds more. “There hasn’t been a full biography of Chaucer for a generation” It’s notable that there hasn’t been a full biography of Chaucer for a generation. Whereas there are so many biographies of Shakespeare , for example—many of which are great and take different approaches, of course—there hasn’t been a full biography of Chaucer for a long time. What I’ve done is focused on spaces and places, so that each chapter is a location or institution – ranging from Vintry Ward in London, to Genoa and Florence, to the Great Household, to Thresholds, or Peripheries. For me the focus on spaces and places has really helped me to focus on Chaucer’s imagination, and to think about what he saw and how he lived. I’ve tried to find a new way of cutting across his life, and to explore different ways of thinking about the relationship between life and texts. It was fascinating to have the scope to explore places ranging from his daughter’s London nunnery, to Olite and Roncesvalles in Navarre, to places that he thought about philosophically, such as the Milky Way. I hope that I’ve opened up new aspects of his life and thought. But I don’t feel like this should be the last biography of Chaucer—there’s actually lots of interesting opportunities for biography. People are thinking about all kinds of innovative ways of writing biographically. I don’t think there should ever be the definitive life—the authorised life—of anyone, and certainly not Chaucer, who was deeply suspicious of anything authoritative."

"I absolutely love this book. It’s extraordinary. It’s quite different from the other books that I’ve chosen today. As you say, it has a fantasy element; all the other books I’ve chosen are more obviously realist. This is a book which is more mythic, more symbolic, and it’s also set in a different era. The medieval period is ridiculously long, about 1,000 years. The other books I’ve chosen are all set in the later part of that period, after the Norman Conquest. This is set after the Romans have left the British Isles, at a time when there are Britons on the island and the Saxon tribes have started to come over from Germanic lands. It’s a book that I find powerful in so many ways. It’s essentially about memory and forgetting. It’s about terrible atrocities that have happened between different groups of people and how they can then manage to live together, and how they can break out of cycles of revenge and trauma. It’s very obviously relevant to all kinds of conflicts—to things that have happened in Northern Ireland, or Israel and Palestine, for example. It’s a book that speaks to experiences that cut across time and space. It also reminds us that the history of this country has always been a history of immigration, of lots of different kinds of people coming here. Immigration is not a recent, 20th century phenomenon. We’ve always been a place that has a mix of different peoples and that’s been a great strength. The book also makes us think about historical fiction itself, about why we want to remember our own past. Why does it matter to us? It kind of thematises the reading experience, if that makes sense, because it is so profoundly about this issue of memory. ‘The Dark Ages’ is a bit of a contentious term because it implies not only that we know nothing about it, but also that the things going on were inherently dark. In fact, we do know some things about this period and what was going on: we have chronicles and poems, particularly as the period goes on. There’s always been some reasonable bureaucracy in this country that has left records, so we do have written artefacts. We also have archaeological evidence. And yet, at the same time, I think that Ishiguro is right that we really don’t know much about what happened to the people that were here before the tribes of Angles and Saxons came. There is debate about to what extent they were wiped out, or intermarried, or were driven out. There is certainly a space there for being very imaginative about what happened. I really love the way that he does that, the way that he imagines how the Britons were living, the way that he thinks about the relationship between the people that were here before and the people that came later. It’s a mistake to read historical fiction as a history lesson and I think Ishiguro absolutely does not want us to do that. His book features Gawain as a character, for instance, a mythic character. It also features a dragon, who symbolizes important themes in the book. The country is covered with a mist, which is making people forget. He is not trying to write a book that teaches us about what the period was like. He’s very explicitly saying that in the quote that you gave because he’s saying, ‘this is a place where I felt I could be imaginative.’ He uses symbols and so on, to try to imagine us into the time. That’s hugely effective in helping us to try to get inside the mindset of people who are struggling with change, with what’s changed in their country, with what they need to remember in order to move on, and the way in which dealing with that memory might cause real problems. It makes you think about issues to do with truth and reconciliation, how different countries or systems have dealt with the trauma of the past. The kinds of things that this book is doing are very consciously not just about that particular historical moment."

"This book is set in the 13th century. It’s called Pilgrims , so we immediately think of Christianity and a Christian pilgrimage, which is indeed crucial to the structure of the book. But the religion that matters at least as much, and possibly more, in this book is Judaism . It focuses on the persecution and expulsion of the Jewish community from England in the 13th century. I found that particularly powerful and important. We were just talking about something similar with Ishiguro. Matthew Kneale also moves us away from the idea of a monolithic sense of medieval English or British culture. Instead, he shows us all kinds of issues relating to what we would think of as colonialism, invasion, different kinds of immigrants and takeovers. Another part of the book is fundamentally rooted in what’s going on in Wales. It’s about the English incursion into Wales, and the different atrocities and accommodations that are going on between England and Wales at this time. But the Jewish experience is really at the heart of this book, because in the late 13th century very important Jewish communities were expelled from England, not to return for hundreds of years. That’s one of the most crucial aspects of this book. “The medieval period is ridiculously long, about 1,000 years” In terms of religion more broadly, there are many different aspects. You’ve got the doctrine, which most ordinary people wouldn’t have thought very much about, or not in detail. You’ve got popular piety, which might be more about feast days and going on pilgrimages. Pilgrimage was a very important part of medieval Christianity, little local trips—not going all way to Rome, which is what this book is about. Today we know lots of people who are atheist and agnostic: that wasn’t really an option in the medieval period. For European Christians at this time, being religious wasn’t a choice. Religion was a constant part of life and the church was crucial. From almost the day of your birth—you might well be baptized on the day of your birth or the next—you were part of a parish, part of a community. People heard church bells ringing to structure their day. There were lots of monks and friars. There were periodic heresies, people challenging the church. There are also lots of moments when you see people have more individual relationships with God, trying to think about God for themselves. And, of course, at the end of the medieval period, we get the Reformation. But before that, there were other movements that tried to reform the church in various ways. So the church is different at different times across this long period. I think I would say there wasn’t a choice between either doing it as a performance or believing it. It’s fairly indisputable that everyone did basically believe in their religion at this time. There was a general level of belief. That isn’t to say that people wanted to go to church all the time. A lot of people would go on pilgrimages in order to have fun. Some of them were going because they believed, because they wanted to get a cure for an illness. But other people went for a bit of a change, a bit of a holiday. There was a lot of criticism of pilgrimage because people were doing it as a way to travel and do something different. So yes, people would buy badges displaying where they’d been to show other people back home. One of the other things that I really liked about Matthew Kneale’s book, Pilgrims, is that he does have quite a few really interesting female characters. His characters are very varied and one thing he’s very good at is different voices. He did this in his earlier book, English Passengers , as well, he told it through lots of different voices. Here again we have different characters, different stories feeding in, that are in some ways based on The Canterbury Tales , though it’s a very different kind of text. He’s not just interested in the experiences of Christian English men, but also in the experiences of different kinds of women and, as I’ve already mentioned, of Jewish characters and of Welsh characters, too. He really gives us this texture of medieval English life as something which is diverse in lots of ways. Certainly, the ordinary plowman at this time was not likely to travel far beyond their own immediate vicinity, but people of slightly higher classes might well have opportunities to travel. When you get into the educated classes, lots of those people travelled. There was a huge amount of traffic between France or the so-called Low Countries (what we would think of as the Netherlands and Belgium) and England at this time. Also, people such as Chaucer, who was not a hugely important person (although he was a diplomat and went on royal trade missions) would indeed go further afield, to places such as Italy and Spain. Kneale’s book is about a pilgrimage to Rome. There are records of lots and lots of English people in Rome. There was an English hospice there, where English people would go and stay and lots of interesting examples of English people who went there. Some English people went all the way to Jerusalem . They got boats to the Holy Land, whether on pilgrimages or, at other times, to fight on crusades. So there was a lot more travel at this time than people often imagine. People think that everyone just stayed at home in the medieval era and are often surprised when they hear that someone like Chaucer was riding to Italy and Spain and very frequently crossing the channel, and that products were coming to England from as far away as Indonesia."

"It’s so interesting that it did so well, isn’t it? It’s set in Italy in a monastery. Eco makes interesting demands on his reader. There’s a lot of philosophy , theories of knowledge. I find it very, very heartening that so many people have taken the time to read this complicated book. And I think the reason it’s been so popular is that he did this really genius thing of putting together a very complex field—semiotics or sign theory—with detective fiction, because those two things are essentially the same thing. What do clues tell you? When you have a sign, which could be a footprint, what does that footprint tell you? What can you deduce from it? What assumptions are you making that don’t quite work? It’s a real page-turner. There are red herrings, different suspects, false leads. You’re very excited and interested to find out what’s happening. That is set against lots of discussions about how we can read signs, how we can we think about knowledge, about different kinds of heresy, different modes of belief. He puts quite complicated philosophical, religious and theological thought into his book, almost by sleight of hand. It’s so clever. The other thing that makes the book so appealing is the way that he describes setting. You get so rooted in the world of the monastery, the world of the library where there’s this secret book. It’s immersive. You really feel like you’re in those shadowy corridors, you want to get into these secret spaces, and he holds you back. You really are with the characters because his descriptions are so powerful. It’s fiction, so it’s making us question the status of this text. It’s actually a very medieval thing to do, giving a fake authority, pretending that you’ve got this source from somewhere when really it’s from somewhere else. He’s not trying to trick us. He’s trying to set up an ambiguity around the text, to say, ‘Does anything really have an origin? Can we believe signs? What do they really refer to? Is everything a copy, a version of something? Can we ever actually get to the thing itself?’ He’s making that same point about sign theory over and over again. I think it’d be very hard not to involve it in some way, just because it’s part of the fabric of people’s lives. The Name of the Rose is set in a monastery. Pilgrims is set on a pilgrimage. You can have books about the Middle Ages which aren’t so profoundly set in a religious context, but you can’t really ignore it. Say, The Invention of Fire , which we haven’t talked about yet: although religion is there in the background, it’s not really about religion. I suppose there are still references to religious characters, so religion is involved, but it is not central."

"I think it probably is what draws a lot of people to historical fiction. It’s not the only thing. Of my book choices today, I think The Buried Giant is perhaps doing something a bit different because of its less realist nature. But I think most of the other books are aiming to produce a realist, immersive experience where you can feel that that you’re there. The Western Wind gives us an in-depth immersion into this small, rural village. It’s the only one of the books that I chose that is set in a village. It’s an exceptionally powerful description of a locale. It was something that I was a bit worried about when I was putting my list together. I think it would be quite interesting to know, in publishing terms, whether there are fewer women writing historical fiction about this era. Or whether they are they writing it, but it’s not getting picked up by publishers. I was thinking about what other medieval historical fiction I’ve read, by women. There is a very famous book called Katherine by Anya Seton , which is about Katherine Swynford, the mistress of John of Gaunt. That book gets a lot of people into the world of historical fiction. It’s not one of my personal top five, so I didn’t pick it for this interview but it is certainly an influential book. But overall I do think there is less medieval historical fiction written by women, which is a shame. The Western Wind is a really great book. I was very keen to put it on my list. What Harvey does is very clever: she tells the story backwards. It starts with a certain day and then it goes back in time through different days. It was billed as a whodunnit, though I actually don’t think that’s the best way of describing this book. It is much more about atmosphere and a particular world and uncovering the details of different characters’ motivations and ideas rather than solving what happened. If you were reading it as a mystery, it might not be satisfying because it leaves some things quite open, in ways that I think are quite brave for a writer to do. She writes absolutely beautifully. Some of her sentences are just so wonderfully crafted. She’s a very skilful writer. I think people like reading historical fiction from lots of different eras. It’d be interesting to know if there are particular eras that are more popular than others. With Hilary Mantel, and also the Shardlake books, there’s been lots of good early modern historical fiction, so slightly later than these books. I suppose people are often fascinated by books that are set at quite a temporal remove from our own time because it does offer that experience of making those imaginative leaps into a different kind of world. I think that’s very appealing. As I said earlier, people also often read books set in different periods in order to make connections with the present day as well, which I think all these books encourage us to do in many ways. There is this interesting tension, where you’re in this different world, but you see lots of things that are familiar as well. That combination is very powerful."

"That’s a really interesting question. Detective fiction, as we know it, really gets going in the 19th century, and then develops a lot in the 20th century. I would be making a big stretch if I tried to push earlier texts into that model, but there are medieval texts where there are mysteries. I think Gawain and the Green Knight , which I mentioned earlier, is a good example of a text where there’s suspense and there are puzzles. I wouldn’t call it detective fiction, but it appeals to some of the same things that detective fiction appeals to for us. The Invention of Fire is a very clever work of detective fiction. Bruce Holsinger is himself an academic, and really knows this 14th century world. For someone like me, who also really knows this world, it’s quite satisfying to read because he gets it so right. The book really is rooted in the medieval period. There are lots of references to legal cases, which if you’re a non-specialist reader, you wouldn’t know were based on real cases. For example, one part of the book talks about a cross-dressing prostitute in medieval London. This was a real person, John Rykener, known as Eleanor Rykener. Lots of people would think that we don’t have records like that from the 14th century, but we do. Holsinger then adds some fictionalized elements. He does so many interesting things like that in this book and it is extremely effective. I don’t think he does over the genre as a whole because the medieval period is so long. If you think about the books that I’ve talked about today they’re set in quite a few different periods. Also, probably quite a lot of writers might be reluctant to put real people into their fictions because it can be a real risk. You do get Holsinger’s books where Chaucer is a real character, and he completely pulls it off; and in Pilgrims there’s a kind of Canterbury Tales riff going on. But medieval historical fiction is a very varied genre; there are a lot of different things going on so I don’t think it is particularly Chaucerian overall. The Invention of Fire, though, is set in Chaucer’s lifetime. Chaucer is a character, and one of Chaucer’s contemporaries, John Gower, is the main detective figure. Lots and lots of the characters are real people whom Holsinger has then fictionalized in various ways. One of the things that I really like is that Holsinger upsets people’s expectations about what’s going on in this world. So the plot is partly based around the fact that handguns are being invented at this time. Gower also has spectacles, which are a new thing at that moment (Eco in fact, also uses spectacles in The Name of the Rose ). I like it when authors of medieval historical fiction remind us of scientific or technological advances. At the beginning, we were talking about the ‘Dark Ages’ idea. A lot of people do think that it was like Monty Python and the Holy Grail : ‘How do you know he’s the king?’ ‘He hasn’t got shit all over him.’ There’s this idea that people in the Middle Ages are all going around mucking out pigs and grubbing food out of the ground and that’s it. In fact, this was a very sophisticated era when people were travelling, thinking, writing—and there were all kinds of technological inventions. It depends what the author is trying to do. If the author is trying to be historically accurate, then it matters that they get it right. In most of these books, the authors are trying to be historically accurate, and they really nail it. With Ishiguro’s book, that’s not what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to be imaginative and mythic. And I think that’s great as well. So, no, I don’t think that books have to do that, but if they are writing in a realist genre, it’s annoying if there are anachronisms, for example. From the 14th century onwards, there’s some very dramatic writing about the plague. There is the Italian writer Bocaccio’s Decameron , which is written immediately after the plague hits, and it’s about people fleeing Florence, going to a country house, and staying there and telling stories to keep away from the plague. So there are some texts like that, directly responding to the plague. We then see it dripping into other texts. Chaucer mentions the plague. He has a story about people who, when they find out the plague is killing everyone, want to go and kill death. There is this symbolic death figure who also represents the plague in all kinds of ways. In medieval art, a focus on decaying bodies develops at around this time. There’s also a broader sense in which the plague, because it caused a lot of social change, affected the fabric of medieval life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In terms of medieval historical fiction, it varies a lot, because it’s such a rich genre, and there are so many different things happening. So it depends on precisely when the book is set. Only two out of my five books are set after the Black Death hits. I read another book recently, James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time , which is set in the period when the plague is coming. If you’re writing a book that’s set after 1348-9, and particularly in the half century after that, it’s probably quite hard not to talk about the plague and have it in there because it caused such massive social upheaval. There are obvious parallels to draw, but one thing to say is that the Black Death was so much worse than what we’ve experienced. We’re talking about perhaps one third, maybe a half of the population dying of a disease that hit people of all ages indiscriminately. One thing that we have been spared in this pandemic is the sight of many children dying. Though in this pandemic there’s been terrible individual trauma, the mass trauma was on a different scale in the 14th century. So I think that the way people responded was different in all kinds of ways as well. Still, in my lifetime, I hadn’t experienced this kind of global catastrophe, something that is so collective. I suppose it happens with big, world wars but, luckily, many of us alive today have not lived through that. That sense of, ‘how do we respond collectively?’ is a really interesting parallel. “It’s a mistake to read historical fiction as a history lesson” Also, one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is how you build back. Are we going to be able to build back better? Because after the plague, a lot of things did improve for the people who survived. They were horrifically traumatized, but wages went up for the poor because there were fewer people to do the jobs. Things improved for women in lots of ways, they moved to town, got jobs, delayed their marriages, had more options. That all happened organically and not because of government policy. But in our current situation, things at the moment are worse for women and worse for the poor than they were before Covid. The question then is, how much do people see the parallels or how much do people want to try to learn from an experience which, while not the same, has comparatives? Not only is the experience different, but the way we can respond is different because, with our relatively interventionist government, there are many more ways in which our responses as a society can be controlled and can help restructure society. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Also, if people do indeed want to think about this or if it’s also just a bit too depressing to think about the medieval plagues. I really do think that all of these are fantastic books that aren’t just good within the genre of medieval historical fiction, but good in all kinds of ways. I think even people that don’t necessarily love that genre might enjoy all of these books. I think if I were going to pick one, I would pick The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. The reason I would pick it is, in a way, precisely because of its mythic qualities. There is something about it that aims to be timeless in all kinds of ways, in the themes about memory and reconciliation that that we talked about before. There’s a lot about that book that I haven’t really plumbed or got to grips with yet because there’s so much going on in the images that he uses, and in the characters that he reinvigorates. So I feel like I’ve got more work to do with that book."